She opens her mouth, ready to protest, but then hands me the documents I asked for and sighs loudly. “I’m going to be late,” she says. She pulls a lipstick out of her purse and goes to town on her mouth as I walk back to my car.
I patrol the parkway until lunchtime and then pull into Subway to grab a sandwich and a Coke to take back to the station. Later I’ll head toward the suburbs, hoping that it’s quiet and that there are no unpleasant surprises waiting for me, like a missing child or a domestic dispute.
I think back to the woman I pulled over the other day. The pretty blonde in the SUV with a burned-out taillight. I remember her smile and how nice she was.
And how for the rest of my shift I kept picturing her face because she reminded me so much of Jessie.
4
claire
I’m dusting the built-in bookcases in the family room when the rumble of construction machinery, so loud and foreign in my neighborhood, startles me. I look out the window, in the direction of Justin and Julia’s backyard, which abuts mine, and spot a bright yellow excavator fifty yards away. The man operating the controls lowers the bucket and metal slams into dirt. They’re digging the hole for the swimming pool today.
I run my cloth over a picture of Josh and Jordan, set it down, and then smile when I pick up a hand-carved wooden sculpture Chris and I bought on the beach in Hawaii a month after he lost his job. The trip had been his idea. He bookmarked the websites for several resorts and asked me to pick one. “I may never have time off like this again, Claire,” he said. “When I start a new job I might not be able to get away for a while.” That was back when he thought it would be only a matter of weeks before he found another job. Before either of us knew just how bad things would get.
I’d been begging him for years to take a vacation, and it would be only the second time we’d gone away by ourselves since Josh and Jordan were born. My mom and dad took the kids for a week while we drank margaritas and swam in the ocean. We walked on the beach holding hands, and spent hours having vacation-caliber sex in the giant king-size bed in our room. If unemployment bothered Chris, he didn’t let on, at least not then and not to me.
The expense of a vacation didn’t worry him at all. If he found a job right away, he’d be pulling in a double income due to the eight months of severance pay his employer had agreed to pay him. We had no debt other than the house, a healthy balance in savings, retirement accounts that we told ourselves not to worry about because they’d certainly recover when the economy turned around, and college funds for the kids. On paper, we looked pretty good. I was also employed. Granted, my freelance graphic design projects didn’t bring in a tenth as much as Chris’s lucrative commissions had, but it supplemented our income nicely and I was able to work from home. More importantly, I enjoyed it.
We were also able to extend our health insurance benefits for eighteen months, albeit it at a very steep price. That was the only thing that really worried me back then. I’m a type 1 diabetic—I was diagnosed at age twelve—and without health insurance my disease could severely derail our careful financial planning. I wear an insulin pump, which greatly improves my quality of life, but it doesn’t come cheap. There are frequent doctor visits to my endocrinologist and medical supplies that must be purchased each month. We had eighteen months before those benefits would run out.
Plenty of time.
It wasn’t like the downsizing had come as a complete shock, either. It was May 2009 and we’d spent the better part of the previous year listening to the nightly news reports of the plunging stock market and the housing bubble bursting in front of everyone’s eyes. The experts claimed the recession was coming to an end, but the lingering effects of high unemployment could plague the nation for months—maybe years—to come. We knew lots of people who had already lost their jobs and it seemed that everywhere we went someone was networking, leaving no stone unturned when it came to ferreting out a job lead.
The privately owned software company Chris worked for held on as long as they could, but they’d expanded quickly and relied too heavily on external funding and product revenue. Drowning in debt, they laid off their employees in waves, first the support staff and then the highest-paid executives. Chris had time to mentally prepare for what was coming. He didn’t know exactly when it would happen, but he knew the sales department would be next. “Then who will sell their product?” I asked.
“Doesn’t matter,” Chris said. “No one’s buying it right now and they won’t stay afloat long enough to ride this out. I’ll be surprised if the company is still in business in six months.” In the end, it took only three before they shut their doors for good.
I was sitting at the kitchen table assembling the treat bags for Jordan’s upcoming birthday party—pink cellophane filled to the top with assorted candy—when I heard the garage door go up that day. My first thought was that Chris decided to knock off early, but that was wishful thinking. Chris loves to work and it isn’t in his nature to stop unless he has to. He had held the position of sales manager for eight years, but when he walked into the kitchen holding a cardboard box containing the contents of his office, and a folder outlining the details of his severance package, it didn’t matter that his team—under his relentless guidance—had shattered every prior sales record in the company.
Times were hard.
I walked over to him. “I am so sorry.”
He set the box down on the island, pulled me into his arms, and gave me a kiss. “I know. But we both knew it was coming.”
“Why didn’t you call me on your way home?”
He shook his head. “I had to turn in my cell phone.”
A woman in my yoga class, who often placed her mat next to mine, had recently confided that her husband lost his job and hadn’t stopped crying for three days. “He just couldn’t stop,” she said. “He parked himself in our home office and every time I walked by he was sitting behind the desk staring at the computer screen with tears running down his face.” I nodded in sympathy although I had no idea why she’d chosen to divulge this information to me because all we’d ever said to each other up until then was “Hello” and “Hard class today, huh?”
“I’m sure he’ll find something soon,” I said, patting her awkwardly on the shoulder.
She looked at me hopefully. “Do you really think so?”
“Sure.”
She doesn’t come to yoga anymore.
But Chris didn’t cry. In all the years we’d been together I’d never seen him shed a single tear. In fact, he didn’t even seem that upset. Everything he’d ever undertaken in his life had turned out perfectly. He’d grown up in a household where love was abundant but money was tight. The youngest of four siblings, he was accustomed to working for the things he wanted and he put himself through college, zooming through the University of Kansas with a 4.0. After graduation he landed a series of increasingly lucrative jobs, each one paying more than the one before.
Headhunters pursued him relentlessly, trying unsuccessfully to lure him away by promising to double his six-figure base salary and provide an uncapped commission structure. They dangled stock options and company cars in front of him to sweeten the deal, but he refused to budge. Loyal to a fault, he’d built the sales department from the ground up and felt personally responsible for his employees. He would never have left on his own.
None of this prepared him for the possibility that, someday, he might not land on his feet. Chris never once considered, even with the unemployment numbers looking bleaker every day, that he could be one of those left floundering, fighting for a position in a job pool that was shrinking and would end up smaller, figuratively speaking, than the inflatable one his children splashed around in on a hot day. Every man for himself.