Read Carpool Confidential for Free Online

with this? Were you helping with financing? Or—”
    â€œIt, um…came to me,” he admitted. “Sort of on the Internet.”
    â€œI don’t understand—,” I started to say, and then realized. “I get it. It was spam!”
    â€œIt was meant to be, Cass,” he said stubbornly.
    â€œRick,” I said very calmly, because I have been led to understand that’s what you are supposed to do with sleepwalkers and escaped mental patients, but, really, I just had to ask the question. OK. Ask it again. “Have you lost your freaking mind?”
    â€œNo, Cass.” He shook his head, then pushed his glasses back up his nose. This time I did not find it endearing. In fact, I couldn’t help but think about how satisfying a crack they’d make if I grabbed them and snapped them right in half. “It’s just time for me to cast off the shackles of materialism and find my creative soul.”
    â€œYou do realize that people do not find their creative souls from spam, right, Rick? They get Viagra offers and useless stock tips. They complain about how much crap they get, they do not decide to devote themselves to bizarre”—I stopped, I’d pretty much run out of steam due to my lack of a descriptor—“um, Muzak things.”
    â€œYou don’t know the first thing about either this production or Barry.” His jaw was rigid. “And FYI, it’s more interpretive than imitative,” he said. “It’s the man, the music, the life. Not some cheesy karaoke rehash.”
    My jaw was rigid, too. “Won’t this affect your job? I mean, people trust you with unthinkable sums of money, are they likely to do that if you spend your nonworking hours draped over a piano in a leisure suit?”
    â€œI left. Today was my last day.”
    I had honestly believed there was nothing left that could have sent me reeling further, which just goes to show that you should never, ever assume you’ve hit rock bottom until you’ve felt the splat. “What?” I thought I might faint. “You’ve done what ?”
    â€œLeft already.” There it went, my last link with my old what-I’d-fiercely-believed-to-be-normal life, gone.
    Breathe, I told myself. Then the next minute, OK, forget the breathing. It was a luxury I couldn’t afford. I’d in some way understood what was going on here since the first second he’d opened his mouth tonight, but I wasn’t in a hurry to take it in. “Who is she?” I heard the words like they’d been spoken by someone else. Harsh, completely lacking in sarcasm or bravado or anything except desperation. And then it hit me, hard. They hadn’t been spoken by someone else, but by me . To my husband.
    â€œThere’s no one else, Cass.” He looked me in the eye and shook his head. “I’m leaving you for me . Just me.”
    He looked and sounded sincere, but did I believe him? Men, in my experience, do not leave the comforts of home unless they have a replacement already in mind. “So you are, you’re really—” I closed my eyes for a second and saw our life, of parenthood and PTA meetings and dinners with friends, theater tickets, reading to the boys at night, summers at the beach, soccer matches, charity fund-raisers, family dinners. “—leaving.” The word was a whisper. “Why can’t you do it from here?”
    â€œI’m sorry. It’s just not possible. It requires travel, commitment. I need time.”
    I tried to picture what of this life we’d built so carefully could exist without Rick, without the rhythm that his presence gave to our days, and I couldn’t. Just couldn’t. So I latched onto the practical. “What about money?”
    â€œMoney.” He looked at me very intently. “Really it’s all about that to you.”
    I wanted to tell him that he was wrong. That not one second