Read The Lost Husband for Free Online Page B

blinked at me.
    “I should probably hit the sack,” I said, faking a stretch.
    “Sure,” Jean said, plainly reading every feeling I was trying to hide. “Of course.”
    I turned to go, but she called for me to wait one second.
    She popped out of the room and then reappeared with a pairof faded overalls over her arm. One knee had a heart-shaped patch. “For you,” she said, holding them out. “You will absolutely live in them.”
    I stared at them. “I will?”
    Jean nodded happily. “Go on to bed.”
    I was mid-escape when I stopped at the door on a matter of business. “Jean?” I asked, turning back.
    She had picked up our teacups. “Yes?”
    “If every night of the last five years of my life is any kind of pattern, Tank will wake up between two and three in the morning, calling for me.”
    “Okay,” she said.
    “When that happens,” I went on, “will you come and get me?”
    “Of course.”
    “And Jean?” I added, anticipating that sometime after breakfast the next day I’d be packing the car up to head back to Houston.
    “Yes?”
    “Thank you so much for all those birthday cards.”
    I took a shower in the tiny white bathroom, and then dug around until I found my nightgown. There didn’t seem to be any point in unpacking, so I just flipped off the light and crawled on top of the bedspread. It was old-timey cotton chenille, and I ran my palms over the nubs of fabric as I stared at the ceiling.
    How had life taken me here? How had I ever become so dependent on the kindness of strangers? Not that long ago I’d been a bona fide, functioning adult at the helm of a tidy, sensible household with a sweet bear of a husband at my side. A mom like any other, with a grocery list, a full calendar of play dates, personalizednotepads with my name in script, and evidence all around me that I had made the right choices. Now it was all gone. I was off the grid. I had no model for a life like this. I had no sense of where I was headed. Or any idea how it would turn out.
    Off in the distance, I could hear the crackle and pop of fireworks. The people of Atwater were ringing in the New Year, making the choice to celebrate whatever was to come. But I couldn’t do the same.
    When I’d moved in with my mother two years before, after twelve months of trying to manage the wreckage of my life, I’d been too shell-shocked to even contemplate looking back. Now, though—with my little ones at the far end of the house and nothing to do but stare at the ceiling—my mind drifted back for the first time in ages to linger over what I’d lost.
    The last New Year’s Eve I’d spent with Danny, we’d both conked out by nine-thirty at night. When the fireworks started at midnight, they woke us up, and we lay side by side, eyes open in the dark, holding hands and making resolutions.
    “I’m going to go to the gym this year,” I’d said. “At least once.”
    “I’m going to clean out the garage,” he said.
    “I’m going to learn how to make crepes.”
    “I’m going to teach myself how to juggle.”
    I turned to study his profile. “I don’t see you as a juggler,” I said.
    “My dad couldn’t do anything cool,” he said. “I want to be the kind of dad who’s sort of a badass.”
    “You could learn to do magic tricks, too,” I said.
    “Next year,” he said, tugging on my hand to pull me closer. “One awesome thing at a time.”
    It had been a miracle, really, to have had a real home for the first time in my life. Even if I didn’t always trust it, and even if Iworried too much about it, it had been a real thing. A real thing I’d planned, deep down, to keep forever.
    Now, limp against the bed, I let myself ache for the past. My old bed, my old house, my old life. And then, maybe because I was so tired, or maybe even because it was long past time, I let that ache surround me, and swallow me, and pull me down into a lightless, airless, dreamless sleep.

Chapter 4
 
    In the morning I found the kids at the