He seemed to take in her distress. "Gwen, of course you'll have alimony. Sure, it only happens in about fifteen percent of divorces, but I'll help out after everything's final. It could take a couple of years to make sure this is done right, but an attorney can fill you in on all that." He shrugged so casually, she wished for a second she could be him. "In the months and months ahead, I'd encourage you to give your future some thought. The corporation has put the house up for sale, but nothing's set in stone."

She found herself at the door and hadn't a clue how he'd maneuvered her there. Then he kissed her on the lips, less an invitation than a dismissal, and closed the door.

Standing at the top of the staircase, she looked down at the parking lot and for the first time in her life she honestly didn't have a place to go. No place. There might be a bed to borrow somewhere out there, and there might be places that could be hers if she had the money, which she apparently didn't. But at that second in her life she understood she had no place to go.

She'd packed her bag from Max's in a car borrowed from Missy, and she had nothing. She thought of those yearly estimates of what a wife and mother would earn if she were a salaried employee. Even the cheapest help available would make a goodly amount of money, twenty thousand for cooking, another thirty for childcare. For house cleaning, who knew, but hourly it would really add up. She could have made thirty thousand for being a chauffeur. She'd easily have earned over a hundred thousand a year. But after twenty years she had nothing, and she was nowhere.

She got in the borrowed car and drove across a town she didn't live in anymore. Sometimes when you lost something the only thing to do was return to the last place you had it. Maybe, like a set of keys, she could find her life again.

Gwen's journal - June 8th, 1989 Sunday There's nothing to say. Three months. I'm not going to make it.

Gwen's life - the day before The room looked so empty with Molly already gone with her parents. Gwen gripped the last box and wanted to cry, cry and hide under the desk so she didn't have to leave Belmar. Her freshmen year was already behind her, the classes checked off in the catalog. It felt great to be a sophomore, but something was gone and wouldn't come back again.

She'd never have the year again and Max was moving off campus in the fall so things would be different, and why did they have to be different when they were so perfect? She felt the sniff turn into stinging eyes and that burn in the throat and finally tears dripped and her ride home was coming any minute.

"Hey."

She heard Max behind her, knew she couldn't hide her teary wreck of a face but didn't turn around just in case he might not notice.

"Gwen." He came around in front of her, smiled, and shook his head which only made her cry more. He took the box and set it on the desk and took her into his arms. "It's just for the summer, babe. It'll go so fast you won't even miss me."

She sniffed into his shoulder. "I will." He'd be so far away, Boston, working for family friends she hated without ever meeting, and she'd be at the Dairy Haven and back home with Ellen, a summer she hated before it even began. She hiccupped.

Max leaned back and held her face in his hands, warm and strong. He just looked at her, and she wanted to stay there for more than forever. He shook his head, smiled. "I love you, and I'll call you every day that I can. I promise." And then he kissed her and she added that to the huge list of all the things she couldn't do without for a whole summer.

"Uh, ready?"

They both turned toward the voice, and Gwen gathered herself, looking in vain for a Kleenex in the empty room. The two guys shook hands, and she gave up on the tissue, and tried to wipe her eyes and sniff without calling too much attention to herself. "Max, this is my ride home, Steve Frame."

Back to U...

Maybe it wasn't like a set of keys, and she wouldn't be able to trace her life back to where she'd last seen it.

Her life wasn't under the table, but she was. Again.

She felt better under it than over it. The surface, with its fine sheen of dust, reminded her of dinners done and time passed. It had felt, when she first came into the quiet house, that she and the table both had abandonment issues. They were uncared for enough that dust had settled over whatever shine they'd once possessed.

Even the frozen yogurt she'd dug out of the freezer was past its prime. The crust of ice crystals obscured what had been chocolate fudge, low fat. She understood that squatters shouldn't be picky, so she scraped aside a big chunk of clear ice with a serving spoon, the first utensil she'd grabbed, and dug in. She flipped the spoon over and let the yogurt hit her tongue full on. It helped with cold headaches to keep it off the roof of her mouth as long as possible, but she was going to have one anyway. Tension headache, cold headache, migraine headache, divorce headache, stone-cold-broke headache. It didn't really matter what she called it when the pain continued to arrive and thrive.

She ignored the knock at the door. Steve could intercourse himself, not that he wouldn't have other options. He was a catch in all the categories that were mate measurable for guys. Age didn't matter in a man. He had money. Everybody's. He possessed all his hair, which was maybe better than real estate. He was healthy from twenty years of her excellent cooking. He would have been thirty pounds heavier and riddled with heart disease if she hadn't made his favorite recipes healthier. She'd cursed herself.

Max walked in, a bag in each hand, and dipped his head to meet her eyes under the table as if he knew she'd be there. "Ellen sent me."

She wanted to fall right into his beautiful green eyes and invite him to kiss her senseless and never stop, but she knew that one life crisis at a time was already more than she could handle. She had to focus with the mindset of an asexual woman. "Steve's going to live forever, and it's my fault."

"We all make mistakes."

She snorted.

"Many, many mistakes."

"I fed him really well."

"Wish you'd over-salted now?"

"Damn straight, skippy."

She eyed the bags. What exactly did a man bring to a woman whose mother sent him under a dining room table to find her? She put another bite of yogurt on her tongue and lifted her chin toward the bags. "Whatcha got?"

He looked under the table as if unsure of proper etiquette, set one bag down, and opened the other. "Ice cream." He looked at the container she gripped. "Real ice cream."

Setting her expired frozen yogurt down, she reached out with both hands, peeled off the lid, and plunged the spoon into chocolate chip and caramel swirl full fat heaven.

He pulled a chocolate bar out. "American."

She nearly smiled but was too far gone to manage it.

"Potato chips. Regular and barbeque. Bath salts."

She raised an eyebrow.

"For you. Nothing untoward here."

"Untoward. Good one. I'm not distracted by your trying to appear asexual by the way. 'Cause that's what I am."

Reaching for the other bag, he nodded. "Sure you are. And for tonight, and tonight only, I can be trusted."

"My mom made you promise, didn't she?"

"The scout's oath would prevent me from ever taking advantage of a woman under a table."

She waited.

"And your mother and Missy made me promise." He tried to straighten his neck and still look under the table then pointed beside her. "May I?"

"Sure. Pull up some carpet and sit right down."

He crawled under the table, still unable to completely straighten his neck with his height until he slid down more. With his back against a table leg and his legs poking under a chair, he snagged the other bag and handed it to her.

She put another bite of ice cream on her tongue and handed the empty spoon and full carton to him while she opened the other bag. She found a tin of Vienna Sausages, all pale and uniform on the label. "Okay."

"Ellen said you loved those when you were little."

"Right." She dug out a bottle of pink fingernail polish.

"Missy said you liked to paint your toenails."

Gwen shook the bottle, heard the tiny rattle of the silver dots inside as they swirled the color more uniformly. "Missy loved to when she was little. Right after big girl panties, she got to have pink toenails. I potty-trained her with a dollar's worth of polish."

"Impressive."

"She was."

"No, you."

She ignored him and pulled an Oprah magazine out of the bag. "My mother or Missy?"

"Hayden."

"I did not see that coming."

"He's got sisters and a mom. At least that's what he said when Bryan started calling him Vagina Boy."

"Oh. That's not good."

"We will not be seeing a superhero named that any time soon."

"Why are you here?"

"Your mother sent me."

"Why are you here, Max?"

"I'm your friend."

She eyed him.

"Tonight I'm your friend."

She was broke, homeless, guilty of both breaking and entering and ruining her life. "I need one."

"You have everything you need all alone under this table. But I'd like to help."

"Did you bring alcohol?"

"No."

"Good. That will help."

In a guy buddy movie they would have gone to a strip club where the Up-buddy would hand the Down-buddy a five dollar bill to tuck into the G-string of Brandy, who had just licked the pole.

In a teen movie they might have smoked a huge bowl of weed and laughed at nothing.

In an independent film they would have gone to an abandoned warehouse and danced on Ecstasy or committed suicide or did nothing or both or accidentally killed somebody and tried to hide the body in a rug bound for export.

But in her Tonight I'm Your Friend film, she'd eaten a lot of ice cream and a few barbecue chips and rubbed her barbecue tinted fingertips on carpet she didn't have to clean anymore. They'd both taken a quiz in the O magazine that indicated that she under-accessorized, and Max needed to strive for a cleaner look. And she'd fallen asleep, still under the table.

The morning light, late light the way it came straight in the dining room windows, made her squint and long for coffee and a younger body. Despite the comforter and pillow Max had brought her, the night had not gone comfortably, and she felt stiff, like her lower back had been tightened by some cosmic screwdriver God used on forty-year-old muscles.

"Hey," Max leaned under the table.

He'd slept beside her she was pretty sure. At least he'd been there at the end of her night's memory.

"Coffee." He set a mug down beside her, and she smelled the wonderful steam of it. "There's a whole pot. Feel free to spill as much of it on the carpet as you want."

She sat up and reached for it. She wished she wanted to ruin the carpet, but in the light of day it was still the tan Berber she'd picked out, vacuumed, walked on, had a life unfold over. She sighed, so deeply it even took her by surprise, like her lungs let out the deepest air they held, had held, maybe for a long time.

Max started to reach out but seemed to stop himself. "There's a bath. And it has stuff in it a man wouldn't know anything about but chicks dig."

"Chicks dig, do they?"

"Absolutely."

"Well, if you're sure."

He held up three fingers. "Scout's honor."

"You were a very honorable scout last night. Thank you." She felt herself tear up, took a gulp of coffee, and the burn of it held her together.

"I'm gonna run out and grab something to eat. Any good bakeries?"

She gave him a look that said, ask me something challenging. "Simply Sweet for the lemony cheese Danish, Ceres if you're looking for a fresh fruit Danish, Polebridge Bakery for the whole wheat orange cinnamon roll."

He made a face that Missy would have worn for brussel sprouts.

"It's good, really, but if you're looking for a regular cinnamon roll, try Wheat Montana."

He looked like he was trying to take it all in, and she smiled at herself. "It's a gift.

Chapter Eighteen.

Keep cooking magazines on the nightstand to check out new variations of your favorites.

The bath was exactly what she needed. Well, almost exactly. If the bath held half the equity from the house, divorce papers signed by Steve, a college degree, and a road map of where the hell she was going, it would be everything she needed besides bath salt and coffee.

She reached for her cup and realized it was empty. Time to get out.