Free Fly Away Home by Jennifer Weiner

know how to tell them without sounding like an ungrateful bastard.”
    “Well, let’s figure it out.” She got off the bed and sat cross-legged in the folding metal chair that was the only other seating in the room. Richard, meanwhile, sprawled flat on his back, arms and legs and even fingers extended, as if that would help the words come more easily. Sylvie picked up a notebook and, after considering her pen selection, chose green ink. “We’ll start off by saying how overwhelmed and grateful we are.”
    “Grateful,” he repeated, nodding. “Overwhelmed.”
    “And then we’ll tell them …” She paused, hearing Richard’s voice in her head. “That you think it’s important to make your own way in the world, like they did. To learn as you go.”
    “That’s not gonna sound like I’m an asshole?”
    “It won’t,” she assured him. That was the first speech, the first of many, that she’d helped him write … and never mind that she hadn’t completely agreed with its substance, that she would have been more than happy to take the loan and move into a place that didn’t have mice and a bathroom with barely enough room for a toilet and a tiny sink and a shower stall where the curtain stuck to your body unless you positioned yourself just right.
    They’d moved into the apartment on Court Street in the Carroll Gardens neighborhood of Brooklyn. Richard had gone to work at the D.A.’s office, as planned, and she’d been a summer associate in the trust and estates department of Richter, Morgan, and Katz. Two years later, she’d had Diana. A year after that, Richard had left the D.A.’s office and become a partner at a big firm downtown. Buoyed by his six-figure salary and the promise of bonuses, they’d moved from Brooklyn to Manhattan, into a classic seven two blocks away from Central Park with a big living room and floor-to-ceiling windows, a place someone in Richard’s firm had found for them, perfect for entertaining. With its cramped kitchen and small bedrooms and lack of closet space, the apartment was less perfect for raising a family, but Richard hadn’t seemed to notice and Sylvie hadn’t complained. Years later, when he’d come to her in the hospital after Lizzie was born and said he was going to announce his run for the state assembly the next week, and asked if she was ready, she’d set the baby, fed and freshly changed and swaddled, into her bassinet, sat up as straight as she could without her stitches pulling, and told him, “Absolutely.”
    Over the years Sylvie had decorated their apartment, choosing dishes and furniture that looked good enough for dinners for twelve and cocktails for forty but could withstand the assault of children; a pair of couches slipcovered in canvas, good Persian rugs. After Lizzie came home she hired a nanny named Marta, who lived two subway stops down from their old stop in Brooklyn. Richard’s work, his campaigns, the researching and the scheduling and the speechwriting, kept her as busy as a full-time job would have, and the extra set of hands turned out to be invaluable. The girls, Lizzie especially, loved Marta, the soft-boiled eggs and toast fingers she’d cook for breakfast, the chicken and rice she’d prepare for dinner. On the weekends they begged to be taken to her apartment, where Marta lived with her husband and two teenage sons.
    As soon as she was on her feet, Sylvie swapped her maternity clothes for power suits with towering shoulder pads, which she’d wear with sheer black panty hose and sneakers, the better to walk miles on the sidewalks, distributing window signs and pamphlets. Instead of colorful beads and inexpensive bangles, she had the pearls Richard had given her as an anniversary gift, and a drawer full of Hermès scarves. Once he was elected, she managed his district office, helping handle constituent service, ghostwriting his speeches, doing research, drafting bills. She did step aerobics in the 1980s, spinning in the 1990s, yoga