The Half Life

 

ALSO BY JENNIFER WEINER

Good in Bed

In Her Shoes

Little Earthquakes

Goodnight Nobody

The Guy Not Taken

Certain Girls

Best Friends Forever

Fly Away Home

 

WASHINGTON SQUARE PRESS

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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2010 by Jennifer Weiner, Inc.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to
Redbook
magazine, a publication of Hearst Communications, Inc., where “The Half Life” first appeared.

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Atria Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020

First Washington Square Press edition December 2010

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Manufactured in the United States of America

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

ISBN 978-1-4516-4062-5

 

Contents

The Half Life

 

 

The Half Life

 

“Can you believe this?” the man in front of Piper grumbled. The line, which they'd finally crested, had snaked through a half-dozen switchbacks and extended down the glass-lined corridor of the Philadelphia International Airport, past the white-painted rocking chairs and the flat-screen board listing
DEPARTURES
and
ARRIVALS
. Piper gave him a tight smile.

“I get here two hours early for a domestic flight—domestic!” said the man, undeterred by Piper's silence. “And still. Look at this.” He jerked his chin at the line, barely bothering to glance at her face and almost certainly not seeing her, not really, because if he did, he'd see a woman on the verge—if not of a nervous breakdown, then definitely of tears. Piper had tried hard with her makeup kit in the fifteen-minute cab ride from her row house in Center City to the airport, but concealer could do only so much to cover up the dark circles under her eyes. Liner and mascara couldn't disguise the threads of red in the whites of her eyes; lipstick could brighten her mouth but couldn't change the way it turned down in a trembling bow. When you come home from work and your husband meets you at the door, his bags neatly packed at his side, and says, “I won't be here when you come back,” what do you do with that information? What do you do when you've got a four-year-old, when you're the only one in the house with a full-time job, when you've spent the last two years trying to jolly him out of the black cloud that's enveloped him since he lost his teaching position, when you've been paying all the bills, trying to keep everyone happy and clothed and fed? What do you do when he tells you that the night before you're leaving on a business trip to Paris?

It turns out that what you do is hiss the words “Not now” and attempt to step over his suitcase, and you almost succeed until you feel his firm grip on your elbow.

“I've been trying to tell you,” Tosh said, having the good manners to look pained. Piper supposed that this was true. “We need to talk,” he'd said one rainy night back in September . . . so she'd filled the kitchen with cheery chatter, directed mostly at their daughter. “Piper, I'm not happy,” he'd said on New Year's Eve . . . so she'd fetched him a dish of ice cream, handed him the remote, and slipped out of the den to return email from her office. When he'd started sleeping in the basement the month before, she'd told her daughter it was because she snored, and when he'd said he was in love with someone else—well, she'd simply ignored him. In love with someone else? It was ridiculous. They were married. End of story.

“It's a phase,” she'd said brightly to her best friend, Sarah, who'd looked at her with eyes brimming with unbearable sympathy. After that, Piper had stopped talking about it. Talking about it only made it real, and it couldn't be. It was a phase, a bad mood, Mercury in retrograde or something like that. Tosh would get a job, he'd move his stuff out of the basement, he'd start wanting to sleep with her again, and everything would be fine.

Except if that had been true, Tosh couldn't have left. He couldn't have piled his suitcase into the trunk of a taxi, crying, and ridden away from her. Yet that was exactly what he had done. All Piper could do was watch him go.

This isn't happening
, Piper had told herself. She'd said it over and over in her mind, at increasing volumes, until she believed it. Not happening. Couldn't happen. Then she'd gone inside, collected Nola from the babysitter, made her dinner and put her to bed. “Where did Daddy go?” her little girl had asked from the cozy depths of her bed (Nola slept with two down comforters, a cotton blanket, and flannel sheets, all of which would be kicked to the floor at some point during the night), and Piper had said, “Business trip.”

She'd stayed up all night, zipping her toiletries into plastic bags, settling her suits in their dry-cleaner's plastic into her suitcase, not checking her email, not listening for the phone. She'd shaved her legs and painted her toenails. She'd exfoliated. She'd reorganized her closet, bagging up pilled sweaters and two pairs of maternity pants for Goodwill. In the morning, she'd gotten Nola out of bed, supervised face-washing and toothbrushing and Cheerios with cut-up banana, then walked her to nursery school. Piper's mother, who'd be staying at the house and helping Tosh look after Nola while Piper traveled, would pick Nola up at noon and take her out to lunch and maybe a movie. At two o'clock Piper would call for a cab of her own and head to the airport and then Paris. By the time she got home from the trip, she kept telling herself, everything would be fine. Tosh would have realized how much he missed Nola and missed her. Her mother would of course agree to stay an extra night to give them a chance to
go out to dinner and maybe even spend the night in a nice hotel, and there, on anonymous high-thread-count sheets, she and her husband would make everything all right again.

In the airport, the line inched forward, and the man in front of her was still intent on conversation. “You from here? Philly?” he asked. Piper nodded. “You like it?” he persisted, and she nodded again. She supposed she should be flattered that a man, any man, thought she was worth an effort. Dressed for work, with eyeliner and high heels, her hair twisted on top of her head, she could still get away with a sexy-librarian look. In the mirror, plucking her eyebrows, she could see the signs of age—the deepening fan wrinkles in the corners of her eyes, the odd age spot, and still the occasional zit. She was forty, with a four-year-old, a full-time job, and an unhappy and unemployed husband (whose defection she would not, could not acknowledge), and sometimes she felt every day of her age and more.

Tosh, of course, didn't seem to have aged a minute. His nut-brown skin was smooth, his hair still glossy, his body firm, the muscles supple, visible whenever he moved. Tosh was a sculptor; he worked with his hands, with his body, heaving blocks of stone, while Piper, deskbound and increasingly, dismayingly flabby underneath her clothes, supported them.