Chapter 6

6

When Dan and Lisa arrive home they talk for a while, then Lisa retires to the den to read. Dan doesn’t join her. He can’t sit still, and he can’t focus. He hasn’t been able to focus on much of anything these days, other than his problems. He thinks about those endlessly, obsessively, but not productively. Now, after what happened at his parents’, he feels the urge to do something drastic, something final—anything to find a resolution.

Dan keeps these thoughts to himself.

He pours himself a whiskey in the living room and paces restlessly. He doesn’t bother turning on the lights, and the room slowly grows dark.

He can’t see his way through to a new beginning. He still feels as if he’s in shock, that he hasn’t recovered from the pain of his father telling him he was selling the business. At first, he’d hoped the new owners would keep him on, at least for a year or two. He briefly nursed a private ambition of rising in the company his dad had sold and taking it to new heights. But he’d been told his services wouldn’t be required, and that was the second blow. His father had sneered, “What did you expect?”

Lisa hadn’t taken it well, although she’d tried valiantly to pretend otherwise. She has always been his rock.

If he doesn’t find gainful employment soon, they will be in serious trouble. He has an MBA. He has good experience. He needs an executive position, and those aren’t so easy to come by. He can’t just go work in a car wash.

Last fall, he’d unwisely taken a big chunk of money out of their investment portfolio—over the objections of his financial adviser—and put it in a private mortgage that guaranteed a much higher rate of return. But then his father had sold the business and he’d lost his job. And unlike his previous investments, which had some flexibility about withdrawals, he can’t get the money out until the mortgage term is up. And now his father has screwed him again—won’t even give him a short-term loan.

There’s one thing that keeps him going, that gives him hope for the future. He’s got his inheritance to look forward to—but how long before he gets that? He needs the money now. His parents are worth a fortune. Their wills distribute the money equally among their three children. At least that’s what they’ve been led to believe, even though his parents have always played favorites, Catherine being the clear front-runner. Dan is the least favorite, and he knows it. They do a big song and dance about Jenna all the time, but he knows that she comes in second, their beautiful, “talented” daughter, despite her sometimes appalling behavior.

If his father was a normal father and not a complete bastard, he could ask him for an advance on his inheritance now, and get it. That’s what a real dad would do. He could maybe start his own business. But he can’t even get a goddamned loan from his father. His father has ruined him, and he’s enjoyed doing it.

Dan slumps into an armchair and sits in the dark for a long while, mulling over his shitty situation. Finally, he gets up and pops his head in the den and says to Lisa, “I’m going for a drive.” He often does this at night. It relaxes him. Some people run, he drives. It’s soothing. It feeds some need in him.

She puts her book down. “Why don’t you go for a walk instead?” she suggests. “I can come with you.”

“No,” he insists, shaking his head. “You read your book. You don’t need to wait up. I just want to clear my head.”

Once he’s in the car, he turns on the ignition and turns off his cell phone.

---

•   •   •lisa listens to the front door close and turns her attention back to her novel, but soon puts it down again. She can’t concentrate. She wishes Dan wouldn’t go out for drives at night like this, especially after he’s had a drink. Why does he do it? Why does he prefer to go for long drives rather than spend his time with her? She knows it’s a habit, that it helps him wind down, but she wishes he would find some other way to deal with stress. Walking or running would be better than driving. They’ve got a perfectly good exercise bike in the basement.

She understands his anxiety, though—she’s stressed too. If Fred doesn’t loan them money soon, they’ll be in real trouble. If only Dan had found another job, they wouldn’t be in this position. She’d gone to college, she could get a job, but when she suggested it, he seemed wounded. He didn’t like how it would look. He’s got his pride. A lot of good that’s doing them now.

Once she starts worrying, she can’t help going down the rabbit hole. She doesn’t know how his job search is going because he doesn’t tell her, and he’s vague whenever she asks him. She knows he signed up with an executive search company—a headhunter—and they got him a couple of interviews early on, but there hasn’t been much lately. He spent weeks fiddling with his résumé upstairs in his office, but she can count on one hand the number of times he’s dressed in a suit for an interview. They’ve been “exploratory” interviews to assess fit. She doesn’t know if he’s done any follow-up interviews at all. Why isn’t he getting more calls from the headhunter? Are things really as slow as he says?

She casts aside the cozy throw, gets up, and leaves the den. She climbs the stairs to the second floor and makes her way to his office at the end of the hall. This is his private space. She’s never done this before, never snooped. She knows it’s crossing a line, but she can’t help herself. She flicks on the lamp on his desk rather than the overhead light, in case he comes home suddenly.

His laptop is closed. She opens it, but she has no idea what his password is. She quickly gives up and closes the lid. She sees his day planner on the desk and pulls it toward her. She looks at today’s date. Sunday, April 21. The pages for this past week are blank. She turns the page—nothing there for next week either. She pages forward—there are no appointments, other than one with the dentist in three weeks. Then she goes backward from today’s date. Those pages are blank too, except for a doctor’s appointment. But she was certain he had interviews, at least two of them, in March. She distinctly remembers him dressing in his steel-gray suit, looking very dapper, and going out. She recalls another day he left in his navy suit—both times were just last month, but there’s no record of either appointment in his planner. Maybe he doesn’t note things down in his diary—maybe it’s all on his phone? But there’s a dentist appointment in the diary. And that doctor’s appointment from a couple weeks ago. She goes back months. There are only two other appointments noted, both with his headhunter. She remembers how hopeful she’d been in those early days that he’d find a good job and, best of all, not with his father. She focuses on the diary again. There’s nothing since those two initial meetings with the headhunter almost six months ago.

Her heart sinks. Has he been lying to her? Dressing up in a good suit and tie and carrying his slim, expensive attaché case to go sit and have coffee alone somewhere for a couple of hours?

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•   •   •when catherine and ted returned home from the awful Easter dinner, they’d binge-watched something on Netflix to take their minds off things. Now, as the closing credits roll upward on the screen, Ted turns to his wife and asks her if she’d like to watch something else. He thinks she still looks too wound up to sleep.

“I’m not tired,” she says.

“Me either. Do you want me to make you a drink?”

She shakes her head dismissively. “No. But you go ahead if you want.”

“I won’t if you don’t.”

“I wonder,” his wife says, “if there was something else Mom wanted to talk to me about.”

He can hear the worry in her voice. What a particularly shitty Easter, he thinks. Ted says patiently, “Why don’t you go over and see her tomorrow? It’s Easter Monday, you’ve got the day off. You can find out then. No point in working yourself up anymore tonight.” But he knows his wife. She’s like a dog with a bone when she’s got something on her mind. She won’t let it go. She gets a bit obsessive about things. Like pregnancy. But he’s heard that many women get like that when they can’t conceive. It’s a fixation with a ticking clock attached.

He thinks about what it’s been like for her the last few months. The cycle monitoring—running into the fertility clinic first thing in the morning, before work. Having her blood taken, her egg follicles monitored. His own role hasn’t been as onerous, only the awkwardness of providing a semen sample for testing. The first three months of cycle monitoring, armed with the knowledge of perfect timing, they had done it the old-fashioned way—at home in bed. But last month they stepped it up. It was the first time they tried artificial insemination. He went in at the appropriate time to provide another sample, but other than that, there wasn’t much for him to do. He hopes it works and these interventions can stop soon, rather than becoming even more intrusive. If nothing else, it’s messing up their sex life.

“I think I’ll just call her,” Catherine says, breaking into his thoughts.

“It’s late, Catherine,” he says. “It’s after eleven.”

“I know, but she won’t be asleep yet. She always reads at night.”

He watches as she picks up her cell phone from the coffee table and calls her mother. He hopes it will be a short, reassuring call, then they can go to bed. But Sheila had said it was important. He tells himself it was probably about selling the house, and there’s nothing else.

“She’s not answering her cell,” Catherine says, turning to him in concern.

“Maybe they’ve gone to bed and she left it downstairs. Try the landline.”

Catherine shakes her head. “No. I don’t want to chance speaking to my father.” She seems to be considering something. “Maybe I should go over there,” she says.

“Catherine, honey,” he protests. “You don’t need to do that. She probably just left her phone somewhere—you know what she’s like.” But Catherine looks worried. “She probably wanted to talk to you about the house,” Ted says. “You can wait till tomorrow.”

But Catherine says, “I think I’ll just pop over there.”

“Really?”

She comes close to him. “I won’t be too long. I just want to talk to Mom, find out whatever it was she wanted to tell me. Otherwise I’ll never be able to sleep.”

Ted sighs. “Do you want me to come with you?” he offers.

She shakes her head and gives him a kiss. “No. Why don’t you go to bed? You look tired.”

He watches her go. Once her car has disappeared down the street, he turns away from the door, and as he passes by on his way upstairs, he notices that she’s left her cell phone on the hall table.