Summerlong by Dean Bakopoulos Read Free Book Online Page A

is too much to ask. She doesn’t deserve to roll down the window.
    “We got lots of notice,” Don says. “I just thought I could—”
    “We see this a lot, Claire. We see this more than you wouldthink,” Halverson says as he eases down the cul-de-sac. “One spouse is often in the dark. It’s shameful for men. They are breadwinners. All of that. I feel for you, Donny, I really do. I’ve been there, if it helps. Lori and I went broke about nine years ago, and then I became a cop. You know all of that. My business went belly-up and—”
    “Okay, last night, Don,” Claire says and interrupts the cop. “Where were you?”
    Don turns and looks out his window. “It’s hard to explain.”
    “Because I was . . . ,” Claire begins, but stops. Don is right. How does one explain something that seems like a dream, separate from real life?
    In the light of morning that narrows the shadows on their front lawn, Claire sees her children outside, gathered near another cop. They are in pajamas, drinking from boxes of juice.
    “The kids were a little frightened. My partner knocks loud. He’s new. He’s from Milwaukee. The kids, I’m afraid, woke to some pretty loud knocking,” Halverson says. “You wake up to that kind of knocking, I guess, I mean, if you’re a kid, it’s just—anyway, they want us to serve these in person, but when you didn’t come to the door, we nailed it to the door, which involves hammering and which broke into your door, which is not really good wood. Those doors, from Home Depot, they don’t last.”
    Claire leaves the car to go to the kids before Halverson has the car in park. The children stare at Claire as she comes toward them: like victims of some natural disaster, they have had blankets put over their shoulders. Cop blankets. What kind of mother allows her children to end up wrapped in cop blankets while she skinny dips the night away?
    A bad mother.
    “We gave them some juice,” says the other cop, a younger one who has been waiting with the kids. “The littler one, your girl? She got a sucker. The other kid didn’t want one. He demanded a phone call and a lawyer, like he was on a cop drama. He’s a cool customer.”
    Bryan smiles at this, a big grin.
    A few neighbors are out on porches, in robes, but none of them come over.
    Claire lets out another whistle and waves her arms at the kids as she runs and shrieks again in that flutelike manner, “Oh! Oh! Oh! Hey! Hey!” and then, “Everything’s okay! It’s all okay!”
    She gets to them and begins kissing them, hugging them, trying not to make eye contact with the grim deputy who has been assisting Halverson; she turns and sees finally that Don Lowry has not yet left the squad car.
    It is as if he’s hoping to be taken away.

PART II
    Marriage is a small container.
    —Jane Smiley, The Age of Grief

1.
    Three times in the course of a long, mostly happy, but occasionally uncertain marriage, Don and Claire had considered, at least elliptically, the possibility of a divorce. The first time this happened was only six months into the marriage; they were twenty-three and they’d been up late arguing after drinking late into the evening with friends in the Village. This was the only year of their married life in which they had lived somewhere other than Iowa. New York, where they had gone simply because Claire had missed it and had cried on their wedding night because she missed it and all her New York friends so much, seemed like a long part of their shared history, but really, it was now just a sliver of it.
    The argument itself had started during sex—Don could not remember exactly what had been said, but it involved the accusation of boredom or dissatisfaction or sleepiness—and he remembered, at some point in what became a long night of endless, edgy bickering, just before dawn, Claire, sitting at the edge of the bed, staring out at the dimmed building across the alley, had said, “Maybe we were too young to get