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teach me,” I said.
    “You’re pretty good. I don’t think you need a lesson.”
    “I’m sure I have room for improvement. You tell me yes or no, or whatever you want me to do, okay?”
    He nodded, closed his eyes, and leaned back.
    I was excited to think he might help me understand how to please him better.
    I started with my usual moves and then heard him say, “A little faster.” I was happy to oblige. Then a few minutes later, “Okay, a little slower now, and can you take more?” I pushed as far as I knew I could without gagging and felt great satisfaction from the sound that escaped his lips.
    “Yeah, just like that, yeah. Ohhh.”
    I even felt bold enough to try something I had never done but read about a few weeks before in one of those articles about how to please your man. It was licking all around the base and up and down while sucking with your mouth at the same time. It seemed difficult and I wasn’t sure if I was doing it correctly, but I tried my best.
    The noises coming from Rick grew louder and he seemed to approve of my new trick. Soon he gave me his familiar verbal warning that it was time and then it was all over.
    We lay there for a while, naked, breathing heavy, and damp with sweat in the hot summer air, on our family couch in the living room. I couldn’t help but imagine how horrified Sam would be if he knew what we had just done there. But these were the things parents did that their kids were never to know or think about. The things parents were supposed to do for each other to keep their love alive, which would in turn keep their family strong. Still, I felt a little dirty and conflicted about who I was supposed to be as a woman, a wife, a mother, a daughter, a professor. Then something occurred to me. Our little private lesson had me so enamored with Rick that for the first time in a long time, the thought of Dave never even crossed my mind.

C HAPTER 4:
T HE R ETURN OF J ILL
    “COME ON, SAMMY, let’s go in the pool.”
    “I said I don’t feel like swimming today. You go in with Jack and I’ll play Minecraft.”
    “But it’s more fun when all three of us go in. He likes when you splash him and push him around on the raft. There are only a few more days of summer. When it’s fall and the pool’s all cold, you’ll wish you went in more when you had the chance.”
    He rolled his eyes and sat down on a folded up old Batman blanket on the hardwood floor in front of the TV in the living room, game controller in hand. I gave up for the moment and watched him enter his favorite world, a world I was no part of, a world he was capable of escaping into for hours on end, if I let him.
    As I cleared breakfast dishes from the dining room table, I thought about the battles Rick and I had when we searched for a house eight years earlier. At almost nine months pregnant, with swollen ankles and only two huge, muumuu type maternity dresses that still fit, I trudged from house to house arguing with Rick. He wanted a super safe neighborhood. I wanted a decent sized bedroom closet. He wanted a two-car garage. I wanted a home office for my work as an adjunct professor, thinking I’d be able to keep up teaching seven or eight classes a semester even after having kids. And those kids would be the perfect little boy and girl, of course. I now knew that like everything else in life, the fantasy and the reality of having a family are light years apart.
    There were heated debates over endless criteria before we compromised and settled on our quaint little one story, three-bedroom, 1,300-square-foot ranch house in the San Fernando Valley.
    Above all else, and Rick knew it, I wanted a pool. In the small town where I grew up, in the suburbs of Long Island, New York, hardly anyone had a pool. Except Lorinda Dayton, that is. My second story window in our tall, skinny, two-bedroom house looked right out into her tiny backyard, the entire footage of which was taken up by a small, square “built-in” pool, as we