The Good Life by Marian Thurm

Author:Marian Thurm [Thurm, Marian]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9781579624712
Publisher: Permanent Press
Published: 2016-04-20T04:00:00+00:00

~ 19 ~

When Stacy and Roger moved to their new apartment on the Upper East Side, Will was barely a month old and Olivia had just turned two. It meant nothing to a two-year-old, of course, but Stacy couldn’t resist pointing out to her daughter—in the cab ride to Park Avenue the day of the move—the hospital where Stacy herself and Roger were born, and whose rooftop Olivia would see from the window of her new bedroom. Their apartment on the West Side had been more than comfortable and Stacy would have happily raised her children there, but Roger had other ideas: their new home, in a Park Avenue high-rise, was house-sized at well over three thousand square feet—a three-bedroom condo with an eat-in kitchen, a quartet of marble bathrooms, and generous views of Central Park and the Manhattan skyline from nearly every room. And, too, it had central air-conditioning, and its own washer and dryer, a necessity for Stacy, since she had, by choice, no housekeeper to help her, and, with an infant and a toddler, more laundry to take care of than she could ever have imagined. The apartment was considerably larger than the house she had grown up in, and considerably more luxurious. She hadn’t worked with the homeless in the two years since Olivia was born, and Stacy was, from time to time, plagued by feelings of guilt about both her departure from that world and also her good fortune, and she instinctively reached into her wallet in search of a twenty-dollar bill for any homeless person she happened to encounter loitering outside in front of her neighborhood subway station on Lexington Avenue.

Whenever her sister came to visit with the twins, who were now ten years old (and, shockingly, already interested in makeup and fashion), Stacy tried to downplay the views of the Empire State Building from her twenty-seventh floor windows, the custom-made cabinetry in the kitchen, the heated bathroom floors. The first time Lauren saw the apartment, she came without Chuck, and murmured to Stacy, “Whoa, Roger must really be raking in the big bucks from those shopping malls!”

“I guess,” Stacy had said with a shrug, because this kind of talk would always make her uncomfortable. And, too, in the five years since her wedding, she’d kept her distance from the financial aspects of their marriage; there was always more than enough in their checking and savings accounts, and that, for her, was pretty much all the information she needed. Though she knew, too, that this willful ignorance might come back to haunt her someday, for the moment, she thought, it was all fine.

Her sister looked at her sharply. “Don’t take this the wrong way, Stace, and it’s not a criticism, just an observation, but honestly, I don’t think you realize how lucky you are.”

“No, no, of course I do,” Stacy said, and could feel herself blushing. In the few months they’d been living here in the new apartment, she had never felt entirely at

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