Nancy Reed changed the channel. It didn’t make much difference. She was looking at the TV, but not really watching it. Her mind was preoccupied. She was doing the two things guaranteed to bum a person out on a Friday night: drinking alone and reflecting on her life.
Somewhere along the way, something had gone wrong. She was forty-one, unemployed, and staring down the barrel of a divorce. But when she looked back, performing a kind of post-mortem on her life, there was no obvious cause of death. There was just a series of wrong turns, bad decisions, and unfortunate events. The cause of death, it seemed, was life.
It was coming up on 11pm. That’s late, for suburbia. Her daughter was at a movie and her husband – ex, she reminded herself – was in a budget room at the Camp Hill Motor Inn, where he’d moved while they finalised the divorce. Nancy was alone, free to fall into a pit of despair and self-pity. Speaking of despair, the Camp Hill Leader was on the coffee table in front of her, open to the employment section. Her yellow highlighter sat beside it. She hadn’t even needed to take the cap off. The only things she seemed qualified for were night-filler, check-out-chick, or flipper of burgers. That was the problem with being a stay-at-home mum. None of those skills translated to the workplace. Tracie wasn’t exactly the Antichrist, but she’d been a handful. Still was. Seventeen years of child-rearing should have qualified Nancy for an upper-management position in a psychiatric hospital, or a hostage negotiator, or a— Creak.
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