Free Through Thick and Thin by Alison Pace

quickly.” When Meredith sees what she thinks may be an opening, she tends to run off with it. She gallops.
    “It’s been four days.” Stephanie answers, “and you’re supposed to be hungry.”
    “I thought it said somewhere that your blood sugar is supposed to be so balanced that you’re not supposed to feel hungry or headachey or fatigued? I think I feel all those things.”
    “Meres, let’s give it a few more days,” Let’s, she says silently to herself, stop raining on my Zone parade. “Let’s talk about something else.”
    “Okay,” Meredith agrees. “But, just, even if they are somehow technically allowed, how possible is it to have an entire bag of those delicious Goldfish pretzels on hand, and only eat fourteen at a time? Can people really do this? And by people, I do mean people whose spirits are, if not broken, then slightly bent, seeing as they are on a diet and therefore might really need and deserve a bag of pretzels anyway?”
    Stephanie doesn’t say anything, instead she waits for a moment for the Goldfish pretzels to stop tormenting Meredith on their own. And after a longer pause, Meredith asks, “How’s Ivy?”
    “Oh, she’s good, she’s right here. She woke up for some reason. I’m not sure why. So I gave her a little snack and she actually just fell asleep while we were talking.”
    “Oh, sleep. Good,” Meredith says softly.
    “Yes, very, very good. Maybe I should go test the waters and see if it’ll actually stick if I put her back in her crib.”
    “Oh, of course, I’ll let you go.”
    Stephanie contemplates the walk to the stairs, through the family room, past the door downstairs to the workroom. She predicts Ivy waking up like clockwork the moment she tries to put her down, or even, just going down into her crib and everything being so quiet. “I have another minute,” she says.
    “What’d you give Ivy for her snack?” Meredith asks. Stephanie wonders if it’s more of a polite question, something to connect them in case this bonding by dieting doesn’t work, or if Meredith might be inquiring after Ivy’s food because she’s sure it’s more interesting than her own.
    “Bananas.”
    “You know if we stay on this diet we can’t have bananas, like ever again?”
    “I think it’s fine,” Stephanie says even though inwardly she shudders a little bit at a world without bananas, and not just because of Ivy, and not just because of sleep.
    Meredith exhales, not loudly, but a little bit more than the regular breathing out, and asks, “How can you look at the world, at your future, and know that, if you’re doing what’s right, if you’re doing what’s best for yourself, then there won’t ever again be bananas?”
    Stephanie wonders what sorts of things Meredith might be equating with bananas right now, what other things she worries might never again be in her life (Josh, a boyfriend, a life beyond her career). She wonders what things she herself would equate with bananas right now (a husband who isn’t in an emotional coma, a world that wasn’t shrinking in on her, Martha Stewart calling to offer her a job). “I think you’re being melodramatic,” she says.
    “I’m not sure if I am.”
    “Well, maybe not then, but I think you’re having the wrong attitude.”
    “Maybe,” Meredith concedes, albeit briefly, “but what if I’m not?”
    “I don’t know, Mere,” she says because she can’t think of anything else to say, “I really don’t.”

    After they’d gotten off the phone, after Stephanie ate her Zone-friendly dinner alone, with one hand, while Ivy slept on her shoulder because she didn’t want to risk waking her up and she also didn’t want to put her down, she gets up and starts down the hall. She stops halfway through the family room, and looks at the door to Aubrey’s workroom, and she goes to it and opens it. She stands at the top of the stairs, rubbing Ivy’s back in soft circles, comforted by the softness of her lavender velour