Free Sleepwalker by Wendy Corsi Staub

colleagues in his fickle industry. If that happens, they will be, as Mack recently said and an eavesdropping Hudson later colorfully quoted, up a certain creek without a paddle.
    Allison knows only too well what it’s like to be laid off without warning. But at least when she lost her job at the magazine, she and Mack were childless newlyweds, and he could support them both on his salary—with a nice cushion in the bank, thanks to his dead wife.
    For the first time in her life, someone was taking care of Allison, and it felt good.
    Most days, it still does. Stay-at-home motherhood is fulfilling. But once in a while, she longs for something a little more stimulating. Unlike Randi and most of the other women she’s met here in the affluent suburbs, she isn’t into yoga, golf, manicures, or day spas.
    Then again, whenever she’s around petite, striking Randi, who has a thick mane of dark red hair and a tanned, Pilates-toned body, Allison wonders if she’s let herself go.
    She rarely wears makeup these days, and this isn’t the first time she’s gone too long between dye jobs at the salon, resulting in a streak of dark roots along her part line. Plus, her once-willowy frame isn’t quite as taut as it used to be.
    This morning, realizing the weather had gone from summer to fall overnight, she’d pulled on a pair of jeans—faded Levi’s, as opposed to Randi’s dark-wash 7 For All Mankind. After an active summer with the kids—wearing shorts and sundresses that have a lot more give than denim—the jeans feel snugger than she’d expected; the last ten pounds of her third pregnancy weight gain are conspicuously drooping over the top button.
    She reinforces her no to the dessert Randi is offering but says yes to a cup of coffee—black—and lingers to sip it as Randi chatters on and J.J. delightedly turns a seven-dollar pumpkin-shaped cookie into sugary sludge.
    Interrupting her tale of Lexi’s upcoming first high school dance to peer closely at Allison’s face, Randi asks, “Are you just quiet today, or am I boring you to tears and not letting you get a word in edgewise?”
    Oops—I must have drifted.
    Allison shakes her head. “I’m just quiet today.”
    â€œYeah? I think you’re just too polite to tell me to please shut up. Most people don’t have that problem. Ben sure doesn’t.”
    Allison grins. “Mack doesn’t, either. With me, I mean.”
    â€œOr with me,” Randi says wryly. She and Mack have long had a casual, brother-sister relationship. “Ben said he took a few days off this week. I thought maybe it was to make up for the three vacations he missed out on, but Ben said no.”
    Three vacations . . . In addition to the curtailed July week at the beach and the September Disney trip they’d had to forgo, Mack and Allison had planned a late August getaway to a charming, family-friendly Vermont inn recommended by Phyllis next door.
    But Mother Nature seemed bent on robbing them of any pleasure they might salvage from this all-too-fleeting summer. The day before they were supposed to leave—and just forty-eight hours after the freak earthquake—the unprecedented Hurricane Irene came barreling up the coast with New York in her crosshairs. Not only did the storm leave Glenhaven Park littered with downed trees and wires, but floodwaters swept the New England inn they were to visit.
    â€œDon’t bother to come up here,” Phyllis Lewis advised over the phone, having driven to Vermont ahead of the storm. “It’s like a war zone. You’re better off just staying home.”
    Ah, but the one comfort zone they could always count on—their Happy House—had been cast in perpetual shadow, unnervingly silent in the absence of reassuring electronic hums, with rotting food in the fridge and not even the promise of a hot shower to wash away the tension of a