Just Breathe. Susan Wiggs

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      He had to ask. There were people who knew her, acquaintances of her parents, former classmates, employees of the Moon Bay Oyster Company, Judy the Goth, a clerk at Argyle Art & Paint Supply. Sarah had run around with a group of other misfits, but hadn’t stayed in touch with them after high school. She’d fumbled through an explanation. “I was never very social…”

      “You must’ve had friends.” To a guy like Jack, who was surrounded by a vast and happy group of friends—good friends, real ones—this was unthinkable. There was no way Sarah could explain this to him. No way he could understand that her entire adult life was spent trying to escape her adolescence, not relive it.

      Unable to produce a vibrant social group from her past, she suggested they leave Glenmuir a day sooner than planned, ostensibly to play tourist in San Francisco but actually to get away from reminders of the person she’d been. After that, she embraced Jack’s world and it had embraced her. His parents were like a latter-day Ozzie and Harriet. He had enough close friends to populate a small town. At his side, she was liked and accepted, even admired.

      The idea of coming home after that, to the empty house on the bay and her father looking lost, was flat-out painful. She made subsequent visits home without Jack, spending quiet hours wishing she could ease her father’s agony, but failing at that. Her father soon took to visiting her in Chicago, and his company was a comfort to her during Jack’s illness.

      Now she felt like a stranger here, her footsteps sounding hollow in the empty workshop. She studied the ball of bright pink cashmere yarn still on the spool, remarkably untouched even now, as though endlessly waiting. I still see you in dreams, Mom, she thought. But we never talk anymore.

      She touched the top of the spindle with the tip of her finger. Suppose she were to prick herself and bleed, and then fall asleep for a hundred years?

      Good plan.

      

      “I’m home,” she said, putting her purse and keys on the Formica counter in the big, sunny kitchen of her father’s house.

      “In here,” he called out. In his easy chair, with catalogs spread out on the coffee table in front of him, Nathaniel Moon looked like a man of leisure. He had certainly earned the privilege. Before retirement, he had the business to grow and teach to Kyle. Now that he’d stepped back, he spent most of his free time researching and restoring the Mustang.

      “You look busy,” she said.

      “I’ve been reading up on how to repair an intake carburetor,” he said.

      These days, his passion consumed him. When not over at Mounger’s garage, working on the car, he was surfing the Internet for parts or watching car restoration shows on television. Sarah saw him disappearing into the car the way she disappeared into her art.

      Embarrassingly enough for his children, he had become a babe magnet since being widowed at a relatively young age. He was a kindly, tolerant man, unfailingly polite as he rejected the women vying for his attention.

      Everyone in town knew Nathaniel Moon, and everyone liked him. “Such a nice, good-looking man,” people often said.

      Sarah could not disagree with a single thing that was said. Yet she felt now, as she had all her life, that she didn’t really know him. He was like a TV dad—well-groomed, sympathetic, benign and ultimately unknowable.

      “Does this town have an animal control department?” she asked him.

      “I think so. Why? Did you spot an animal out of control?”

      “A stray dog. I saw it nearly get hit in the middle of downtown.”

      “We’re a progressive area,” he said. “We have a no-kill shelter.”

      “That dog better hope you have no-kill drivers.”

      “I’ll see if I can find a number for you. How did your meeting go?” he asked without looking up from the catalog he was studying.

      “It went. I was surprised Birdie Bonner remembered me.”

      “She’s Birdie Shafter now,” he reminded her. “Why surprised?”

      “Because we weren’t friends,” Sarah said. “We went to the same school, but we weren’t friends. I never had many friends.”

      He flipped a page. “Sure you did, honey. There were kids over all the time when you were young.”

      “Those were Kyle’s friends. Remember him? My perfect brother? The only time people came to see me was when Mom put the squeeze on their mothers and they were forced, or bribed.”

      “I don’t remember that at all.” He flipped another page.

      She studied her father, saddened by the distance between them. There was plenty more she could say. She wished she could ask him if he missed her mother the way she did, if he still saw his wife in his dreams, but she felt used up, too emotionally frazzled to deal with her father’s curious distance.

      “Come on,” he said, standing up with an unhurried motion. “Let’s take the boat out. I’ll bring something to eat.”

      She wanted to say she wasn’t hungry, she’d never eat again. The fact was, she was starving. Betrayed by her own primal greed.

      Within fifteen minutes, they were out on the water, the Arima Sea Chaser pushing up a V-shaped wake behind them. They pulled out into the channel and slowed down to trolling speed so the motor would run quietly. Power-boats were restricted on the pristine bay, but as a local oysterman, her father was exempt. The feel of the soft vinyl-covered seat, the rich smell of the tidal flats and the taste of the air evoked a feeling of days gone by. For a short while, time flowed away. The marriage and Jack’s illness and his final betrayal might have happened to someone else.

      Her father opened a beer and offered her the can. She reached for it, then hesitated.

      “Not your brand?” he asked.

      In the pit of her stomach, she felt a swift, dull terror as the illusion shattered. Those years had happened to her.

      Her father studied her face. “Did I say something wrong?”

      “No, I just…It’s been a while since I’ve had a drink. Before all this happened, we were trying to get pregnant.”

      He looked supremely uncomfortable, his eyes crinkling behind his shades. “So, um, are you…?”

      “No.” Part of her wanted to tell him about the clinic visits, the drugs and discomfort and nausea. Another part wanted to keep her pain private. “After Jack’s treatments ended,” she went on, “getting pregnant was my main goal in life.” Hearing herself speak the words, she felt a twinge. When had her priorities shifted from her marriage to her reproductive system?

      “Anyway, I’m not,” she said quickly, knowing this conversation was going to be a challenge, “and I’ll take that beer.” She took a swig, savoring her first gulp. God, it had been too long. “For the past year, I’ve been undergoing artificial insemination.”

      He cleared his throat. “You mean Jack couldn’t…because of his cancer?”

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