Free The Year That Follows by Scott Lasser

gets. In the middle of her reading she knows Connor is asleep, hears it in his breathing, and so she kisses him on his hot forehead and goes to call the boy’s father.
    Michael answers on the second ring, the telltale sounds of a football game in the background. She tells him she wants to take Connor to California over the several days he would normally have the boy.
    A whistle blows in the background. She says nothing, something she learned from Sherri. You want to sell something, you’ve got to know when to shut up. Ask for the order, then don’t talk. People will buy just to break the silence.
    “Okay,” Michael says. “But he needs some shoes.”
    Of course, she says, she will buy him shoes. She’s been meaning to do it anyway. Lord knows Michael never buys the kid anything to wear, save that one Aerosmith T-shirt she suspected he found on sale, the very shirt Connor wants to wear every day, unaware who Aerosmith is, unaware even of his longing to have his father close. Not even Michael can see this, only Cat, who sees it and feels it, and knows there is nothing to be done.
    How did she end up with Michael? It is the mystery of her life, the men in it. She always liked boys, and then men, the company of them, the relative simplicity of their interactions that can pass for honesty, and sometimesis. She met Michael in a sports bar (of course) up on Square Lake Road, where she went with two girlfriends on a Monday night precisely because it was a football night. One of the girlfriends, Rhonda, insisted it was the perfect night to meet guys, who would be there to watch the game and not to meet women. “There’s nothing worse than a guy trying too hard,” Rhonda said. “Plus, the odds will be good.” Sure enough, there were only a handful of women in the place, and at halftime there was a subtle shift in attention, Cat could feel it, and then suddenly she was playing pool with Michael.
    Pool. Of all the ridiculous things. But she was weak then, susceptible as any woman to broad shoulders and a strong jaw and what started that night carried on for almost a year, when she decided that she could not spend the rest of her life with him, that the whole idea was ludicrous—he was a carpenter, had two years of college and little ambition—but before she could tell him she found she was pregnant. She was at work at the insurance agency, and she threw up in the plastic trash can that was under her desk. It was the third time that week, some stomach flu, she lied to herself. As long as no one saw her she could be willfully and effectively delusional, but on this morning Rhonda witnessed it, and said, “What are you, pregnant?”
    There was briefly a moment of limb-loosening, gut-clenching, sweaty panic, but then she caught her breath, looked at Rhonda, and understood something like the truth. It was as if her whole life were aiming to thispoint, when it would happen just like this, repeating what had come before. It felt preordained, ever since that afternoon almost twenty years before when her mother sat her down and told her what was what.

IX
    S omething in the female of the species requires more sleep, which Sam noticed once Kyle went off to college and it was suddenly no big deal to have a woman spend, say, the entirety of a Saturday night in his bed. This morning he rises before the sun, and stands barefoot on the cool stone of Phyllis’s garden walkway. He drinks two cups of coffee, reads the
Los Angeles Times
, and contemplates how he will tell Cat of her origins. Or what Sam knows of them. There are mysteries there.
    When the sun is up, Phyllis wakes and makes herself a cup of coffee. He waits for her to take a sip, and then he tells her that Cat is not his biological daughter. “You’re kidding,” she says, her hair still down, her body wrapped in a silk robe of Asian origin. Not Japanese, Sam is fairly sure. “You’ve never told her?”
    “No.”
    “Why not?”
    It’s the obvious question: Cat might