Free Breakdown Lane, The by Jacquelyn Mitchard

indeed Senseless in Sheboygan. “I know he was having menopause for guys at first. People go through this all the time and nothing happens.”
    And sure enough, nothing did. Leo wrote to us and sent beautiful pictures of “intentional communities” where twenty people shared one snow-blower and jointly purchased twenty hardcover books each year. There were group suppers and yoga classes. “You should see my downward dog!” he wrote.
    And yet, the moment his plane touched down at Mitchell Field, twenty-four days later, it was I who felt I’d come home. He was better for his adventures. Tanned and ebullient, Leo seemed literally to have fewer lines in his forehead. Pitifully grateful to see the kids, he kept calling them into our room just to look at them. He told me that the sight of me holding Aury reminded him of a Cassatt painting. We made love ferociously—the kind of sex married people don’t have, the kind that leaves rug burns on your knees. That night, watching Aurora sleep, Leo literally cried. He said her black hair shined in the dark and how nothing he’d done could give him back the month of her changing and growing he’d missed, but that he wouldn’t have known that if he hadn’t missed the month.
    “I was just worn out, Jules,” he told me, as we stood in our underwear late that night in the kitchen, toasted bread, and smeared it with peanut butter. “That’s all. Tired of being a good boy. But, hell, I am a good boy. A lifer. Must be genetic.”
    “There’s a lot worse things a person could be, Lee,” I said. “Not everyone has to be Jack Kerouac.”
    “I thought I would once, though,” he said wistfully.
    “We all thought we would once, honey,” I told him, encircling his shoulders with my arms. “If you wanted to so badly, why didn’t you?”
    “I was expected to do what…I was expected to do,” he said. “My only rebellion was”—he smiled crookedly—“falling for a WASP in a leotard.”
    Would I have ever thought to ask him, Leo, were you anything more than a little tired? Like, a little tired of me? Would it have occurred to me to sneak a peek at his e-mail, since I knew the password was “Innisfree.”
    Two weeks later, Leo decided the Unitarians were too conservative and suggested we visit a Tibetan retreat center south of Madison on Sunday afternoons.
    I dug in my heels. Sundays were…well, sacred. I liked to spend Sunday afternoons proofing my column and reading the Times . I suggested he take Aurora Borealis.
    “The name’ll knock ’em dead,” I told Leo. “She can meet some nice Swedish kids called Tenzig and Sorgay.” He didn’t seem to see the humor.
    He brought me books about the way quantum physics and human creative thought were both wave-based. I bought him the Stephen Jay Gould book about why people believe nutty things. He bought Aury Math-O-Mozart blocks. I bought a wide-screen television, which was, in our family, akin to buying an Uzi. (Gabe and Caroline literally knelt in gratitude and placed their foreheads against my hand.)
    When Aury was ready for preschool (it was really a sneaky form of day care, where they charged you more because they used chalk instead of crayons and had a creative-movement teacher come in twice a week; the kid was only one and a half), Leo suggested I homeschool her instead, giving up my column and perhaps taking on a couple of other students. I suggested he homeschool Aurora.
    “If anyone ever needed homeschooling, it was Gabe, ” I said. “Do you know the crap he put up with from kids… and teachers? Eight years of torture because he’s smarter than almost anybody in school and has every learning disability short of a Martian implant? Why didn’t you care then? Why was it so important that the kids go to public school because you work for a public institution?”
    “That’s the whole point, Julieanne,” Leo said. “I don’t want to make the same mistakes with Aurora as I did with the older kids.” Leo looked