Free Tuesday Night Miracles by Kris Radish

hand-polished wood, but they make the large living room and the formal dining room seem cold and uninviting.
    The upstairs, a glimmering mass of steel bedroom furniture, includes a master walk-in closet that is as big as many downtown Chicago apartments, and the last time the beautifully appointed guest suite had visitors was so long ago the gold towels have dust on them.
    Jane’s very last guest was her college roommate, who had kept in touch sporadically and then, almost a year ago, called to say she was in town.
    “Ask her to come for dinner and spend the night,” Derrick had mouthed while she was on the phone.
    Jane invited her, and the entire evening was a disaster. Her soon-to-be ex-friend had become a high-powered attorney who was in town for a huge corporate-compensation battle. She looked fabulous, had a fabulous job, two fabulous children, a fabulous husband she apparently adored, and Jane could absolutely not stand the fabulous competition.
    She started picking on the woman as if she were a piece of lint. She couldn’t believe she didn’t like the same wine. Why had she cut her hair? Have you thought of letting your hair grow again? Remember the time I stole your boyfriend?
    Derrick told her later when they went to bed that he wasn’t just embarrassed but mortified. “You don’t belong to a book club, there are no friends stopping by, invitations from anyone to go out for drinks, no weekend getaways to Lake Geneva,” he pointed out. “Keep this up and you’ll be more of a snob than you already are.”
    Jane knew that Derrick wished she’d had siblings and different parents, but he had known what he was getting into when he married her. When the college roommate slinked off to bed early and then left before they even got up, Jane caught him fingering the guest towels that had never been touched.
    Her lack of an extended family might also explain why there are very few personal items in the entire house. No family portraits in the hall. No old college keepsakes hanging on the door that leads to the garage. Not one mismatched pair of shoes or slippers thrown carelessly against the fireplace along the full wall in the living room.
    It’s as if the house had never really been lived in.
    And in an honest moment, which is becoming rarer and rarer, Jane would admit that the silence, the coldness, the aloneness is sometimes suffocating. Why is it so hard for her to admit anything emotional? Why can’t she reach out and touch someone, speak gently, admit her myriad failings, her weaknesses, the longings that parade inside of her but dare not surface? Why?
    She is pushing a crystal wineglass from one hand to the other, and trying very hard to pace herself in between sips. The envelope is glaring at her as if it has eyes. She drank three-fourths of the bottle before she went to her anger-management class and is now less than half a glass away from finishing the entire bottle. And she wants to keep drinking.
    Drinking is what occupies at least five, if not seven, nights of her week. The high-end real-estate market, even in Chicago, is a very small world, and once you nearly kill a broker with your shoe it’s hard to get new listings.
    Gone are the late-afternoon strategy sessions at all the best restaurants. Gone are new listings. Gone are the phone calls from other agents tapping into you for your cast-off listings. Gone are the lovely, sophisticated, well-connected, and filthy-rich clients whom you could parade through all the lakefront mansions.
    Things were bad enough when the economy did a belly flop, but after word of Jane’s attack on the broker got out, her professional world skidded to a halt as if it had hit a brick wall.
    As if .
    As if no one else would have flipped if they had worked for three months to close a deal only to have the rotten broker cancel it because of “potential” funding discrepancies.
    As if a multimillion-dollar deal came along every single day of the week and clients like this