Dean Koontz: Winter Moon

There was, after all, a bright side to being unemployed. She just hadn't been looking hard enough for it. No doubt, if she put her mind to it, she'd think of a long list of other benefits. Like not having to buy any new clothes for work. Look how much she had saved right there. Didn't have to worry about the stability of the bank in which they had their savings account, either, because at the rate they were going, they wouldn't have a savings account in a few months, not on just Jack's salary, since the city's latest financial crisis had required him to take a pay cut. Taxes had gone up again too, both state and federal, so she was saving all the money that the government would have taken and squandered in her name if she'd been on someone's payroll. Gosh, when you really thought about it, being laid off after ten years at IBM wasn't a tragedy, not even a crisis, but a virtual festival of life-enhancing change.

"Give it a rest, Heather," she warned herself, closing up the carton of sherbet and returning it to the freezer.

Jack, ever the grinning optimist, said nothing could be gained by dwelling on bad news, and he was right, of course. His upbeat nature, genial personality, and resilient heart had made it possible for him to endure a nightmarish childhood and adolescence that would have broken many people… More recently, his philosophy had served him well as he'd struggled through the worst year of his career with the Department. After almost a decade together on the streets, he and Tommy Fernandez had been as close as brothers. Tommy had been dead more than eleven months now, but at least one night a week Jack woke from vivid dreams in which his partner and friend was dying again. He always slipped from bed and went to the kitchen for a post-midnight beer or to the living room just to sit alone in the darkness awhile, unaware that Heather had been awakened by the soft cries that escaped him in his sleep. On other nights, months ago, she had learned that she could neither do nor say anything to help him, he needed to be by himself. After he left the room, she often reached out beneath the covers to put her hand on the sheets, which were still warm with his body heat and damp with the perspiration wrung out of him by anguish.

In spite of everything, Jack remained a walking advertisement for the power of positive thinking. Heather was determined to match his cheerful disposition and his capacity for hope.

At the sink, she rinsed the residue of sherbet off the scoop.

Her own mother, Sally, was a world-class whiner who viewed every piece of bad news as a personal catastrophe, even if the event that disturbed her had occurred at the farthest end of the earth and had involved only total strangers. Political unrest in the Philippines could set Sally off on a despairing monologue about the higher prices she believed she would be forced to pay for sugar and for everything containing sugar if the Philippine cane crop was destroyed in a bloody civil war. A hangnail was as troublesome to her as a broken arm to an ordinary person, a headache invariably signaled an impending stroke, and a minor ulcer in the mouth was a sure sign of terminal cancer. The woman thrived on bad news and gloom.

Eleven years ago, when Heather was twenty, she'd been delighted to cease being a Beckerman and to become a McGarvey-unlike some friends, in that era of burgeoning feminism, who had continued to use their maiden names after marriage or resorted to hyphenated surnames. She wasn't the first child in history who became determined to be nothing whatsoever like her parents, but she liked to think she was extraordinarily diligent about ridding herself of parental traits.

As she got a spoon out of a drawer, picked up the bowl full of sherbet, and went into the living room, Heather realized another upside to being unemployed was that she didn't have to miss work to care for Toby when he was home sick from school or hire a sitter to look after him. She could be right there where he needed her and suffer none of the guilt of a working mom.

Of course, their health insurance had covered only eighty percent of the cost of the visit to the doctor's office on Monday morning, and the twenty-percent copayment had caught her attention as never before. It had seemed huge. But that was Beckerman thinking, not McGarvey thinking.

Toby was in his pajamas in an armchair in the living room, in front of the television, legs stretched out on a footstool, covered in blankets… He was watching cartoons on a cable channel that programmed exclusively for kids.

Heather knew to the penny what the cable subscription cost. Back in October, when she'd still had a job, she'd have had to guess at the amount and might not have come within five dollars of it.

On the TV, a tiny mouse was chasing a cat, which had apparently been hypnotized into believing that the mouse was six feet tall with fangs and blood-red eyes.

"Gourmet orange sherbet," she said, handing Toby the bowl and spoon,

"finest on the planet, brewed it up myself, hours upon hours of drudgery, had to kill and skin two dozen sherbets to make it."

"Thanks, Mom," he said, grinning at her, then grinning even more broadly at the sherbet before raising his eyes to the TV screen and locking onto the cartoon again.

Sunday through Tuesday, he had stayed in bed without making a fuss, too miserable even to agitate for television time. He had slept so much that she'd begun to worry, but evidently sleep had been what he needed.

Last night, for the first time since Sunday, he'd been able to keep more than clear liquids in his stomach, he'd asked for sherbet and hadn't gotten sick on it. This morning he'd risked two slices of unbuttered white toast, and now sherbet again. His fever had broken, the flu seemed to be running its course.

Heather settled into another armchair. On the end table beside her, a coffee-pot-shaped thermos and a heavy white ceramic mug with red and purple flowers stood on a plastic tray. She uncapped the thermos and refilled the mug with a premium coffee flavored with almond and chocolate, relishing the fragrant steam, trying not to calculate the cost per cup of this indulgence.

After curling her legs on the chair, pulling an afghan over her lap, and sipping the brew, she picked up a paperback edition of a Dick Francis novel.

She opened to the page she had marked with a slip of paper, and she tried to return to a world of English manners, morals, and mysteries.

She felt guilty, though she was not neglecting anything to spend time with a book. No housework needed to be done. When they'd both held jobs, she and Jack had shared chores at home. They still shared them.

When she'd been laid off, she'd insisted on taking over his domestic duties, but he'd refused. He probably thought that letting her fill her time with housework would lead her to the depressing conviction that she would never find another job. He'd always been as sensitive about other people's feelings as he was optimistic about his own prospects. As a result, the house was clean, the laundry was done, and her only chore was to watch over Toby, which wasn't a chore at all.because he was such a good kid. Her guilt was the irrational if inescapable result of being, by nature and by choice, a working woman who, in this deep recession, was not permitted to work.

She had submitted applications to twenty-six companies. Now all she could do was wait. And read Dick Francis.

The melodramatic music and comic voices on the television didn't distract her.

Indeed, the fragrant coffee, the comfort of the chair, and the cold sound of winter rain drumming on the roof combined to take her mind off her worries and let her slip into the novel.

Heather had been reading fifteen minutes when Toby said, "Mom?"

"Hmmm?" she said, without looking up from her book.