Carpool Confidential by Jessica Benson Read Free Book Online

making sure it was less clichéd than that. I laughed. “You’re sleeping in the guestroom, Rick, so forget about any last conjugal fucking. And if you so much as hum a note of a Manilow song in this apartment—ironic or post-ironic—I’m killing you with my bare hands.”

5
Losing Touch
    Then things got worse. I woke up at 4:30, stumbled out of bed, and made my bleary way down the hall to the guestroom, mentally preparing for round two (surely he will have morphed back into an actual human being with whom one can have an actual exchange of ideas, i.e., that thing we call a conversation) , only to find him gone. So much for don’t worry. I’ll talk to the kids .
    The freedom of the road must have been more alluring than one last espresso from the built-in Miele machine, a leisurely interval under the power shower, and a long, impassioned farewell. I couldn’t believe that this was the man whose side I’d slept against for fifteen years, who’d held my hand and cried when our children were born, who had never once given me reason to doubt his love or constancy.
    I made coffee. Barry Manilow? Even on three hours’ sleep and in the dim half-light of 5 a.m. on an October morning, that one defied belief. Rick wasn’t even a music guy. He liked going to the symphony, but other than an occasional wince of distaste for my lowbrow liking for PLJ in the car had never expressed any strong musical feelings.
    I also understood, as Rick must have, that unless he’d gone into the Federal Witness Protection Program, it would take me about ten seconds to hire a private detective and about ten more for the PI to track him down and figure out what he was doing and who he was doing it with. So what really was going on?
    My hands were shaking so badly that I left a trail of coffee drops between the counter and the table. I looked at the floor and tried to summon the energy to get up, but couldn’t. The windows here in the kitchen looked out on the neighboring buildings. I stared out at the rooftops, tried not to hyperventilate, and took stock. It was too early to call friends. And my family? Well, it was too early to call them too, and the fact was that not one of them was any use in a crisis anyway.
    Actually, that’s not true. My parents are the people to know if you chip a bicuspid while eating a bowl of muesli, and my brother, Luke, is brilliant—provided the crisis involves your Internet connection going down. Useful skills, but not applicable here. My mother was un-comforting, singularly un-maternal, and had never made a secret of the fact that she wasn’t exactly leading the Go Rick! cheering section. My father was not interested, and my sister was incredibly charming but useless with any practicalities. In other words, if I was harboring half-baked fantasies about one of them rolling up their sleeves and taking over so I could go back to bed, pull the covers over my head, and cry for a month, it was just not going to happen.
    I had no choice other than to keep putting one foot in front of the other. Which meant a shower, getting Jared and Noah up and…telling them what? I took a gulp of coffee even though I knew no amount of caffeine was touching this headache. I couldn’t not tell them. On the other hand—there seemed to be another little voice whispering in my head, the passive-aggressive-conflict-avoiding one—maybe it would be better not to tell them. It really should come from Rick if it came from anyone. Plus, it was perfectly likely that he was going to come to his senses in a few days, and in that case, it made no sense to shatter the boys about nothing.
    An unexpected business trip, maybe. Rick had always traveled a lot for work. And somewhere in this, I recognized that trying to slide along in life’s ordinary routine as much as possible was my greatest hope of staying sane. The PTA committee meeting I’d been dreading suddenly