Read Breakdown Lane, The for Free Online

alternating Thanksgiving dinners at each other’s houses and such. He balked when I wanted to make Cathy the kids’ legal guardian, in the event that Leo and I should die; but finally saw that she would certainly be a better substitute for us than my sister, Janey, and her husband, or than his own parents. Heck, she was more a sister to me than my sister, in reality.
    Just as Leo graduated, a job opened up as legal counsel to the chancellor at Wisconsin State. The money was ever so right, and Leo grabbed it. Soon enough, he was handling legal issues, problems not so different from the ones in my letters. We got raises. I hired someone to landscape the front of the house. I found a school for Gabe where ignorant plate-heads didn’t suggest he was autistic because he couldn’t name his colors but could make the pencil sharpener run on solar energy. I knew then that there was something different about Gabe, just as I knew there was something different about me when I was little, though they didn’t have a name for it then. I wasn’t “hot-headed” or “too chatty,” I had what would now be called an attention deficit disorder and hyperactivity. Gabe had something else. He could express the hell out of himself verbally, but his writing still looked like a kindergarten child’s. He read like a house on fire, but couldn’t spell the words he’d just read. But he was so bright and wonderful! I thought I could smite down whatever it was that was off about him—just as, through force of will and a couple of minicourses, Leo and I had become the kind of swing and ballroom dancers who could clear the floor at weddings.
    We lived well.
    People marveled that we’d been married for so many years. We marveled that we’d been married for so many years, slipping out to skinny-dip in Door County when the parents and the children were asleep. A neighbor once told me she walked past our house and saw all of us on the lawn, trying to teach Caro to stand on her hands; and that turned out to be the night she told her boyfriend that her answer was yes. She wanted a family like ours.
    Anyone would have. Anyone except Leo. Leo holds himself blameless for “the turn of events,” as he calls it, as if the space that opened between him and me was caused by weather or new tax laws. He tends to hold himself blameless in most things—I guess he always did. Now, if I let myself be the one doing the looking back, I see that Leo may have had one foot out the door before I ever suspected it—that his odd behavior was a detail of a larger picture, of which I could see only one corner.
    What he did was, I thought, sort of have a breakdown. He began to fall apart from stress, and he let me believe it was largely my fault, or my fault and the kids’ fault, or the simple fact of his own clarity muddied by the chaos of our culture. He didn’t say in so many words that he was Leo Steiner, victim, but if he’d shouted the implication through a bullhorn, it could not have been clearer.
    He began with odd, uncharacteristic complaints. He observed that the organic chicken at the co-op wasn’t…organic enough. We all needed better nutrition, Leo told us, whole-er food and potions. Our immune systems would collapse otherwise. The extra responsibility of Aury, yet another child to outlive, as he once bizarrely explained it, combined with the strain of work, and the very unkindness of the air we breathed, pushed him to ill health.
    We ended up going to this free-range farm where the chickens were actually beheaded, a forty-five -minute drive, and driving home with sinister-looking bloody bags in the back of the Volvo. Leo soon began to talk about our raising a few of our own, though I put my foot down, sure that kids who had to eat their acquaintances might need analysis.
    But which came first really, the chicken or…well, the egg that became my youngest daughter?
    I don’t think I’m ever going to know that.
    I don’t think Leo entirely knows