Free The Leading Indicators by Gregg Easterbrook

dissatisfaction.”
    Margo said, “Really!” She left out that she had done this. Though the claim of dissatisfaction was easy enough to believe.
    â€œI was watching cable news,” Lillian said. “Today’s scandal is the governor having affairs. With persons of the opposite gender. At least there’s a refreshing change of pace.”
    â€œHow does anyone have time for affairs?” Margo asked. In her twenties, she wanted romance to fill her every available hour. Now she had no available hours. “My day is broken down into ten-minute intervals of work, driving and chores. Who has a period in the afternoon that isn’t already accounted for? When does this governor find time to seduce?”
    â€œI suspect politicians don’t seduce,” Lillian said. “Presumably it’s all arranged by the staff.”
    â€œStill.” Margo said this in the way the word “still” can be converted via inflection into a sentence. “If someone arranged to have Will Smith waiting for me in a hotel room, my first words would be, ‘This needs to be quick.’”
    â€œCable showed the governor giving the mandatory tearful speech, stalwart wife by his side. Let’s hope she has a percentage of the book rights,” Lillian said.
    â€œMaybe she set her own husband up with an intern so she could get a divorce and a movie sale all in the same package. That would prove this really is the twenty-first century.”
    They laughed. Margo said, “Before Tom gets home—you seem all right, are you all right?”
    â€œWhy wouldn’t I be?”
    â€œI mean, hasn’t it been five years?”
    â€œFive exactly,” Lillian said. “I’m touched you would remember the date.”
    Sheepish, Margo indicated her smart phone. “I put the date in here,” she explained. Then stopped and said, “Should I not have placed something so personal and private in an electronic device?” The smart phone was efficient but callous. Diaries and notebooks are inefficient, but seem warm to the touch.
    â€œI had a difficult time last night, knowing today would be five years,” Lillian said. “Then when I woke up I felt fine. Is it wrong for me to feel fine?”
    Margo felt nothing about her friend could ever be wrong. That Lillian was fine on the morning that marked the fifth anniversary of Madeline’s death seemed a sign her period of grief was ending, assuming one could ever stop grieving a child’s death.
    â€œI think it’s good that you feel fine, this is what Madeleine would want,” Margo said. Grief counselors often tell relatives or survivors that the dead would want them to be happy. This may be hollow sentiment, but it’s not exactly as if grief counselors have a huge toolkit at their disposal. “Do you want to talk about her?”
    â€œNo,” Lillian replied. “What I want is to change the subject.”
    Since Margo had mentioned her cell phone, Lillian supposed she might know something about computers, and asked her how to back up hard drives. Lillian had been working for a decade on a history of village art in Carpathian Ruthenia. Her manuscript and all her notes were on disk—if a passing comet caused electricity to stop flowing, the entire project would vanish. She’d chosen Carpathian Ruthenia because she believed it the sole period no art historian had done. Lillian lived in terror of coming across a university-house publication catalog listing an upcoming title like Representationalism Among the Proto-Magyars: Volume One.
    Margo told her any one of her students—anyone under age twenty-five—could answer any question about electronics. Then Margo wondered aloud when Tom would be home, saying indistinctly that in his new job Tom did not control his hours.
    The two women spent some time arranging furniture to try to make the place seem larger. Tom and Margo had put a lot