Happily Ever After: A Novel by Elizabeth Maxwell Read Free Book Online Page A

five minutes after dropping Allison at school, I’m back in the minivan, heading across town to Target. I once considered starting a blog just so I could post an entry called “When Minivans Happen to Good People.”
    I live in Billsford, New York, a charming hamlet located about forty miles from midtown Manhattan. Our proximity to the only island that matters make real estate prices unreasonable and taxes so high the suicide rate climbs a few percentage points every April 15.
    I forced the move from city to supposed country because one day, shortly after Allison was born, I tripped over a dead man in the entryway to our building, a great prewar place near the corner of Broadway and Great Jones. The police assured me the man had not died at the hands of another but rather from neglect and an unwillingness to take his meds. While this was marginally better than murder, I could not get the man out of my head. His dirty clothes and yellow, rotted teeth. His bare feet. His overall deadness.
    “I donate to Pathways to Housing,” I shrieked at the nice policeman. “I give bags of groceries to City Harvest. Why is this happening to me?”
    “Well, ma’am, it’s not exactly happening to you,” the officer said. “He’s the dead one.”
    The cop had a point. But still the dead man haunted me until my sleep-addled, hormone-bathed brain demanded action, the more illogical and dramatic, the better.
    Bundling up an infant Allison, I hopped a Metro-North train and headed out of the city. I got off in Billsford because the train station was cute and behind it appeared to be a matching cute town. I wanted cuteness. I wanted green grass. I did not want homeless, forgotten dead people on my doorstep.
    The real estate agent, sensing a live one, showed me five houses. They ranged from a ridiculous Tara-size mansion to a recently updated four-bedroom center-hall colonial. The lots were all multiacre, with gardens and trees and butterflies. I felt like I’d dropped into an early Disney film.
    “You might occasionally see a wisp of smoke from a neighbor’s hearth,” the agent said to me. I had not heard the word hearth used in a sentence since we studied the Pilgrims in grade school. I liked it. I bought the house we were standing in at that moment, hearth, butterflies, and all.
    Roger wasn’t pleased. He wondered what sort of marriage we had if I didn’t consult him about something as huge as moving out of New York City. I blamed my irrational behavior on hormones. Roger reminded me I was using that excuse for everything, which, I pointed out, did not make it any less true. I said he could buy a train pass and be at his SoHo yoga studio in under an hour. I told him he could expand and open another studio in chic Westchester County. The place had a whiff of rich, bored, well-maintained women. A gold mine. This made him a little happier, though not happy enough to remain heterosexual, I guess.
    As I pull into a parking space roughly twenty yards from the doors of Target, I try to appreciate the upside of my suburban existence. There is always good parking to be found at the big-box stores on a weekday morning.
    When I cross the threshold into the store, a blast of air-conditioned, artificial-smelling air escapes around me. The chill is welcome after the uncomfortable heat and humidity outside. On the short ride over, the radio overflowed with apoplectic weather reporters.
    “Global warming!”
    “Record-crushing heat!”
    “Locusts!”
    “Zombies!”
    “Vampires!”
    “The end of time!”
    But to their credit, it is damn hot. I fumble around in my purse for today’s shopping list, now amended with detergent and nail polish.
    Hanging a left in front of the scarves and cheap handbags, I push an empty red cart in front of me. I miss the weight of my daughter in the small, flip-down seat, the way she would kick me relentlessly in the thighs as we traveled up and down the store aisles. After years of the constant presence of a