Free Opening Belle by Maureen Sherry Page B

from me is getting stroked by my two-year-old. I grab his hand maybe harder than I intended.
    â€œOw!” he yells.
    Wife turns and says, “It’s okay,” and gives Owen a gentle stroke on his face before turning back. He reaches out again but not before I intercept.
    â€œOWWWW!” This time the entire front row turns to look at us and I’m glad for the loud music.
    I whisper in Owen’s ear, “We aren’t allowed to touch strangers.”
    There is such a force in my voice that my rambunctious boy, the one who most loves confrontation, improbably sits back on his faded Gap overalls while I caress his back. The story of reaping and sowing goes on and on. The anger he feels radiates as heat coming from the hand I hold.
    It happens the millisecond I adjust my grip. Owen senses this is his moment. He reaches forward fast. I swing out instinctively and catch air. It’s too late.
    With the small motor skills of someone beyond his years, Owen grabs the thong. He wraps his little fingers around that top strap, the one that’s been peeking out at him for the past half hour. It was too difficult to resist in its lacy pinkness. He grabs the thong and pulls it toward him, where it seems to stretch beyond possibility. And it is only when Wife yelps “OWW!” that he releases it with an impressive Snap! That was not cheap elastic.
    Wife turns to me and I’m expecting I don’t know what. I mean Wife is one of the most beloved mothers in the school. She runs the library, she heads the benefit committee, and she has just had her thong snapped in front of all her PA friends. She is probably about to snarl at me but I can’t tell for she has no lines, no movement in her face, which has been Botoxed into submission. I anticipate the scolding I deserve but instead see her blank look turn into a stiff smile.
    â€œIt’s okay, big guy,” she says sweetly. She drips honey packed sweetness onto Owen as he attaches himself to my lower leg and she pats his head before turning to talk to someone else. Chapel has abruptly ended. Henry looks not at me but at the floor surrounding me—my slightly rumpled suit, my practical gray everything, and my giant sack of work with assorted technology spilling out. He says nothing but I can see what he’s thinking.
    All these years without Henry, all this time apart from someone I thought I would never be apart from, I found comfort in the fact that he ended up with this woman. It’s not that I didn’t like her, despite her seducing my then boyfriend, it’s that I knew what Henry liked and she was not that. I had secretly reveled in the fact he married someone who, despite being rich and connected, had never had a grown-up job, who I’m told spent all her time fixing and refixing their apartment and country house, and managing an army of household staff.
    Henry was too smart to stay interested in someone like her. I’d given their union one year of success, the sex year, before deep down I was certain he’d be suffering without having someone like me to keep him grounded, to sharpen his mind, to crack him up. But no, watching his eyes now I could see everything I had assumed was wrong. His face bore no recognition of the girl I had been. He simply looked incredulous. It was then that I knew what he knew.
    Henry had picked the right girl.

CHAPTER 9
On the Floor
    T HE SECRET of working mothers everywhere is compartmentalizing: the ability to jam into a mental drawer that which can’t be dealt with at the moment. She jams a family problem into a mental filing cabinet, slams the door shut, and does her work. When she gets home she reverses the process, disconnecting her wireless world while reviewing first-grade spelling words, or reading Harry the Dirty Dog for the fifty-seventh time. As she does this she tries not to think about the fact that her entire department will be tested on synthetic mortgage products the