Free Sing You Home by Jodi Picoult Page A

the drop-off zone and closed the door, wondering if I should knock or yell or somehow let the technician know that it was ready and waiting.
    I decided they’d figure it out, and I washed my hands and hurried into the hallway. The receptionist smiled at me as I left. “Thanks for coming,” she said.
    Seriously? Shouldn’t that phrase be banned from use at an IVF clinic?
    As I walked to my car, I was already thinking of how I’d tell Zoe what the receptionist had said. How we’d laugh.
    When I wake up, I am lying on a pillow covered in purple fur, on the floor of a bedroom I do not recognize. Gradually, ignoring the sledgehammer at my temple, I sit up and see a bare foot, flame red polish. My tongue feels like it’s carpeted.
    Staggering upright, I look down at the woman. It takes me a full minute to remember her name. I can’t really recall how we got here, but I do have an image of another bar, after Quasimodo’s, and maybe even another after that. I can taste tequila, and shame.
    Sally is snoring like a longshoreman—the only saving grace. The last thing I want to do is have a conversation with her. I tiptoe out of the room, holding my pants and my shirt and my shoes in a ball at my groin. Did I drive here last night? I hope like hell I didn’t. But God only knows where I left my car.
    Bathroom. I’ll go to the bathroom, and then I’ll sneak out of here. I’ll go home and pretend this never happened.
    I pee and then wash up, dunking my head under the faucet and scrubbing my hair dry with a pink hand towel. My gaze falls to the counter, to a foil snake of condoms. Oh, thank God. Thank God I didn’t make that mistake, too.
    Get a grip on yourself, Max, I say silently.
    You’ve been here before, and you don’t want to go back.
    Everyone messes up from time to time. Maybe I’ve had a few more instances than others, but that doesn’t mean that I’m down for the count. This wasn’t falling off the wagon. It was just . . . a speed bump.
    I open the bathroom door to find a toddler sucking his thumb and staring up at me, with his older sister—a teenager—standing just behind him. “Who the fuck are you ?” she asks.
    I don’t answer. I run past them, out the front door, down the driveway that does not have my car in it. I run all the way out of this suburban cul-de-sac in my boxers. At the juncture of the state highway, I throw on my clothes and dig in my pocket for my cell phone, but the battery’s dead. I keep running, certain that Sally and her children are going to chase me down in the minivan that was in the driveway. I don’t stop until I see a strip mall. All I need is a phone; I’ll call a taxi service to get me back to Quasimodo’s to pick up my car (which is, I hope, where I left it) and then I’ll take refuge at Reid’s house.
    It’s not really my fault that the first place I find open is a restaurant whose proprietor is doing inventory on a Saturday morning. That the guy shakes his head when I ask to borrow the phone, and says I look like I’ve had a rough night. That he offers me, on the house, a drink.
    Normally, we would have been home. After all, the progesterone shot had to be given between 7:00 and 7:15 each night—and it was easy enough to plan our evenings around that, since we didn’t have any spending money to go to a movie or out to dinner anyway. But Zoe had been invited to the wedding of two seniors who’d met in one of her group therapy classes at a nursing home. “If it wasn’t for me,” she’d said, “there wouldn’t even be a wedding.”
    So I came home from work and showered and put on a tie, and we drove to the nursing home. In her purse, Zoe had the progesterone, alcohol wipes, and syringes. We watched Sadie and Clark, with their combined age of 184, get united in holy matrimony. And then we ate creamed beef and Jell-O—the food had to be denture-friendly—and watched the residents who were still mobile dance to big band records.
    The happy newlyweds fed