Read This is Your Life, Harriet Chance! for Free Online Page B

old, clutching your hand tightly, World’s Fair lariat cinched securely around his neck, smiling up at you. At 130 pounds, you’ve never looked better. And look at Bernard, fit as ever, his arm, strong and able, around your waist, as the Bubbleator ascends into the unknown. The future is on everybody’s mind, and you’re on a rocket ship speeding toward middle age, but suddenly you’re okay with that.
    Maybe, like everyone else on the Bubbleator, you’re no longer taking your future for granted. A single phone call, a little red button, and poof, it could all disappear. Have you finally embraced domestic life, Mrs. Bernard Chance? Have you released your independence at long last? Have you finally stopped tracking the progress of that other incarnation of yourself, the one who didn’t bow to the expectations of society, the one who didn’t opt for the easy way out, the one who wasn’t going to have children until she was thirty?
    Or have you simply lowered your standards?
    It helps that Bernard has started to notice you again lately. He’s showing signs of tenderness, displays of affection. Rarely does he pass you in the hallway or in the kitchen without some physical communication—the grazing of an elbow, the touch of a hand, and yes, even a pat on the fanny. What’s more, he’s taken an interest in Skip now that the boy can talk. Together, they go to the Montlake landfill on Sunday, where they sit in the Buick and eat BurgerMeister fries, marveling at the perfectly good things people throw away.
    Perhaps it’s that promotion to general manager that has put a little spring back in Bernard’s step. Weekends, he’s sporting a Hawaiian shirt, to which he attributes good fortune. If not a friend, you’ve found an amusement in Margaret Blum. On Friday nights, the four of you, Gene and Bernard, you and Margaret, dine together at the Blums’ house in Madison Park. You play cards: pinochle, poker, bridge. You drink Zombies and Stingers and Pink Squirrels. And sometimes you surprise yourself with your candor and familiarity.
    By the time you get home to release the sitter, you’re already missing your little Skipper. Some Friday nights, you wobble to his room and listen to the excited sound of your own breathing in the darkness as you watch him sleep. You want to pick him up and hold him, caress the downy hair on the back of his neck. You want to wake him from his sleep, so you can hear the singsong of his little voice, so you can answer his thousand questions. There, there, that’s all you needed, Harriet: a little space once in a while to decompress, a little time for abstraction, a little distance from which to count your blessings. And yes, a few Zombies never hurt.
    If the hustle and bustle of Fourth and Union still seems a long ways off, so does the thankless malaise of last year.
    It’s the good life, Harriet Chance, drink it up!

August 19, 2015
(HARRIET AT SEVENTY-EIGHT)
    I ’m so sorry to keep you waiting, dear,” says Harriet, answering her doorbell the morning of the cruise. “Please come in. I’ll just be a minute.”
    She’s sorely misjudged Dwight Honeycutt, and the guilt of this miscalculation has been needling at her conscience for two days. All these years, Harriet’s been looking at Dwight with a jaundiced eye. Yes, he was the chief proponent of Mildred’s move to Sunny Acres, the liquidation of her automobile, the downsizing of her existence. Yes, he dresses like a fallen oil baron, in bolo ties and ten-gallon hats, cowboy boots with khaki dress suits. And then there’s the matter of the silver Jaguar, out there in the driveway, crouched in the pink dawn, quietly belching a plume of exhaust into herdahlias. It’s true he landed a tidy sum listing the bluff house. But why shouldn’t he? It was going to be his someday, anyway. The truth is, all of it was probably in Mildred’s best interest. Harriet can see that now.
    Dwight has been a doll the past two days. He feels terrible that his