Free Social Lives by Wendy Walker

schools, another hundred. Dance, piano, squash, riding: thirty thousand. Then there were the gifts, parties, clothes, trips. Another eighty. Now add in the utilities, gas, oil, cable, and phones: sixty thousand. They had a seven-thousand-square-foot house to heat and cool. The list went on. Medical expenses, therapists. The Christmas season, with the endless array of presents and gatherings. And, last but not least, taxes.
    They could pare down. Of course they could. Jacks had a mental checklist of all the things that would go first. But at the end of the night, after the mind-bending analysis of their financial reality had taken her into the little cracks and crevasses of their existence, the larger picture emerged. Living on a smaller income didn’t alarm her. Nor did the vanishing equity and 401(k). Those things could be rebuilt over time. It was what they said together that had Jacks racing north for the slums of Connecticut.
    It took forty minutes to reach the exit. She turned off the Parkway and drove to the end of the ramp. As she waited for the light to change, she exhaled for what felt like the first time all morning. With the car stopped, she allowed herself to take in the dismal surroundings. Dull, gray concrete littered with debris,cracked sidewalks, dilapidated brick town houses with rusty metal railings and clothes hanging from lines out back. The only foliage was the occasional weed that no one bothered to pull or spray, as though it would make a difference. The accumulated neglect lent itself to more neglect. What could one person possibly do to hold back the tide that swept through cities like this one? It was a plight Jacks knew well, having grown up in places so similar, she felt a wave of remembrance every time she came here. They had their own feel, their own smell—gas fumes, garbage. It was the smell of rot. The feel of hopelessness, the acute kind that makes a person want to flee, and if that proved impossible, then to find another avenue of escape. Alcohol. Drugs. And, if one were lucky, a man like David Halstead.
    The light turned, and she went through it, one hand on the wheel and the other curled up over her mouth as though she could hold back the air that was trying to get inside her. She had made it out, for seventeen years she’d been on a kind of parole, a furlough, and the thought of returning for good was as impossible as anything she could imagine for herself, let alone the children. She drove two blocks, made a turn. Another three blocks, another turn, her mind seeing documents and numbers as she drove. She knew the way by heart. By feel. She’d been going there for over twenty years.
    As she pulled up to the house, she felt strangely relieved. Even with the state of things, the peeling paint, the unruly patch of grass littered with plastic balls that were faded from the sun and blackened with mildew after a rainy month. Nothing had been done to this house for years, nothing could. Her sister was so damned stubborn.
    She drove around back and parked next to an old Ford station wagon. She gathered the papers from the front seat, grabbed her purse, and headed for the back door.
    â€œKel?” she called in through the screened window, pressing her face closer to see inside. The kitchen was dark, even through the morning hours, shaded by the other units that crowded around.
    She heard the footsteps, then the familiar voice. “Coming, Jacks—hold on a sec. . . .”
    When Kelly Moore finally appeared through the doorway, she was in her usual state of controlled chaos. Still dressed in a beige Holiday Inn uniform, her name tag slightly askew as it hung from her chest, she was pulling a long drag from a cigarette with one hand and steadying a cup of coffee with theother. A broad smile came across her face as she opened the door and saw her sister.
    â€œHey, baby girl,” she said, throwing her arms around Jacks. “You okay?”
    Jacks squeezed her back