She stepped onto the bathmat she'd coordinated with the shower curtain after a week of shopping. She'd wanted to accent the exact shade of olive green that ran in a thin stripe down the curtain. Otherwise she'd felt the browns and burgundies would be too predominant. How the domestic mighty had fallen.

Dripping wet, she stared at the green mat visible around the pink of her feet. "I thought you were mine." Half hers she realized, but not half at all. When she and Steve shared their lives there wasn't a half and half division. That was for single people living together.

She reached for a tan towel and wrapped it around her body. A couple didn't think in terms of half. Half the books on the shelf are mine and half are yours. Half the dishes, sheets, food, bills, money. Being a couple was being in it together. One hundred-one hundred. Never fifty-fifty.

But it had been just one one-hundred and it was Steve's. All she had done. All she had thought. All she had been. Gone. Wrong. And gone.

She reached for the robe she'd left on the back of the door, shook it to watch the fluff of dust move in the air. She pictured an archeologist wielding a brush and carefully removing the time that obscured the objects. An Englishman would narrate. We see how a people lived, how they arranged their shelters, the way they cared for children, what was in their diets, what killed them.

"Gwen?"

It was Max, and she wasn't sure she could answer. She wanted to crawl back in the tub, let it cool and freeze around her, another dinosaur disappearing until someone stumbled upon it and thought how foreign, how ancient, how over.

"I have breakfast."

Well, there was that. She may just live for food. She'd stop cooking it and start consuming it full-time. She'd be the size of a dinosaur and no one could overlook her when she died in the tar pit. The rumble of her mighty footsteps would ring out in the land. I was here. I was here. I was here.

Max had gotten out the red special occasion plate that actually said Special Day around the rim in white letters. Missy had loved it and then hated it at thirteen, but Steve had always tolerated it. That was one thing he'd been a sport about.

The plate sat on top of the table, and she was more inclined to dwell below, but it held a lemony cheese Danish with coarse sugar granules. And a fresh fruit Danish with strawberry and peach slices fanned out and glazed with orange. A whole wheat cinnamon roll anchored the center with its swirl of dark pastry that smelled like tangerines. And hanging over the S, the P, and the E was an enormous square of cinnamon goodness smeared with a thick layer of sweetened cream cheese. He'd gotten them all.

She sipped her third cup of coffee, a lot of need even for her, and admired the display of thoughtfulness. It wasn't always so visible. It wasn't always so anything. She wore old sweats she'd tucked in the back of a drawer and felt the ends of her hair drip down the crew neck of her Bunco Babe t-shirt. No need for any shame about possessing it. If Max could wear one for Ellen, she could do it to thank her mother for sending him.

Max handed her a small plate. "Which one?"

"All, I think." She got up and went to the kitchen. Pulling out the chef's knife, she had a flash of holding it aloft in her fit of onion crying. She felt her hand shake twice, the blade jerk in the light. That had been the storm before the storm, hadn't it? The moment when her eyes knew what her brain wouldn't admit. She was being kicked out of her own life.

She gripped the knife, wished she could get a grip on herself as easily, and went back in the dining room. One by one she cut the pastries in half. In half. Maybe fifty-fifty wasn't perfect, but it was better than one-hundred/zero. She spotted the Oprah magazine, let her eyes trace the deep orange circle. She'd cut it out and wear it on her Bunco shirt. Zero.

"Do you want to see the house?" She broke the long silence of breakfast.

"Sure." Max picked up his cup and followed her, not sure what kind of mood she was in. Not mood exactly. He wondered, really, where she was. In the past, struggling with regrets or anger? He'd had plenty of both in his own life. He just wished his past was more pure, and he could really nail Steve for his asshole treatment of Gwen. If he hadn't been guilty of it himself, he'd take that smug son-of-a-bitch and punch him good just once and straight into his smirk of a face.

Gwen was pointing out the front windows, telling neighbor stories. He smiled. It was so Gwen to connect anywhere, everywhere, with anybody and everybody.

"Olga lived to ninety-three. She left at about eighty-five, needed to live with some care, and moved across town to senior living and then the attached nursing home."

He studied the house she'd pointed to, a small gray square no one would have noticed. She had. And paid attention to the woman in it.

"She and Missy would sit on the front porch when Missy was little and talk. I'd walk Missy across the street when Olga waved her over. I don't know what they talked about. So animated, you should have seen them. Both of them. Eighty-some years apart and not apart at all."

She indicated the three houses south. "That was all flowers at one point. Long before we moved here. The woman who originally lived in Olga's house grew roses and bridal wreath spirea and iris for the local florists." She sighed. "I would have liked to have seen that."

He would have liked to have seen her seeing it. To watch her take in something beautiful that she enjoyed was enjoyable for him. Maybe it had been like that always with Gwen. It didn't mean anything. He just liked seeing how into things she got. He wasn't sure he'd felt that much in his life or had that much consideration for anyone but himself. If he ever doubted his self-absorbed tendencies, all he had to do was ask Nicola. Or any woman he'd spent more than thirty minutes with.

"So," Gwen turned back to her house. "You've seen the living room."

He had. Comfortable and perfectly coordinated. That was a balance hard to come by. Maybe it was where the real gender divide lay. A man wanted his chair to feel good. A woman wanted his chair, her chair, the entertainment center, the coffee table, the fanned display of magazines, the pictures, even the coasters to look good. But Gwen had done both. There was ease and aesthetics.

She headed up the staircase, not grand, but grounded with its risers painted white and warm pine on the steps.

On the second floor, the wood turned to the same carpeting they'd slept on the night before. The hallway opened to three rooms, and Gwen waved into the bathroom with a shower curtain, towels, and bathmat all matching in shades he couldn't name. Brown was all brown to him, blue was blue. He'd never understood Nicola's distinctions between the taupe shoes that wouldn't go with the buff slacks or the bone shoes that would. Taupe shouldn't even be a word. Brown always went with brown and blue should never be called, what was it? He tried to remember as Gwen opened the door to Missy's room.

He knew it was Missy's immediately. There was a sweet girlness shocked with teen additions of collaged magazine clippings and black accents. Cerulean. That was it. They'd been in some store in Paris, and Nicola tried to get him to try on a dress shirt that wasn't white. Cerulean blue. A not guy blue, he'd said. Sophisticated cerulean, she'd said.

Then they'd probably had a fight. Well, she'd fought. He tried to avoid everything as much as possible. Had he walked? Probably he'd just left the store, found her back at the apartment later and apologized or not, depending on what was required. God, he was as big of an asshole as Steve ever thought of being.

"Master suite."

He wasn't going to go in there. Hell no. He may have left her free to date, marry, have a child, live twenty years of her life. But he wasn't going into their goddamn bedroom.

He glanced, didn't want to, but did. It looked tidy. Too tidy. If he were with Gwen he'd make sure the bed was always messed up. And not just with sex. With newspapers and coffee cups and those pastries she liked.

He'd have a camera or two on the dresser, give the place some character. And there'd be a pile of cookbooks she could read at night. And when she said, hmmm this is different with the glazing first, he'd never ignore her, never mumble something auto-pilot back. He'd look right at her and ask questions because he'd really want to know what she meant and thought about and wanted. She deserved that every day for the rest of her life.

"You okay?" She studied him as if he'd missed responding to something.

"Yeah, great."

She shrugged and headed back down the stairs, and he stood for a moment in the hallway. He'd managed to ignore her while he was daydreaming about how he wouldn't ignore her. He'd failed before he ever started.

His whole life, he hadn't wanted to be the kind of man who over-estimated himself. Guys like that were assholes of the first degree. He was only willing to sink as low as a B-level asshole. He'd better stop imagining he could be anything better than that.

Heading down the stairs, he joined Gwen to get the tour of the Tool's home office. If it had ever been used, it didn't show. The pencils weren't lined up in a row or anything and to be fair the guy was moved out, but he'd left everything behind near as Max could tell.

His guess was Gwen had made the place an office, put everything she thought the guy could need or want. And the guy didn't give a rat's ass.

"The basement," Gwen pointed to a door at the opposite end of the stairwell. "We finished off a family room. There's a TV and a little exercise area. Missy and her friends used it a lot when they were younger. Not so much in high school. Everybody gets so busy. I guess they start leaving a long time before they actually leave."

She walked into the kitchen, which he'd seen, but not with her. With Gwen standing there, the sun lighting up the place, she looked more relaxed than in the rest of the house. It was like the house was what she thought it should be, but the kitchen, while it had plenty of that, also possessed some of Gwen.

He noticed the few magnets on the refrigerator. They matched the colors of the kitchen, blues that may or may not be cerulean. But one magnet had a fifty's woman on it with a crazed face, and it said, where am I going, and why am I in this hand basket? That was Gwen. Insight with a bite, but still sweet as a post WWII homemaker.

He studied the room for more things that were clearly not part of the general decorating scheme. She'd made labels for the spices. Half were typed, but the others, interspersed, were handwritten with the occasional little sketch. She'd doodled a pepper on the cayenne, a pink star on the star anise, three exclamation marks on one the curries, and on the jar of cumin, a tiny sombrero.

There were marks of Gwen on the place, few and far between, but the kitchen and only the kitchen, held them.

It looked like, and he wouldn't have said it to her under torture because he didn't even want to think it, but it looked like she'd worked for twenty years to make the kind of family that had need of things like a family room, but had settled for perfecting the rooms themselves.

It didn't seem like Steve had ever lived there. It wasn't as if there were huge blanks from where he'd moved out. And Missy claimed a few spots in her room, but even then, her leaving didn't seem to make a dent in the home Gwen had made.

It felt a little like a Smithsonian exhibit of how a family lived in the twenty-first century. And exhibits never had the actual family.

"And we're back in the dining room." She tilted her head to look beneath the underside of the table. "Hello." She smiled but not at him. "Missy went through a fort stage that lasted one whole winter. She'd dig out a sheet, always the best one she could find because she is my child after all. I'd put it back and get the oldest sheet I could find and drape it over the table. It was big enough to hang down, and she'd make a whole new world under there."

"That's why you were under the table."

"What?"

"You made a fort."

"I made a..." her brow wrinkled. "I made a fort." She shook her head. "God, what is wrong with me?"

"Nothing."

"Oh, everything."

"If everything were wrong with you, you'd be too far gone to make a new world."

"What if I'm too far gone to make anything?"

"When you left Belmar, the first time, you made a life for yourself and the Tool and Missy. I know how hard that was, Gwen. I know because I didn't."

"You traveled and--"

"I drifted. Moving around can be a life when your life moves with you. I left mine at Belmar, and I never came back." He reached for the keys in his pocket. He had to go. "You okay?"

"Uh, yeah."

But before he could make a clean getaway, she kissed him on the cheek, and he was selfish enough to want to stay. "Bye, Gwen."

She was glad to be alone for the drive back to Belmar. The prospect of sitting in a car a foot away from Max for two hours was too stressful. They'd managed, and well, the evening's friendship. She'd been glad for the company under the table. And the full fat ice cream. Especially for the full fat ice cream. But in the morning, the sweet, and she meant that both ways, pastry run and then the tour... It was confusing to have Max in her house. Well, Steve's family's house incorporated. Still, when she was there it was her home. She'd made it. She'd lived it. She'd been kicked out of it.

To have Max there had been odd, not interesting odd so much as not right odd. The whole time, showing him the physical life she'd made with Steve, the family spaces, the bedrooms, thank god he hadn't gone into theirs. She'd thought, not wanted to, but thought, what if? She'd tried not to and hadn't under the table or even first thing in the morning, but once she took him upstairs she had a flash of the two of them, like a real couple in a real home just going up the stairs to their bedroom.

What would that life have looked like? She and Max together for twenty years, a daughter or maybe a few, maybe even an ill-behaved boy who looked like his father. And the bedroom, not just a bed messed up from sex, she wasn't even going to go there in her head. That fantasy was for sleep when she couldn't control what ran through her brain. But their life in the room itself.

She'd seen the bedroom at his place before her mother had taken it over. He'd throw a couple of cameras around. There'd be lenses and photos and magazines. He'd have half a dozen coffee cups on the nightstand. She bet he read in bed every night. Maybe he wore glasses, not nerdy guy glasses but the sexy smart ones. Bare-chested and be-speckled. Yow. Also not going there.

And she'd have to read in bed if he did. The light would be on, so there'd be no sleeping until they were both ready. She'd leaf through a magazine, something with recipes. She'd keep a pair of scissors in the nightstand drawer to cut out anything she wanted to try.

She shook herself, concentrated on the street, and what would happen back at Belmar with no place of her own, or money of her own for that matter. What would become of her? What had become of her? If she attended a high school reunion no one there would have predicted this failure. She'd been on track back then.

The derailment, the true derailment, had occurred when she'd fallen in love with Max. It wasn't his leaving that had done it. It was the falling for him she should have stopped. The leaving was inevitable, and she wouldn't make that mistake again. She'd managed to go on the first time, but she didn't have the time or the energy and optimism of youth on her side anymore.

She just had to avoid him. She pulled up to the curb, looked out at Max's front door. Avoid him. Live with him, of course, because she was homeless and penniless and, oh yeah, her mother lived there. Maybe she wasn't going to Max's house so much as going home to mother's. Her mother just happened to live with the man who had derailed her whole life. Steve had only put the finishing touches on it.

When she walked in, the crowd in the living room surprised her. She set her bag down and saw the boys on the couch that was her bed. Annie sat on the arm next to Guy. Her mom sat on the smaller couch beside Missy, and Max stood in the kitchen doorway with his hands palm out, indicating his complete innocence in the intervention.

She glared at him anyway. "Do you furnish crab puffs for all gatherings or just Bunco night?"

Max hooked a thumb toward the back of the house. "I could grill something."

"You are hilarious. Why didn't you just tell them everything and then they'd all be off my bed?" She waved the length of the couch.

"I don't kiss and tell."

Gwen looked at her mother. "There was no kissing."

"Well, that's a shame." Ellen sounded so disappointed Gwen rolled her eyes at her.

Max straightened in the doorway. "You were the one with the rules. Now you're saying there weren't any?"

Ellen sighed. "Where there's a will..."

"Alright." Gwen sat heavily in the nearest chair. "Max brought me ice cream and pastries. And I showed him around the house, and we drove separately back here."

Jason turned to Max. "You lookin' to make her one of those big gals?"

Bryan seemed to consider that image. "Some guys like the extra poundage on a woman."

"A little," Jason curved his hands like an hour glass shape in front of him.

Guy laughed and mimicked Jason's hour glass. "Curvy kvinne." His sly, if guttural addition made Annie blush and drove Jason to give him a fist bump.

Bryan offered a fist to Max. "You old guys got some mad skill. I never thought about just finding a skinny one and then giving her ice cream until she got the right size."

Max bypassed the fist bump. "I am a fountain of wisdom." He took Bryan's hat off. "I just stop feeding them when they reach harvest weight." He whacked him with the hat and pointed at the women in the room, and Bryan mouthed a sorry.

"What happened when you saw Dad?" Missy looked so stressed, Gwen wanted to reach over and smooth the lines on her drawn face. She certainly didn't want to add any.

"You know, there were some things about the house I didn't know. I just did not know. So, it's not going to work out quite like I thought. But it'll be fine."

"What's not? What's not going to work out?"

"Nothing. It's just that there are some legal complications, that's all. Some I didn't foresee."

"He doesn't want to sign the papers. That's it, isn't it, Mom? He won't give you a divorce because he wants to take you back."

"It's not Victorian England, Missy. Of course he'll sign eventually. And, hey! He's the one who left. I would take him back. Not he taking me back, but no, nobody's going back to anybody. He's just, you know, getting the paperwork, in all kinds of colors, together."

"Then what's going on?"

Ellen shifted and everyone turned toward her. She'd take charge of the interrogation. "Gwennie, we'll all find out eventually. What has the Tool done?"

"Mom." Gwen tipped her head toward Missy. "Steve."