Free Where Love Goes by Joyce Maynard

time.
    Before long it got to be her habit to call him up every day. First thing she’d do as soon as the children went off to school was pour herself a cup of coffee and dial Mickey’s number. “You know what, Slim?” Mickey told her during one of their morning conversations over coffee, “I think this might just be the perfect relationship.”
    Nancy, who has never met Mickey, considers it bizarre that in the two years they’ve been doing this, Claire and Mickey haven’t seen each other once. He sends her his baseball team portrait every year, though, along with an annual report on the state of his hairline. Now and then he sends a photo of Gabe, and one time she sent him a picture of Pete and Sally dressed as John Lennon and Paul McCartney for Halloween. When Claire won a big grant to mount a multicultural exhibit at the children’s museum and a professional photographer took a portrait of Claire for their new brochure, she sent Mickey the contact sheets. He wrote funny captions under every shot except for one he circled with a china marker.
    “Get me a print of that and send it to me, huh, Slim?” he asked her.
    Talking on the phone as they do now, they seldom refer to their old history together. They tell each other about blind dates they go on, music they’re listening to, lovers they have—Mickey’s many, Claire’s few. Mickey tells Claire his theories about what the Red Sox are doing wrong. Claire tells Mickey about the petty politics at the museum, her battles with the board and its director, Vivian, who wants her to put more emphasis on computers and video technology and makes barbed remarks about Claire’s failure to drum up more big corporate contributions. Though they seldom discussed their children when they were lovers, now, surprisingly enough, Mickey often tells Claire something Gabe’s been up to and asks about her kids. She tells him about little things Sam does like forgetting to bring Pete and Sally’s bikes back from his house or sending them home, Sunday nights, full of sugar and video games, with none of their homework done, or the time Claire came home to find Sam upstairs taking a shower.
    “You need to tell that guy if he keeps leaning over the plate, he’s going to get hit with the pitch,” Mickey tells her. The next time Claire sees Sam—and he makes one of his little digs at her—that is precisely what she says. There is a trace of Mickey’s Alabama accent in her voice as well as his strength as she delivers the line. Sam looks at her strangely. But he backs off, too.
    Often in her confrontations with Sam Claire will pretend that Mickey’s standing there in his Hornets uniform, telling her what to say. He may be talking baseball, or whispering in her ear in his scratchy-voiced Miles Davis imitation. “Smooth and slow,” Miles will tell her. “You don’t have to blow hard. Just blow.” Or he may just be Mickey, reminding her that she is good and strong, and not the dysfunctional hysteric her ex-husband likes to make her out to be.
    “I’m sorry, Sam,” she tells him, “but it won’t be possible for you to take Pete out to the comic store again tonight after his game. Until he gets his act together about the chores I ask him to do, he’s got to get to bed by eight-thirty.”
    Sam will shoot Claire an angry look then most likely, followed by a gesture to his son that says, “Women . What can you do?” But for once he doesn’t take it further.
    “You have to draw a line in the dirt and tell him he can’t cross it,” Mickey says. “Your problem is you spent way too many years with that guy and those kids of yours drawing new lines every time they stepped over. And now you wonder why they don’t respect you.”
    Mickey had told Claire when they were still together that nobody would ever love her the way he does. It’s not something they speak of anymore, but this knowledge allows her to hear about his other lovers with a feeling that approaches pleasure. She