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“Mom!” Seth yells. “You going to get that?”

My brain is screaming
Go to the door! Don’t let Seth be the one who answers it!
but I can’t bring myself to move. In this, of all moments, I can’t bring myself to protect my son.

“Really,” I hear him mutter as he clicks off the TV and shuffles towards the front door.

Now my feet are moving, my mouth is open, but I can’t get the words out. I don’t beat Seth to the door, which is swinging open, revealing the officers. And my son, my beautiful, intelligent son, sees the unpleasant task in their faces, turns towards me with a look of horror, and runs.

“Have I got this right, Tish?”
my best friend, Julia, asks in a distracted tone. “You’re saying you haven’t heard from this guy in a couple of days?”

I’m lying on my dining room floor, the phone receiver cradled under my ear. I can feel the itchy wool rug beneath me, and the hardness of the wood floor it covers. There’s a string of old spiderwebs dangling from the plaster cornice on the ceiling. I have no idea how long it’s been there. I don’t usually lie on my dining room floor. I don’t usually have a reason to. But my heart feels like there’s a hand holding it, and that hand is squeezing, squeezing, so:

“It isn’t the number of days, really, but that he hasn’t answered my email—” I stop myself before I add an “s.” I have to be careful here.

There’s a hint of movement on my leg. It’s a small black ant. A line of them is marching across the floor from the kitchen. I don’t know where they’re going, but I seem to be in their way.

“I still don’t get it. What’s the big deal?” Julia asks. Her three-year-old calls for her in the background. His father shushes him.

And that’s the million-dollar question, because the big deal is what took me four hours to place this call. The big deal is what I’m still not sure I can say out loud, though I’ve got to say something now that I’ve got Julia on the line.

“Tish,” she says when I’ve been silent too long. “This really isn’t a good time …”

Here’s my out. I could let her go, give in to the fact that she doesn’t really want to know what I called to tell her. She might even forget we had this conversation. The taste might remain on her brain, but the substance would be gone, like the thought you have right before sleep, the invention, the perfect line, the thing you ought to write down and never do.

I could let her go, but I don’t. Because I’m drowning here, on the floor, with the ants marching across me, the phone slick in my hand. If someone doesn’t pull me out, I may be lost forever.

“Please. Don’t hang up.”

“All right. Give me two minutes. Don’t go anywhere.”

I almost laugh. If I could go somewhere, anywhere, I’d already be there.

I hear the phone click onto the kitchen counter, and the brief negotiation with Ken about taking care of Will for a few minutes.

“Yes, it’s important,” she says, followed by a mumble of assent.

I listen to Will’s wail as his mother leaves the room, and Ken’s curse and immediate apology, like his three-year-old son would be mad at him for swearing.

“Okay,” Julia says a minute later. I can hear the silence behind her. “I’m in the study with the door closed. What the hell’s going on?”

I felt the first flutter of worry Friday night.

After dinner and a movie with Zoey on the couch while Brian worked late, I realized Jeff had never written to say how the firing had gone. He’d been fretting about it so much, I was sure he’d be eager to tell me all about it. But when I checked my email, there was just the message he’d sent earlier in the day.

How’d it go?
I typed, and waited a minute for his response. When it didn’t come, I put my phone down and turned my attention back to Zoey, who was impatient to tell me the problems she had with
Letters to Juliet
, the movie we’d watched.

Brian got home while Zoey was on point #7.

“And why do the main characters always have to hate one another at the beginning of the movie? Like, hello, red flag. It’s so obvious they’re going to get together.”

She stopped her tirade to run to the door and jump on Brian’s back, insisting he take her for a lap around the house even though, at eleven, she knows she’s kind of too old for it.

Brian dropped his medical bag and complied. Zoey whooped with delight. I followed them through the kitchen to the dining room, and up the stairs to her bedroom. It was getting late, close to ten, and Brian ended his tour by dumping Zoey on her bed and pointing to the red, glowing numbers on the clock next to it.

“You need your sleep, kid,” he said, his voice gravelly from a long day. “Big weekend.”

“I know.”

He rumpled her hair, and I kissed her cheek. Together we said, “Don’t read too late,” then we laughed, the three of us, the laughter following Brian and me down the hall to our bedroom.

The sight of our soft king-sized bed made me exhausted. I began to undress.

“Late one tonight,” I said.

Brian loosened his tie. “Sorry about that. Harry’s kids had croup again.”

“You must be the last doctor in the world that still makes house calls.”

“I hope not.”

I gathered my clothes together and dropped them into the hamper. Brian came up behind me and slipped his arm around my waist, placing his lips against my neck. I leaned against him, briefly, trying to summon the energy to return his kiss, finish loosening his tie.

“I’m exhausted,” I said.

“I can be quick.”

I turned and looped my hands around his neck. He was smiling, but I knew he meant it too.

“Why don’t we wait until it doesn’t have to be quick?”

“I’m going to hold you to that.”

“Good.” I kissed him, pressing my lips tightly against his to seal our deal. “You coming to bed?”

“I think I’m going to eat something first, watch the news.”

“Don’t stay up too late. Big day tomorrow, right, kid?”

He smiled. “It is.”

We kissed again briefly and separated, me headed for my nightly ritual in the bathroom, he to the leftovers waiting for him in the fridge. A few minutes later I slipped between
the cool sheets and rested my head on my pillow. I didn’t even bother reaching for my book. Instead, I curled onto my side, and the last thing I remember thinking is
I hope Jeff is doing okay
.

Saturday morning passed quickly while I made sure Zoey and Brian had everything ready for their overnight trip to the Spoken Word Regionals, a three-hour drive away.

Zoey’s dress needed a last-minute ironing, and she’s always pretty particular about what she eats on competition days. It was almost eleven by the time they’d packed themselves into the car. Brian was going to have to drive faster than I liked to think about to get there on time. I watched him back out of the driveway, waving at them through the kitchen window. Zoey had that determined look she always gets, her game face I call it. Brian was wearing his game face too, a mixture of nervousness and pride, similar to my own, I expect.

They navigated successfully down our street and their fate was out of my hands. I went to the hallway and dug around in my purse for my phone. I had three new emails, but none from Jeff. I felt a tinge of disappointment, surprise, then that worry again.

I wracked my brain, trying to remember if he’d told me about something that might explain the absence of an answer. I hesitated for a moment before texting him because we almost never do, but I was worried the firing had gone badly, that he was taking it too much to heart.

Everything go okay?
I typed, listening to the words whoosh away from me. Again, I held the phone in my hand for a minute or two, waiting for a response, but there was nothing.
I put it down eventually and tried to put it out of my mind. He’d answer when he could.

But he didn’t.

I spent most of the day cleaning the house with increasing obsessiveness. The air smells very clean as I lie here, trying to tell Julia enough to justify this phone call without telling her everything.

As the hours crept by, I began to carry my phone around like a talisman. My heart leapt every time it pinged with an email or text, but they were never from Jeff. A few were from Brian and Zoey, updating me on their progress, letting me know they’d gotten there, that her first round had gone well. These I responded to. The rest, I ignored.

But what I couldn’t understand, or explain to Julia, is what made me so worried, why that worry grew as the hours passed, why it became all-consuming. All I can come up with is that it isn’t just the silence but its quality. Something about our usual connection seems missing, and that absence is tugging away at me. Part of me knows I’m being completely irrational, and the other part is terrified I’m not.

My phone pinged for the last time last night around nine. My breath caught. It was a Google Alert for Jeff Manning. My hands shook as I opened it, but it was nothing. Some other Jeff Manning was getting married. How nice for him. My panic subsided, and I smiled as I remembered setting up the alert in the first place.

It was right around the time of a big mine disaster that dominated the news. In the buzz of media attention, it came to light that one of the miners had a wife and a girlfriend. Jeff and I were emailing about it at work.

Not the best way for something like that to get out
, he wrote.

Uh, no. “Something like that.” Funny
.

I’m glad I amuse you
.

I keep thinking about the girlfriend
.

What about her?

Well … and okay, this may be stupid or paranoid or whatever, but … I keep thinking about how the only reason she even knows what happened to him is because it was this big media event. If he’d disappeared or died for some ordinary reason, it’s not like anyone would tell her
.

I sense a deeper thought here
.

Yeah, well … how would I know if anything ever happened to you? Inter-office memo. Ha!

I went back to work, but the idea stuck with me. How
would
I know if something ever happened to him? Not that anything should, but still.

Have found a solution
, I wrote a few days later.

Solution for?

Miner’s girlfriend problem
.

You worry too much
.

Like you’re the first person to tell me this?

What’s the solution?

Google Alert
.

You think technology is the solution to everything
.

Because it is
.

So I’d set up a Google Alert for Jeff Manning, the theory being that my friend Google would crawl the net for me and send me a message any time his name was mentioned online.

It ended up being a joke between us. Turns out there are a lot of Jeff Mannings out there. One won a blue ribbon at a
state fair for having the biggest pumpkin. One was a professional downhill skier who liked to party when he wasn’t in training. There were even Jeff Manning obituaries once in a while, old men dying peacefully or after a long illness. And once, tragically, a young boy.

Whenever there was a particularly funny one, I’d let Jeff know what his namesake was up to. If one of them died, we’d hold a minute of silence, or make an anonymous donation to the charity specified in the obituary. A really big one in the case of little Jeff Manning.

But underneath, there was always that niggling worry, one I couldn’t even explain to myself, especially since it was so close to the feeling I had about Zoey sometimes, particularly when she was a baby and I was sure I was going to drop her at any moment.

After getting the false Alert, a weariness passed through me, the product of tension and little food. I chewed my thumb, contemplating whether I should send one more message. In the end, I couldn’t help myself from emailing:
Worried. Please answer whenever you get this
. I didn’t bother waiting for a response. Instead, I brought the phone upstairs with me and left it on my nightstand.

If it buzzed in the night, I wanted to know.

Today, I woke with the sun, exhausted and certain in the knowledge that there was no message.

Lying there in bed, I flipped through the possibilities like they were index cards. One or two of them made me angry, and the rest made me so sad I’d flick them away only to have them return moments later. Others seemed irrational, but
what if they weren’t? I don’t possess any special immunity against bad things happening to someone I care about because I can’t handle it.

And all the while, I couldn’t help thinking about the deadline, still weeks away. Clearly, I’m not ready for it. Maybe he figured that out? Maybe this is like agreeing to count to three, but dunking your kid on two, so they don’t see it coming? Well, fuck that. If this turns out to be some kind of test, I’m going to kill him.

A final check of my phone confirmed what I already knew. He hadn’t answered. Again, I couldn’t keep myself from emailing:
Really worried. Please, please reply
. After I sent it, I didn’t know what to do with myself. All I knew was I had to talk to someone. I had to try to steal someone’s rationality. But talking would mean telling, and I struggled with that for the next several hours as I wandered aimlessly around the house. Eventually, I decided I didn’t have a choice. Someone had to be told, and Julia was the only possibility.

So here I am, on the floor, phone in hand, putting out as few words as possible, trying to downplay, to couch, to duck and cover. But Julia isn’t stupid. And after I hem and haw, she asks the question I was trying to avoid all along.

“Tish, are you having an affair with this man?”

I met Claire soon after I moved home from college
.

I grew up in Springfield, an almost-a-city town set in the middle of a vast plane of flatness. They used to grow wheat here a century ago, before the land was used up and the farmers moved farther west. Old barns and grain silos still dot the landscape, empty now except for the history they hold.

My parents’ house was equidistant between the only wooded area in town—called, imaginatively, the Woods—and the public golf course. I spent an equal amount of time at both, allowed by my parents to roam free with my older brother, Tim. We learned to swim in the cold pools in the river, and played Pirates, Capture the Flag, and a game of our own invention called “You Can’t Get There from Here” in the Woods.

When Tim tired of me, I’d sling a bag full of my dad’s cast-off clubs over my shoulder and walk to the golf course. Everyone knew me there, and many of the grown-ups would let me join
them, cheering me on if I made a good shot, helping me search for my ball in the tall grasses that waved along the side of the course when I didn’t.

Winter meant snow forts and snowball fights, skating on the rink my dad made in the backyard: fuelled by his dreams of having at least one son in the NHL, he’d be out there late most nights smoothing the surface by applying a fresh layer of water with a garden hose. It also meant shuffling to the golf course to look out over the snowy undulations and frozen water hazards, waiting longingly for spring.

When it was time to apply to college, Tim was already in his second year at State, but I decided to cast a wider net. I had good grades, so why not? And if the schools I applied to tended to have less winter and be in proximity to affordable golf, or have—nirvana—their own golf course, all the better.

I got into a smaller, liberal arts college several degrees latitude south, and my parents were amenable to helping me out, so that’s where I went.

I came home six years later.

I knew a few things about myself by then. The first and foremost was that I was never going to make the PGA Tour. Okay, I already kind of knew that, but a guy can dream, can’t he? But I also knew I didn’t want to be anything I’d imagined being as a boy—fireman, teacher, lawyer. It turned out what I really enjoyed was numbers, the certainty of 2 + 2. In my junior year, I’d switched from history to accounting, stuck around for a few extra years to get my CPA, and worked on how to make “I’m going to be an accountant” sound intriguing enough to get a couple girls to go home with me.

As much as I’d enjoyed my time away, I also knew I wanted to go back to Springfield.

Maybe I was homesick, but I felt like I knew that most of all.

After I got back, I spent enough time living with my parents to change my leisurely plan of looking for an apartment while I set up my accounting practice into a thing of urgency, then borrowed some money from them to buy a condo in a newer building close to what passed for downtown in Springfield.

And that’s how I met Claire.

I needed a lawyer to work out the paperwork for the condo, and to set up my new business. A bit of asking around told me that James & Franzen were the best, so I called to make an appointment. The receptionist asked me if I minded working with one of the newer members of the firm.

“Sure, that’d be fine.”

“Great. Claire James has an opening tomorrow at eleven thirty, would that do you?”

The name seemed familiar, but I couldn’t place it. “It would.”

The next day I put on a pair of pressed khakis and a sport coat—a hand-me-down from my father that had the golf course’s crest embroidered above the right-hand pocket—and strolled across the town square. As I passed person after person I knew, and smiled and nodded and said, “Yup, I’m back for good, you need an accountant, you give me a call,” I wondered what it was about the name Claire James that was so familiar, but I still couldn’t get there.

I cast those thoughts aside as the Claire James in question came out to meet me. She was about my age, maybe a bit older, and pretty. Wearing a navy blue skirt and jacket, she had straight chestnut hair that touched her shoulders, pale blue eyes that were a little close together above a straight nose, and medium-full lips covered in a light gloss. She smiled
and her whole face lit up, exuding warmth and confidence.

I felt tongue-tied as I followed her down the corridor. Although I was still in the process of breaking up with my college girlfriend, Lily—she didn’t want to move to Springfield, but we weren’t quite prepared to give up on the idea of us having a future together—I knew immediately that I really wanted to ask Claire out.

But first, we had some business to attend to.

“Did Tim give you my name?” she asked as she sat down behind her desk, kicking off an uncomfortable-looking pair of high-heeled shoes. “You don’t mind, do you?”

My brain fogged with confusion until I realized she was referring to her stocking feet.

“No, of course not. But how do you …”

Her face fell as memory clicked into place. Claire
James
. Shit. This was Tim’s law school girlfriend, who happened to be from Springfield too. The one I didn’t meet because Tim and I never seemed to be home at the same time anymore. The one I never met before that because she went through the private school system. And, most importantly, the one Tim broke up with around graduation and had been tight-lipped about ever since.

“Oh,” was all I could manage.

“I’m guessing that means Tim didn’t send you?”

“I’m sorry, I called the general line and they put me on to you.”

“Why are you apologizing?”

“For not making the connection, I guess.”

“That’s all right. Have you heard from Tim lately?”

She was trying to act casual as she asked this, but the way her neck flushed gave her away. Problem was, I hadn’t spoken
to Tim lately. None of us had. He’d fucked off a few months after finishing law school to take a “spin around the world,” and his communication since then had been infrequent and short.
In Spain
read one postcard, sent from Seville and depicting a bullfight.
Old buildings
.

“Not really.”

“Me neither.”

“If this is going to be awkward, I’m sure I can find someone else to handle my stuff.”

“No, no,” she waved off my suggestion. “That’s all
done
with. And it’s not your problem.”

But it was.

When I was twelve, my dad decided it was time to give me the Talk.

I’d been caught folding my stained Matchbox-car sheets into the washing machine early one Sunday morning. I stood there, frozen, while my dad watched me over his coffee cup with a look of deep understanding. My ears went hot, feverish. I thanked God my mom was a late sleeper.

He beckoned me into the kitchen, poured me a small cup of joe, and stumbled his way through a version of the facts of life that was so alien to what I already knew from TV and the schoolyard I was pretty sure he didn’t know what he was talking about.

When he finally let me go hide in my room, Tim came to find me. Tim was fourteen. He’d grown. I had not. The weight of him as he sat down on the side of my bed reminded me of my father. But his voice still cracked.

“Nice try, loser.”

I pulled the sheet down. He was smirking at me, but in a friendly way.

“Ah, fuck off.”

“You gotta wait till they’re out of the house.”

“I was kinda figuring that out.”

“Dad talk to you?”

“Yeah.”

“Predictable.”

“Whatever.”

“Bet you can’t wait to get a girl now.”

His mild sarcasm made me wonder whether what my dad had said might’ve been accurate after all.

“No way. Girls are gross.”

“Right. Till they aren’t.”

“Huh?”

“What do you think you were dreaming about, dummy? Unless …”

I picked up my pillow and threw it at him. “I’m not a homo.”

“Sure.”

“I’m not.”

“So girls won’t be gross forever, then.”

I thought about the girls in my class. How my friends and I made fun of their “best-friend” necklaces. How they held hands when they walked down the hall. How they’d cry over the breakup of their friendships.

Who needed that kind of drama?

“Maybe.”

“Trust me.”

“What do you know about it?”

“More than you, Mr. Matchbox Car.”

“I’ve asked Mom like a thousand times to get me new sheets.”

“Well, maybe she will now that you’re a man and all.”

My stomach clenched in panic. “Dad’s not going to tell Mom, is he?”

“I think you can count on it.”

I pulled the covers back up over my head. Tim left me in my fortress of embarrassment wondering whether what he said about girls was right, but it soon became clear. Almost overnight, girls stopped being “girls” and became Sara, Allison, and Christie. And the scuffle that resulted a couple months later from John kissing Brendan’s “girlfriend” led us to adopt the Rules.

Well, there was just the one rule, really: once a girl was stupid enough to go out with one of us, she was off limits.

Forever.

Because forever seemed like a real thing then, something that had to be respected.

Loyalty to my brother—and the certain knowledge that acting on my growing feelings for Claire would be a gross violation of the Rule—kept me from asking her out for months.

I held it in check while she helped me buy my condo and set up my business and became a friend. I worried that becoming her friend would mean I’d lose my chance to be something more. I spent way too much time thinking about the whole thing, to be honest, which really wasn’t like me. With the exception of Lily, I’d flitted in and out of relationships without much thought, and had been attracted to girls who I instinctively knew would tire of me in short order or wouldn’t be that upset if I tired of them.

So I knew I was in trouble.

I just didn’t know how much.

In the midst of all this thinking, I finally broke up with Lily, driving twelve hours to do it in person. Six hours there, a two-hour prolonged and tearful—on her part—conversation, then six hours back, knowing I’d done the right thing but still feeling shitty. Would I have tried harder to work things out if Claire wasn’t in the picture? But Claire wasn’t really in the picture, so why was I acting as if she were? My brain wheeled round and round until I took the final turn off the highway for home and my spirits began to lift.

I was now twenty-four, free, and half in love with my brother’s ex-girlfriend. I did a few stupid things to try to get her out of my system. Like hanging out in the local hook-up bar, taking home girls I knew I was never going to ask out again, who’d become someone I avoided in the grocery store. I was having fun, but I was brooding too. Assuming Claire did want to go out with me, how was I ever going to get past the Tim factor?

Then she did it for me.

About six months after we’d first met, we were having lunch at a deli that had opened recently near her office.

I’d received a postcard from Tim.
Welcome to Coolangatta
it read, with the words
Learning to scuba
written on the back. I had to look up the name to figure out he was in Australia. It was in my pocket, and I was fingering it nervously, wondering if I should show it to her. I eventually decided to do it, and tried to act casual as I pulled out the slightly moist card and slid it across the counter towards her.

“Heard from Tim,” I said, taking a large bite of my sandwich.

“Oh?”

She picked up the card, staring at the azure ocean, the cloudless sky, the red sand beach. I watched her out of the corner of my eye as she turned it over and read the words on the back.

“Well, that’s that, then.” She pushed it back to me.

“What’s that?”

“Tim wanted to go to Australia. That’s why we broke up.”

“You didn’t want to go?”

She shook her head, looked away.

“I know how that feels.” I took a sip of my Coke to wet my drying throat. “Lily, I told you about her, right? Anyway, she didn’t want to move here. So …”

“So?”

“We broke up.”

“I heard.”

I wondered what else she’d heard. Not too much, hopefully.

“Small towns.”

She played with her napkin. “The funny thing is, I would’ve gone with him if he’d really wanted me to, but the minute I expressed some reluctance he blew it up into this big thing, like he was looking for an excuse to break up.”

“Idiot.”

“Pardon?”

“I said, my brother’s an idiot.”

“Yeah, well, some things aren’t meant to work out. I mean, if he really loved me, we would’ve figured it out, right?”

Did that mean I hadn’t really loved Lily? Because I thought I had. It certainly felt like love during the good parts. But one thing was certain: Claire loved Tim enough to move around the world for him; I’d better put my dreams away if I knew what was good for me.

She put her hand on my knee. Thoughts of Tim receded.

“You won’t tell Tim about any of this, will you?”

“Of course not.”

“Thanks, Jeff, you’re a really good friend.” She leaned forward and kissed me on the cheek, then pulled back, looking confused. “I’m sorry.”

“No, don’t be. I … I’ve wanted that for a while now.”

“You’ve wanted me to kiss you on the cheek?”

“Among other places,” I said, hoping I was striking the right flirty tone, my heart racing against my chest.

“Well, then, maybe we should do something about that,” she said slowly.

“What did you have in mind?”

She thought about it for a moment. “Do you like Asian food?”

As I stood in the shower two nights later, a riot of rationalization skipped through my brain.
He
broke up with her.
She’d
asked me out. He’d barely communicated with any of us for months. Maybe he was never coming back. Besides, if I even wanted to ask his permission, he’d made that impossible. We had no address, no phone number, no way of contacting him. He’d untethered himself from us. How could he complain if things happened? How could he be surprised if life moved on?