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awaited him at school. Someday, Amy thought with an astonishingly sharp sadness, her little boy—who told her all about the left-handed presidents and about Achilles with his undipped heel, and who until very recently had held her hand while walking along the street, and with whom she experienced fits of closeness that made life seem not just not pointless but pointed —would likely be sitting in an office behind a sealed window, looking out upon a city or an industrial park. Amy briefly remembered her own view from the window of her office at Kenley Shuber and how sometimes, in the afternoon, she would take a break and stand for a minute with her forehead and the palms of her hands against the glass.
    Life in that office, at first, had been crisp and collegial. There was always more work being set before her, and always she could manage it, but eventually a low-grade familiarity set in that Amy tried to ignore, because when you really thought about it, so many elements of life were similar. The tasks at the law firm became at times interchangeable, and even the clients over lunch began to seem as if they could be siblings. The lawyers wore similar gray suits and silky ice-blue ties, or cream-colored tailored blazers. Someone became the “funny” one in the office, and someone else became the “irritable” one, and the firm took on aspects of a small and self-contained village. Amy became one of several female “nice” ones. She didn’t mind this role; it meant that everyone came to the door of her office and leaned against the frame and said, “What’s up, Amy?” or “We’re all going to Umbrella Sushi tonight,” or sat on the edge of her desk, wanting to reap her niceness personally.
    Soon, when she and Leo fell in love, the job took on a new quality. She had seen big Leo Buckner in the corridors and at meetings, though the domains of their work rarely overlapped. He’d been there a year longer than she had and was a popular young lawyer, broad-bodied, dark, with an easygoing, sighing quality that appealed to everyone. Women were always flirting with him, practically climbing on him as if he were a genial, napping uncle.
    Once Amy and Leo became involved, the other women backed politely away, as if in a formal gavotte. With an office romance, work had a shimmering, exciting aspect, and most days were punctuated by moments when she would see her curly-headed beloved in the corridor, and they would each remember what had happened the night before.
    Then, finally, they were married, and there was the pleasure of being newlyweds at the firm. The work itself remained tolerable, even sometimes highly enjoyable. At night, eating take-out food in bed or watching TV together on the spineless futon in their starter apartment, they advised each other on work matters and deconstructed the idiosyncrasies and intentions of their colleagues. When Amy became pregnant, they agreed that she would leave the firm for an allowed twelve weeks and then return. It was raining on the day of her going-away party, and the sky outside the conference room was dark. This room had also been the scene of other going-away parties; one by one over the years, young lawyers were picked off either through opportunity or failure or having been sucked through the widening portal of motherhood.
    “I’ll definitely be back in twelve weeks,” Amy had said in her brief, embarrassed goodbye remarks. “So nobody take my coffee mug.”
    But twelve weeks proved to be nothing, and when the time was up, it was as though an alarm had suddenly gone off, sending electronic doves cooing, chickens squawking, and horses galloping—the entire rotation of animals in a clamor as if there were a fire in a barn—and yet she could just not get up. She could not leave the apartment, that crazyland of strewn burp rags and unironed miniature outfits and gifts of rattles and soft pillow-books that still lay with the detritus of their wrapping paper all around them.