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Chapter Three Something CompletelyDifferent S o it was that at the age of forty-two I prepared to become single for, in a very real sense, the first time in my life, and prepared to move into my very own place for the first time. The boys reacted to the news in very different and somewhat puzzling ways. Alan apparently hadn’t seen this coming at all. Home for the summer after his first year of college, he went in and out to his two part-time jobs with a deer-caught-in-the-headlights look. Doug, for all his limitations, had been more perceptive and was less surprised. “I knew it!” he burst out. “I knew this was going to happen if he didn’t stop that yelling at you!” It was hard not to feel a little smug. Rick more or less took it in stride, with no questions, no outbursts , and, as far as I could tell, no great upset. Caught up in a swirl of senior year and job and steady girlfriend, he went about his business with his usual independence, getting himself to the doctor when he had some health issues and quietly sending off his application to Rice as a music major. Steven was the one who most worried me. As the youngest, it was his life that was being the most thoroughly disrupted . He reacted by bottling it up inside and going around tense and quiet—so much like his mother. Now it was going to be up to me to make the money to pay bills, keep the yard mowed, and set the tone. I was not only going to have to lower our standard of living, I wanted to. But with Rick going into his senior year of high school and Steven his next-to-last year of middle school, I didn’t want them to have to change schools. So I took a lease on a two-story house on Westminster Circle in the same 45 subdivision as the house on Braxtonshire. It was bigger than we needed and more expensive than I could afford, so not a good start on my plans for a new life according to a different set of values, but I didn’t want them to have to change schools. The house had a living room, spacious dining room, and an eatin kitchen down, and three bedrooms up. I offered Alan and Rick the largest of these, the “master,” with its own bath, and Steven and I took the two smaller ones and shared the hall bath. My room also had a little adjoining sitting area where I could sew or grade papers in quiet when I wanted to, how I wanted to. The gold velvet dining room set was staying with its master, so we decided to use the dining room as a music room—a good trade-off. We did the moving ourselves. No way was I going to spend a chunk of my modest nest-egg hiring movers! Alan drove the UHaul , discovering only when we pulled out onto a busy road that he didn’t know how to shift the gears. He managed somehow, and we got it back to the house and started loading up. Rick’s friend Jerry was visiting again, and worked as hard as anyone. Still, I had been afraid the boys wouldn’t be able to manage the piano and had reluctantly accepted Glenn’s offer to help with it, but that was all, nothing else. Bringing in the piano was the only time he ever passed through that door. Once it was safely off the van and inside, he lingered on the porch to ask if he could he stay with us for a couple of weeks while he got settled elsewhere, but I said no, quickly and clearly. This was my house, mine and the boys’, not his. The next day when I went back to check around for anything we might have missed, I let myself in through the back and had started looking around the kitchen when I realized I was hearing something from the other part of the house. It was Marie, there cleaning up while Glenn got in a round of golf. A pair of his old house shoes flopped on her feet, and her hair was down in her face. We looked at each other a long minute. She didn’t bother flashing a smile this time. “The vacuum...

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