Free Sunday's on the Phone to Monday by Christine Reilly

be sane, like the rest of them, which was impossible. He’d also want her to be happy. Perhaps he secretly wanted her out of his life, to make it easier. What would he say? He’d probably say, go home, Jane.
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    I . Language is a thing in which humans can rhyme whore with floor and off-rhyme sheep with weak. Language is a thing I fear in which people can explain why they cry or write poems and sometimes even still other people do not understand why this is so.

the claudio who promised
december 9, 1989
    O n a night Claudio went to Zane’s house, he and Mathilde had learned that week that the baby inside Mathilde was a girl, and they had named her Natasha Maude Simone. Promise me you’ll be sober when you come home, said Mathilde.
    All of Zane’s parties were the same. Soaked nights. At first, kindling a high before lunch would seem Dionysian. But after her first drink or smoke or pill, Mathilde would begin to feel like a meta-version of herself—the usual way people were smashed, a little bit more of themselves. And sometimes she felt like she became too much of herself: an excess of Mathilde filling up the room, dancing, yelling non sequiturs, emitting an unsanitary mixture of crying and laughing. The next morning, she’d always regret at least one thing that her yesterday-self did. Drunken Mathilde was the opposite of a character. Drunken Mathilde wasn’t slipping into somebody else’s skin, she was magnifying her own—a reckless kind of privilege.
    Mathilde remembered the times she and Claudio went out and argued drunk, passing out and dreaming drunk. The nights when Claudio would sweat through the sheets. When they’d wake up, and everything would smell skunky, like wet felt. That myriad of nights when she’d let him pass out in his clothes and his shoes, to teach him the same lesson. The night after her lastbirthday, when she’d thrown up twice in her sleep and asked him if she would end up like Jimi Hendrix.
    I’ll just say hi. Zane never married and kept throwing parties like nobody was getting older. He made new friends every few years, and the new friends always happened to be in their twenties. To be honest, there’s a reason why we stopped hanging out. But I’m interested in how he’s doing.
    Just promise, Mathilde lingered.
    Of course I’ll be sober, said Claudio. I’m going to be a father now.
    They’d relocated to a two-bedroom on Seventy-second and Central Park West (Mathilde’s family money funding the rent) but were thinking of moving to Long Island, close to the beach. Last week, for the first time, they’d heard Natasha’s Heart beat through the sonogram, sounding like a pen tapping against teeth. These were the things they already knew about the fetal Natasha: she was a girl, she had a meatball-shaped skull, and she felt like a turned-on blow-dryer. Claudio predicted she’s going to be brilliant, and never lonely. Never, ever lonely.
    These days Claudio barely drank and had given up drugs. He told Mathilde that it was fine when they were younger, when they could afford to be selfish. I trust you, said Mathilde.
    Mathilde spent her night catering to herself—crocheting a scarf and reading Curious George out loud. She enjoyed picture books for their simple tensions and ebbing pace. She pretended that Natasha Maude Simone could understand. She boiled a pot of herbal tea, drank the whole thing, and went to the bathroom twelve times. Her cat, Penelope, piled on her lap, pupils broad and open with moonlight.
    She called Zane’s apartment only once, asking to speak to Claudio and saying hi, Kiwi, and Claudio said hi, Tulip, and Mathilde heard party noises in the background, and then they kept calling each other by nicknames until she asked, when are you coming home? and he said, oh, soon.
    At three-thirty in the morning, Mathilde was so stressed sheate an entire zucchini in bed. First she fried it on the