Free Fly Away Home by Jennifer Weiner Page B

one frantic trip to the doctor or the pharmacy to pick up penicillin or replace a lost inhaler every month.
    Eventually, it became easier to let Marta take the girls down to the subway or load them into cabs, to let her take Diana to her rehearsals and practices and deal with Lizzie’s music lessons and bad moods. Marta, who was Sylvie’s mother’s age, short and no-nonsense, with lace-up orthopedic shoes, cardigan sweaters, and gray hair drawn back in a bun, was endlessly patient and, after her own boys, delighted to have two girls to dress up and coddle. Marta was patient in a way Sylvie wasn’t. She could handle the elaborate arrangements for playdates and keep straight the names of the mothers of the girls’ friends and the dosage of Lizzie’s allergy medicine while Sylvie focused on her husband’s work, her husband’s world. Marta could deal with the girls, but only she could take care of Richard.
    And look where that had gotten her, she thought, as the car glided out of the tunnel and up Eighth Avenue, past fast-food restaurants and dry cleaners and drugstores and the ubiquitous chain coffee stores that had sprouted on every corner. Look at her now. The numbness she’d felt since the rest stop restroom was starting to scare her. It wasn’t right. Shouldn’t she be crying, weeping, wailing, on the telephone with her husband, pleading with him to leave his young plaything behind? Yet she didn’t feel like crying, or begging. She felt as if she’d been frozen, until she let herself think of her daughters, how they would be dragged down into the mud, how they would be shamed. Then she felt herself swelling with fury, and that scared her, too, because it was so atypical. She got annoyed—what wife, what woman, didn’t?—but she could count the times over the years that she’d been truly furious at Richard on one hand, and have several fingers left over.
    The car pulled up in front of their building. There were photographers clustered on the sidewalk, a dozen of them, sweating in the heat, some with television cameras and others with digital cameras, plus a few reporters holding notebooks and tape recorders, outnumbered by the photographers and video people. In this case, Sylvie reasoned, everyone knew the story. It was the images they were after, the money shot, the picture worth a thousand words of the disgraced wife lifting the cup to her lips and taking her first bitter sip. Derek put the car in park, then turned to face her. “How about we go around the back?”
    “No,” she said. She wouldn’t be bullied, she wouldn’t be shamed, she wouldn’t slink through back doors as if she was the one who’d made a mistake. She had raised her head, reminding herself that she was Selma Serfer’s daughter, when the first of the photographers spotted the car. In an instant, they were surrounded.
    “Sylvie!”
    “Mrs. Woodruff!”
    “Sylvie, any comment on the senator’s affair?”
    Clarissa winced. Derek squared his shoulders and opened his door, then hers. “Just stay close.” Sylvie grabbed her purse. She left her panty hose crumpled on the floor of the car, pushed her feet back into her shoes, bent her head, and stepped, barelegged, onto the sidewalk. She tried to make herself as small as possible, head tucked into her chest, arms tight against her sides, ignoring the shouts of “Mrs. Woodruff!” and “Is it true he paid the girl off to keep quiet?” and “Did you know about the affair?” and “How long’s it been going on?” and “Are you planning to divorce him?”
    Derek, big and substantial as an armored tank, led her through the heavy glass doors. Once they’d swung shut, the din subsided. The lobby was empty except for Juan the doorman at his desk. When she looked at him, he dropped his gaze. Sylvie wondered if Joelle had ever been here, whether Richard had snuck her up from D.C. for some afternoon delight while Sylvie was visiting that summer camp for kids with cancer or shopping at