Free Danger Zone by Doreen Owens Malek Page B

earlier, when Wayne was still rural and the township mostly farmland. Now it was a crowded, bustling hodgepodge of shopping malls, professional offices and industrial complexes, and the house Grace and Ken had purchased when they were first married was worth four times what they’d paid for it. Ken worked as a chemist for a pharmaceutical company in one of the corporate parks, and their two children attended local schools. Grace was on the PTA and took exercise classes with her neighbors; Ken was a member of the Elks and played golf. They were the perfect nuclear family and always made Karen feel as if she had traveled backward in time and landed on “Father Knows Best.”
    “It’s been a while, huh?” Grace said.
    Karen turned to look at her. “What?”
    “It’s been a long time since you passed through here.”
    Karen nodded. “It’s busier than I remember it.”
    Grace grimaced. “It gets busier every day. Ken says if any more New York commuters relocate to this area he’s going to write his congressman about moving Wall Street to North Jersey. It would save everybody a lot of traveling.”
    “Do you remember Alice Dunphy? Her parents had a farm just outside of Oakland. I wonder if it’s still there.”
    “I doubt it. Probably ten colonials are sitting on it now.”
    “Her father used to say it was just forty-five minutes from Broadway, like the song.”
    Grace snorted. “That was never true. The only thing that’s forty-five minutes from Broadway is the corner of Broadway and Thirty-Third Street.”
    “I love New York,” Karen sang softly, like the tourism advertisements, and Grace laughed.
    Conversation flagged and Karen put her head back against the headrest, closing her eyes and thinking about her forthcoming job search. She would get the Sunday papers with the full classified sections that weekend, and type up a resume to be printed for distribution. As Grace drove she made her plans, unaware that her employment prospects would turn out to be much narrower than she had suspected.
    In the weeks that followed, Karen discovered that getting a job was a problem. With no local references and little demand for a Spanish language translator in affluent suburbia, she sent out a lot of unanswered queries and made quite a few fruitless phone calls. She continued to respond to want ads and finally got a written referral from the Almerian attache´, but the opportunities presenting themselves were still few. She came to see that her skills would be more in demand in an urban environment with a bilingual population, and she expanded her horizons to include cities like Paterson and Passaic. She resolved, regretfully, to include a car in her increasingly alarming budget calculations, and routinely sent resumes to people she had little hope of hearing from in return.
    More than a month passed and she was still unemployed. She helped Grace with the kids, read, took long walks, composed what she hoped were riveting cover letters, and meditated on the meaning of life. Nothing worked. She still couldn’t forget Steven Colter.
    One afternoon Grace came into the paneled rec room with the mail and handed Karen a letter.
    “England,” she said, indicating the postmark. “Must be from your friend Linda.”
    It was, and Karen put it in her jeans to read later, staring out at the lawn and the turning October trees.
    “What’s the word on the job search?” Grace asked, sitting down and glancing at her watch. She had to pick up Mary from the nursery school’s morning session in twenty minutes.
    “Discouraging,” Karen replied. “I’m thinking of buying a pistol and holding some of these personnel people at gunpoint.”
    Grace smiled slightly. “I wouldn’t adopt such drastic measures just yet.” She paused thoughtfully and then said, “Karen, tell me if I’m being too nosy, but I get the definite impression that something is still wrong.”
    “Of course something is still wrong. I can’t get a job.”
    Grace