Free Covet by Tracey Garvis Graves

to get back to his spreadsheets is almost palpable, but his expression softens and he nods and says, “Okay. Give me a half hour.”
    But in the morning I wake up alone, and when I walk downstairs to start the coffee I find Chris asleep on the couch, spreadsheets and laptop on the floor in front of him.



12
    chris
    The sound of someone moving around in the kitchen wakes me. I hear the sliding glass door open and Claire speaking softly to Tucker. The water runs and I picture her filling the coffee pot and starting breakfast. I’m still in the shorts and T-shirt I wore to the parade, and I blink a few times, trying to clear the cobwebs; there’s something I didn’t do. My laptop pings, alerting me to an incoming e-mail, and I notice the spreadsheets covering the floor. I remember Claire’s request and the look on her face last night when she asked me to come upstairs.
    Shit.
    She’s been patient. More patient than I’d ever be if our situation were reversed. And yet I couldn’t even give her the one small thing she asked for, which, quite frankly, is a poor substitute for the real thing.
    It will take me a long time to make it up to Claire. Not just for last night¸ but for last year.
    But I will if she can just hold on a little longer.



13
    daniel
    I stop by the desk of the officer who handles our public works, including speed limit signs. I don’t know him that well, but he seems like a pretty nice guy.
    “What can I do for you?” he asks.
    “I need you to check a list for me. I know someone who’s waiting for a speed limit sign. Her name is Claire Canton.” I wait while his fingers tap the keys. After the parade I looked Claire up on the online white pages. There’s an associated person in the household named Christopher, who’s obviously her husband. I saw her talking to a tall, blond man after the parade, which is yet another reason why it makes no sense for me to keep thinking about her.
    I can’t stop, though.
    She really does look like Jessie. And her hair. I don’t remember what it looked like when I pulled her over, but at the parade it was straight, the way Jessie always wore hers. But Claire’s mouth, that doesn’t remind me of Jessie at all. Because Claire has really great lips. They’re full, but they don’t look as if she’s done anything to make them that way. There’s no way to not notice them when she talks.
    The officer brings up the list on the computer and scrolls through the names. “It’s gonna be a while. She’s way down there.”
    “Can you bump her up?”
    He looks at me and shrugs. “Sure. How far?”
    “To the top.”
    He raises an eyebrow, and I pretend not to notice. “Friend of yours?”
    I don’t know what the hell I’d call her. I hardly
know
her. “Yeah.”
    “Done,” he says. “She should have it in a couple days.”
    “Thanks,” I say. “I owe you one.”
    He laughs. “I hope she’s worth it.”



14
    claire
    By the fifth month of his unemployment, Chris wasn’t quite as confident about finding a job. He spent hours networking on the phone in our home office and entire days online applying directly to company websites. He had relationships with four headhunters, but only one of them was still returning his calls on a regular basis. He started to pull away from me, his responses to my questions clipped, shorter. Sleep eluded him completely, and I’d wake up in the middle of the night and find him in the office, the glow of his laptop filling the room with a weak, eerie blue light. “Are you okay?” I’d ask.
    “I’m fine,” he’d say. “Go back to bed.”
    A feeling of unease would wash over me, and I remembered the woman from my yoga class whose husband had lost his job. I wondered if he ever found one. Without a job to go to, Chris simply didn’t know what to do with himself. Our roles, once so set in stone, remained in a constant state of flux and Chris didn’t quite know how to handle it.
    In mid-August of last year, as the first