Read A Gate at the Stairs for Free Online

grease, newspapers and a book, I eventually fell asleep.
    I woke up in a blaze of white sun. I had neglected to pull the shades and it had snowed in the night; the morning rays reflected off the snow on the sills and on the low adjacent roof, setting the room on fire with daylight. I tried not to think about my life. I did not have any good solid plans for it long-term—no bad plans either, no plans at all—and the lostness of that, compared with the clear ambitions of my friends (marriage, children, law school), sometimes shamed me. Other times in my mind I defended such a condition as morally and intellectually superior—my life was open and ready and free—but that did not make it any less lonely. I got up, trudged barefoot across the cold floor, and made a cup of coffee, with a brown plastic Melitta filter and a paper towel, dripping it into a single ceramic mug that said Moose Timber Lodge . Murph had gone there once, for a weekend, with her new BF.
    The phone rang again before I’d had time to let the coffee kick in and give me words to say; nonetheless, I picked up the receiver.
    “Hi, is this Tassie?” said the newly familiar voice.
    “Yes, it is.” I frantically gulped at my coffee. What time was it? Too soon for calls.
    “This is Sarah Brink. Did I wake you up? I’m sorry. I’m calling too early, aren’t I?”
    “Oh, no,” I said, lest she think I was a shiftless bum. Better a lying sack of shit.
    “I didn’t know whether I’d left a message on the correct machine or not. And I wanted to get back to you as soon as possible before you accepted an offer from someone else.” Little did she know. “I’ve talked it over with my husband and we’d like to offer you the job.”
    Could she even have called the references I’d listed? Had there been enough time to?
    “Oh, thank you,” I said.
    “We’ll start you at ten dollars an hour, with the possibility of raises down the line.”
    “OK.” I sipped at the coffee, trying to wake my brain. Let the coffee speak!
    “The problem is this. The job starts today.”
    “Today?” I sipped again.
    “Yes, I’m sorry. We are going to Kronenkee to meet the birth mother and we’d like you to come with us.”
    “Yes, well, I think that would be OK.”
    “So you accept the position?”
    “Yes, I guess I do.”
    “You do? You can’t know how happy you’ve made me.”
    “Really?” I asked, all the while wondering, Where’s the new employee’s first-day orientation meeting? Where is the “You’ve Picked a Great Place to Work” PowerPoint presentation? The coffee was kicking in, but not helpfully.
    “Oh, yes, really,” she said. “Can you be here by noon?”
    The appointment with the birth mother was for two p.m. at the Perkins restaurant in Kronenkee, a town an hour away with a part-German, part-Indian name that I’d always assumed meant “wampum.” The social worker who ran the adoption agency was supposed to meet us there with the birth mother, and everyone would cheerfully assess one another. I had walked the half hour to Sarah Brink’s house and then waited twenty minutes while she scrambled around doing things, making quick phone calls to the restaurant—“Meeska, the Concord coulis has got to be more than grape jam!”—or searching madly for her sunglasses (“I hate that snow glare on those two-lane roads”), all the while apologizing to me from the next room. In the car, on our way up, I sat next to her in the front seat, since her husband, Edward, whom, strangely, I still hadn’t met, couldn’t get out of some meeting or other and had apparently told Sarah to go ahead without him.
    “Marriage,” Sarah sighed. As if I had any idea what that meant. Yet it did seem odd that he wasn’t with her, and odder still that I seemed to be going in his stead.
    But I nodded. “He must be busy,” I said, giving Edward the benefit of the doubt, though I was beginning to think Edward might be, well, an asshole. I looked sideways at