Breakdown Lane, The by Jacquelyn Mitchard Read Free Book Online Page B

let you do it now whenever you want to.” This was true. Steve Cathcart didn’t care where I was when I wrote my column. I rarely went into the office except to collect mail.
    “This is going to be a log cabin with high-speed cable? What would we do ? Just living alone?” You’re supposed to be charmed at the idea of a loaf of bread, a jug of wine, and thy spouse beside thee in the wilderness of Wild Rose; and I wondered why I wasn’t. It made it hard for me to swallow.
    “We’d do all the things we never got the chance to do. We’d live. We’re in a rut, Julieanne. And we call it life. What do we ever do for anyone? Pound nails for Habitat for Humanity once a year? What do we do for ourselves? Swill some wine with Peg and Nate twice a year? We don’t even make a real difference for our own kids. They see TV at their friends’ houses, even if we feel pure not having one at ours. Maybe if you’d just slow down a little, Jules, we’d be more on the same page. You’re so busy with all those lonely hearts, who are just going to do the same damned thing they were doing before the minute they finish reading the newspaper, and…your ballet…and guided running. What the hell is guided running? You sound like you need a seeing-eye dog…you don’t see the world around you and what you’re giving it and what you’re taking from it. Clothes and amusement parks and cell phones, Jules, the world has more to it than that. Or less. Or it should.”
    Perhaps I should have tried to draw him out. Right then. I might have prevented something. Perhaps he was trying, unawares, to telegraph more than a message on improving our mutual lives. I thought he was just being the New Leo, idealist cynic. He’d always had a potential for this. I thought also of Homo muchas erectus, of trekking along with Vaseline on my face, getting wrinkles and heel blisters under the New Mexico sun, of living like Laura Ingalls Wilder’s parents in the potato barrens and piney woods of central Wisconsin, and mentally began poking holes in my diaphragm.
    Within three months, there was the beginning of what Leo thought of as the real fly in the ointment. It would turn out, nine months later, to be a seven-pound, nine-ounce fly.
    Gabe was just two years short of high school and Caroline was starting to notice boys, and we were starting over.
    Leo was…stupefied.
    He stopped dead in his tracks.
    This had not been part of the second five-year plan.
    While I hadn’t necessarily expected wild delight, the utter absence of any emotion at all when I told him was creepy.
    “You always wanted another child,” I finally pleaded. I’d just given him a bubble-gum cigar. “I was the one who wanted to stop with two.”
    “But we didn’t…”
    “I thought you were fed up with all the doing and wanted to start being.”
    “I meant we’d be free…not raising another life for eighteen years.”
    “No one who has children is ever totally free, Leo. You know that. You don’t want this then.”
    “I do. No, I do, Jules,” he said seriously, taking me tenderly in his arms. “Maybe this is a sign I’m meant to start over with this child and not make the same mistakes—”
    “Mistakes? I think Gabe and Caroline are pretty fine examples of good—”
    “No, I mean guide him or her more on the path….”
    A few months later, he gave me a Mother’s Day photo of myself, floating supine on a raft in Lake Michigan, my belly like a risen dough above and below my red bikini, with an engraving that read “H.M.S. Darling.”
    How could a person do that, and then do what he did later?
    Right after my announcement, Gabe came into our bedroom. Doors never were anything to Gabe except a permeable membrane. “Gabe,” Leo called, freeing an arm to enfold his son, “you’re going to be a father! I mean, I’m going to be a father! Again. I mean, by the time I’m a father again, you’ll be almost old enough to be a father!”
    He was right the first