thought, she could stay and fight for him. Insist on getting help, exploring their issues together, healing together. Couples did that, didn’t they? It all sounded terribly exhausting to Sarah, though. And the cold feeling in the pit of her stomach seemed to contain a terrible truth. He might be the one asking for a divorce, but she was the one who wanted to leave. When had everything gone off track for them? She couldn’t pinpoint the moment. She used to feel so lucky, wanting for nothing. Now she wondered where her luck had gone. Maybe she and Jack had used up all their cosmic Brownie points on the cancer.
“This is your life,” she said to him. “You can’t walk away from your own life, Jack.”
“I just meant—”
“But I can.” There. She’d said it. The words were out, a gauntlet flung to the ground between them.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” he asked. “Where will you go? You don’t know anybody. I mean…”
“I know what you meant, Jack. There really isn’t any point in being diplomatic now, is there? This whole marriage has always been about your life, your hometown, your job.”
“This job made it possible for you to stay home all day and draw pictures.”
“Well, gosh, I guess I should be grateful for that. Maybe it was a way to deal with the fact that you were never home.”
“I never knew you felt put out by the fact that my job kept me busy.”
“You never knew how I felt about a lot of things. Take infidelity. If you knew how I felt about that, you probably would have left me before fucking someone else.”
His cell phone rang again. “I have to go to work,” he said, and went to finish dressing.
He emerged from his dressing room a few minutes later looking as neat and polished as an Eagle Scout. “Listen, Sarah,” he said. “We have to deal with this. Just…take it easy. We’ll talk about it some more tonight.”
She stood at the window and watched his large, shiny truck disappear down the rain-slick road. After he was gone, she stayed there, looking out at the gray day. Her mind worked sluggishly, weighed down by disappointment and a slow-simmering rage. She sorted through the things Jack had said, and found a grain of truth in one thing: they had been so focused on wanting a baby that they didn’t notice they had stopped wanting each other.
It was a lame, overused excuse for infidelity. And Jack was a grown-up. It didn’t excuse what he had done, or justify his demand for a divorce.
She took a deep breath. So she was, what, supposed to hang around all day waiting for him to come home and kick her to the curb? Good plan.
Chapter Three
The empty prairie, crisscrossed by a grid of startlingly straight roads, rolled out like a vast wasteland in front of the hood ornament of the GTO. It was remarkable, Sarah thought, how quickly the suburban sprawl of Chicago gave way to the broad gray-and-white checkerboard of the heartland at its most bleak.
In the late afternoon, her phone sounded off with Jack’s ringtone. She picked up without a greeting. “I’m leaving,” she informed him.
“Don’t be stupid. We agreed to talk about this.” Jack’s voice was sharp with both anger and distress.
“I didn’t agree to anything, but I guess you missed that part.” When had he stopped hearing her? she wondered. And why hadn’t she noticed? “There’s nothing to talk about.”
“Are you kidding? We’ve barely begun to discuss this.”
“The next time you hear from me, it’ll be through my lawyer.” As if she even had one at this point. She felt like such a phony, talking about “her” lawyer. But even just a day after discovering her husband with another woman, she had a clear vision of what her future held—legal counsel.
“Come on, Sarah—”
She gunned the engine to pass a semi.
“My God.” Jack’s voice squawked in disbelief. “Don’t tell me you took the GTO.”
“Fine. I won’t tell you.” She threw the cell phone out the window. It was a stupid, childish gesture. God knew, she would need a phone in the days to come.
She stopped at a RadioShack and acquired a cheap, pay-as-you-go phone, strictly for emergencies. She bought it with a brisk and icy calm, as if she did such things every day. As if she were not on fire with panic inside. There was a brittle outer shell around her and inside, a clockwork brain directing each step she took with passionless efficiency.
It was as if she had rehearsed the act of leaving her husband a hundred times before—pack a bag, burn CDs with all the personal data she might need, all the dark, sad-voiced music she might crave along the way. She’d had no trouble pulling the records—a simple step. She knew exactly where everything was. One of the terrible virtues of Jack’s illness was that it had forced them to keep all their affairs in order and well documented. Now their affairs—all but the extramarital one—were still in perfect order, including her separate bank account and the title to the GTO.
Driving through nowhere, she spared a thought for some of the things she had left—Waterford crystal lamps. An Italian leather sofa, the Belleek china and serving pieces, a set of Porsche forged cooking knives, a flat-screen TV. Maybe one day she would miss some of those things, but so far, she didn’t even want to think about them. Like a wild animal in a steel-jawed trap, she was willing to gnaw off a limb in exchange for a swift release.
Sarah stopped for gas in a town called Chance. She went to the ladies’ room to change clothes and discovered that she had stuffed her suitcase with far too many A-line skirts and blazers and had forgotten certain key items, like a hairbrush and pajamas. Maybe she should have spent more time picking the right kind of clothes to bring on her journey. But when you’re running out on your marriage, she thought, you didn’t really take time to shop or plan ahead. You didn’t even take the time to think.
She tugged a purse-sized comb through her hair, scowling when she hit a snag. Her hair was at that awkward in-between stage, neither impressively long nor sassily short. Jack claimed he liked her hair long and silky—“my California girl,” he used to call her.
“Can you take a walk-in?” Sarah asked the woman at the counter of the Chance, Illinois, Twirl & Curl.
“What do you need, hon?” Heather, the stylist, scrutinized her in the mirror.
Sarah touched her hair. “I want to be ritually shorn of the person I never was to begin with.”
Heather grinned as she led Sarah to a chair. “My specialty.”
It was a relief to lie back over the sink, close her eyes and surrender to the warm stream from the hose and the creamy texture of the shampoo. The familiar perfume of the salon comforted her.
“You’re a natural blond,” Heather remarked.
“I was experimenting with being a redhead but it didn’t work out. I’ve gone through every shade of brunette, too. Always looking for something different, I guess.”
“And
