Free Women on the Edge of a Nervous Breakthrough by Isabel Sharpe

need to make it right had touched Erin, so she'd accepted his offer. And she did enjoy having her own space to paint in. The one room in the house that was hers. Except Joan really owned the whole place, and never let them forget it.
      Erin moved to the window in their bedroom, checked again for Joe's car, then sat in front of the computer. She didn't want to face what was ahead, couldn't stand to sit here waiting. Her legs felt like dancing, fl ailing, or sprinting. Times like these, she wished she still ran, like she did in high school. She probably could have been a marathoner, Coach Auburn said. Running set her free the way nothing did, except her trances.
      Trances she'd discovered when her father was in his mean moods. She could retreat so far inside herself that she stopped existing. When Joy was born, the nurse said she'd never seen anyone stay so quiet and calm through labor. She'd caught her breath, too, when she saw the scars on Erin's body, but of course said nothing. People in Kettle didn't want to know.
      Erin opened her e -mail program and waited hopefully for the system to check the server. She'd sent out an e -mail yesterday, to her aunts who lived near Milwaukee; her cousin; her history teacher who moved back to Chicago; Fran, her freshman tutor in Spanish, now at college in Maine. They were on a list called "Joy."
      She hoped one of her e -mails would catch on enough, touch enough people, and be forwarded so many times, that someone would forward it back to her, not knowing she actually wrote it.
      Yesterday's e -mail was about a woman who didn't make time to have lunch with her sister. Then her sister was killed in an automobile accident. And now the woman would never get to have lunch with her sister ever again. At the bottom, Erin wrote:

    Pass this along to your friends; help their lives be richer in the only way that counts. If it comes back to you, you are richer than Bill Gates, in friendship and in love.
      She supposed that was pretty gag -worthy, but those types of e -mails seemed popular. At least judging by the number she got sent, mostly from her grandmother, in an assisted living facility in Hayward. Maybe you got to like sappy stuff when you reached the end of your life.
      After receiving so many of these e -mails, Erin had decided to write her own. She liked the idea of sending part of herself out there. She always made it look as if she'd forwarded the note from someone else. Maybe someday her grandmother would forward one Erin had written back to her.
      The rumble of their garage door opening preceded the sound of a car engine in the driveway by a few seconds. Erin's hands fumbled to close her program, turn off the computer. If Joe saw her, he'd want to know who she'd been writing to, what she'd said. He could make her feel guilty asking what she'd eaten for lunch, and he could smell guilt a mile away. Once he smelled guilt, things got unpleasant. Her breath came faster; fear cut sharply into her stomach. She should have had more to eat.
      A loud noise from the garage, a metallic clank, like something had been knocked over, a shovel or something. Joe could hold nearly half a bottle and walk okay. If he was stumbling and knocking things over, he was beyond drunk.
      She peeked in the mirror, made sure she looked pleasantly neutral. Anything to avoid comment, confrontation, though by now it was inevitable.
      " Er'n." His slurred shout increased her adrenaline. Not the nice, excited kind of adrenaline, a dark burn that sapped her, made her tremble. Fight or fl ight—she could do neither. Just stand and watch it coming, take what he wanted to give her, and tomorrow pretend it hadn't happened. Over and over, year after year.
    " Yes, Joe . I'm coming ."
      She ran the length of the house to the garage door, opened it, smiled welcome she didn't feel. He was trashed. Eyes swollen into slits, lip curled the way it did when he was feeling cruel and horny. Oh