Count the Ways by Joyce Maynard

Author:Joyce Maynard
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: William Morrow
Published: 2021-04-09T00:00:00+00:00

Cam didn’t show up for dinner. Eleanor made a meal for the family, but nobody wanted to eat. For all the days leading up to the launch, Ursula had insisted on keeping the television on the news, but that night nobody turned it on. The girls went up to their room. Toby put on his Thomas the Tank Engine bathrobe, retrieved his meercat from her bed, and sat on the rug. Eleanor stoked the woodstove.

It was seven thirty when Cam walked in the door, bringing a gust of cold air with him. “Sorry about that,” he said. “Guy on the road needed help changing a tire.” Standing over the table, with his parka still on, he reached for a chicken leg off the platter and bit into it.

He must have been the one person in the United States of America who didn’t know what had happened that day. He had come through the door, shaking snow off his boots, calling out to Ursula to tell him all about it. Meaning Florida. Christa. The Challenger.

“She’s upstairs,” Eleanor said. “She said she wants to be alone.”

“Where’s my future astronaut?” he called up the stairs. “Come down and give your dad a hug.”

“I saw you with your girlfriend at Hopewell Falls,” Eleanor told him, as he reached for a beer. Off in his truck all day away from the news, though not alone, he was thirsty. “Also, Christa McAuliffe is dead.”

That night, after she tucked the girls in—Eleanor alone this time, though it was Cam who got Toby in his pajamas and settled him on his mattress in the borning room—Eleanor fixed a pot of tea and the two of them sat at the kitchen table. They waited until they were sure that everyone was asleep and kept their voices low, knowing how sound carried to the upstairs bedrooms. Cam’s face, as he looked across the table at Eleanor, bore an expression she could not remember having seen before. She would have preferred despair, but what he offered looked more like eerily calm regret, and pity.

“We didn’t mean for this to happen,” he told Eleanor.

We. A new configuration, in which her husband had aligned himself with their babysitter. Years ago—when she was not much older than Alison, now—Coco had shown up in their kitchen with a loaf of banana bread to mark the birth of Cam and Eleanor’s first child. Back in the fall, Eleanor and Ursula had baked a carrot cake to celebrate her eighteenth birthday.

Cam took a sip of his tea, rubbed his fine chin. His eyes, looking into hers, offered no excuses. This was supposed to be the moment when he’d put his arms around her and say, “What was I thinking? You’re the woman I want.”

“You know as well as I do that things between us have been bad for a long time now,” Cam told Eleanor. She did know this, now that he mentioned it. Since that morning just over seven months ago when she’d knelt at the

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