Read Five Things I Can't Live Without for Free Online Page A

made any overtures to find out about her life, she deflected them and acted like I was just trying to throw her off the scent of my own troubles. She’d tell me about my sister Casey’s academic successes, but just about nothing else.

    Please let someone e-mail me back in the next five days
. Otherwise, I would have to call my mother back and confess what I’d done. I didn’t even want to think how that call would go, but I knew what would come next. Panicked, my mother would increase the frequency of her calls. She might, at some point, start sending cash, which I would accept because I had no pride, but that would be far, far down the road.

    Of course my mother would want me just to take another job, any job. Those e-mails were exactly what she would have told me to do. For the past two hours, I’d been channeling my mother. Less than a week and I was already selling out my dream. This was my chance to change my life, and I was giving up without a fight.

    I paced, stared at the drawer, paced again, stared again.

    You have no talent.

    I have some talent.

    It’s not enough.

    Well, not if I never take a chance. Not if I sit around waiting for something to happen.

    All right, then. What is it you’ll do?

    I’ll be a writer.

    Specifically, what will you do?

    Oh, shut up.

    You’re almost thirty. You own nothing. You have no savings. The Social Security system is collapsing.

    I’m only twenty-nine. There’s time. There’s plenty of time.

    Everyone else got on the publishing track years ago. They all got started when they were twenty-two, but they didn’t just quit when things got hard.

    I didn’t just quit. I went to India. It was very spiritual.

    It was cheap. You went because it was cheap.

    I can do this. I can be a writer.

    That means
doing
something. What will you do?

    I’ll take whatever job I get offered through those e-mails, that’s what I’ll do.

    You mean you’ll give up again.

    I’m being realistic. I can’t just drift along indefinitely. I’m not twenty-two.

    Then give up.

    But I didn’t want to give up. Not yet. Not until I talked to Kathy. If anyone could help me, it was her. I called her cell phone.

    “Hello?” she said, her voice rising above a din.

    “Kathy, is this a bad time?” I asked. “Can you talk?”

    “Nora?” she queried. She knew my voice, of course; it was just loud enough to need confirmation.

    “Yes.”

    “Is something wrong?”

    “Oh, yeah.”

    “Let me pack up my things. I brought my laptop down to a cafe because I couldn’t stand being cooped up in my apartment for another minute. I’ve been working on this book nonstop.” We chatted to fill time until she could get out on the street and give me her undivided attention. After another minute, the line was clear. “Okay. Much better. So, are you okay? I mean, fundamentally intact.”

    “No shattered limbs.”

    “Glad to hear that.”

    “But I’m going crazy. I don’t know if what I did was crazy but necessary, or just crazy, but I quit my job and I have nothing lined up.” Saying it out loud made it even worse. What had I been thinking? Oh, right. I hadn’t been thinking. For once in my life, I decided not to think, and look what happened.

    “Huh. Really?” Her response was inscrutable. She was waiting for more information.

    “This was not the time to act hastily, right? I have no savings, I’m about to move in with Dan, he probably thinks I’m a gold digger—”

    “Has Dan said anything about you being a gold digger?” she asked calmly.

    “No, but he wants to make sure I can pay my half of the rent. Which is pretty reasonable, actually, and soon I won’t be able to. And then what’ll happen to us?” I realized that my mother’s brain would have followed that precise sequence, and ended on just that question.

    “Let’s go back a few steps. How did you decide to quit your job?”

    “That’s the thing. I just went with my gut. I went to work and I saw