Free Breakdown Lane, The by Jacquelyn Mitchard Page B

real sabbatical. From all of it. I’m going to live in upstate New York, right by the Hudson River, with this great community of people I’ve been writing to for years. Before I go there, I’m going to visit some other people I’ve been corresponding with, in Pennsylvania and Massachusetts. Maybe I’ll stay with one of them on their places for a while. I’ve arranged for everything. The mortgage will be paid by automatic withdrawal….”
    “Have you arranged for our divorce? Because basically, you’re deserting me, Leo.”
    The air seemed to shimmer between us. My eyes did that separate move thing, waggling each one in an opposite direction, that they’d come to do in moments of deep stress or confusion. I shook my head to rearrange them. I shook it again. The wall between Leo and me was all but visible, shuddering. I could see it move. Even the waiter wouldn’t approach.
    My husband looked at me with deep seriousness in his great brown eyes. “That’s what I’m trying to avoid, Jules. I don’t want to get burned out on our family, on family life, and skip. I mean that. But I have to…get away. For a while. I have to get away from homework and Gabe’s Individualized Educational Plans and the music blasting and Aury whining…for a while…so that I can stay in our marriage and renew our marriage. I can’t take any more daily pressure.”
    Laughter, you know, is an irresistible human response. A survival mechanism. It’s like hunger or thirst or sexual longing. I laughed. Leo’s description of our family sounded as though he lived with seven severely handicapped children and a wife in a methadone program.
    “You have to get away,” I said. “For how long?”
    “No more than six months.”
    “Six months ?”
    “I said no more than six months. You know how it was last time. I couldn’t stay away from you as long as I’d planned to. I missed my family. I love my kids, Julie.” I didn’t doubt that at all. “I love you.” I did doubt this. “I don’t even mind living…here.” He made it sound as though this, his hometown, was a grimy subway station.
    “You’re frickin’ crazy,” I said, putting down my fork, whispering as the volume of noise in the room spiked. “I don’t mean, you’re crazy, like…Lee, honey, you big goofo, you’re crazy, cut it out! I mean you need help . You really need help. You have to get help, talk to somebody, before you even consider this…bullshit trip.”
    “We’re not one person, Julie. We don’t have to want the same things at the same time all our lives.”
    “I never said we were, though that was the gist of the vows we took. Remember that? I’m not saying we have to be joined at the hip, but this is extreme stuff, Leo. Say you see that. Don’t scare me. I feel like I’m in a room with a drunk.”
    Leo took a long breath, held it, and let it escape slowly. He did this all the time now, and it made me feel as though he were blowing me out, like a candle. Leo’s long breaths were as annoying to me as a fork scraped along a plate. I wanted to reach out and backhand him. “ This is help, Julie. This will be all the help I need. To help me plan a life that will be better for us and the kids.”
    “And what is the alternative, Lee?”
    “I don’t see one.”
    “You don’t see one?”
    Leo cradled his forehead in his interlaced hands. “The only alternative is…I can’t be here anymore, Julieanne. I have to get this out of my system. I have to get this out.”
    He meant this literally.
    Having no alternative myself but to get out of that room then, because I could not breathe and my thigh felt as though I’d stuck the fork in it—symptoms I’d come to realize were the way my body expressed stress in the way other people got headaches, or so I thought—I got up from the table and walked along the exact center of the carpet runner. The room of diners seemed lined up on either side of me like rows of animals in cages, noisily honking and