Jane would have gone on the defense if someone had responded to an idea of hers with this kind of sarcasm, but Chloe took it in and decided to make the best of it. “Bad idea?” she asked.

“It needs fine-tuning.”

Jane could see Chloe adjusting the knobs already, sharpening the focus and heightening the contrast. She could deal with Chloe’s beauty and youth, write them off as superficial advantages which would fade in time, but there was no way to compete with someone willing and eager to actually learn from her own mistakes. She felt like saying, here, take my desk, my office, let’s just get this over with right now.

2.

When Chloe left, Jane went back to her lists. Reading through the orderly arrangement of words on paper—true, false, and everything in between—made her feel more in control of her destiny.

Gerald’s gymnastics class—3pm, halfway down the To Do list, was code for taking her six-year-old son to his shrink. She had no hesitation in admitting Gerald was seeing a shrink—if anything, telling her friends made her feel like a better, more attentive mother than she quietly feared herself to be—but her mother-in-law, who was temporarily installed in their carriage house, would have been horrified at the idea, even though she routinely told Jane, in her oblique way, that she thought Gerald was a peculiar child. In Sarah’s view of the world, having a problem was life and attempting to do something about it was self-indulgence. The stoic put up with their God-given afflictions and addictions; the moral weaklings caved in and tried to do something about them.

So to avoid Sarah’s scorn, Gerald was dragged off to his gymnastics instructor, Dr. Rose Garitty, M.D., every Wednesday. Poor pudgy, peculiar Gerald. The mere thought of him trying to do somersaults was enough to rend Jane’s heart.

“Let’s just tell her the truth,” Thomas had suggested.

“The truth” was Thomas’s solution for everything, which pretty much described her husband’s optimistic, kindhearted, and open view of the world.