Дуглас Кеннеди - Five Days

That extra $15K would give us just the necessary breathing room, and avoid debt (which I have been so damn determined to dodge, but which we are careening towards very quickly). It might even allow us to borrow Dan’s brother-in-law’s condo in Tampa for a week during Christmas and have a proper family vacation in the sun. Of course Dan knew all that. Just as I also so understood he hated the idea of going to work in the stockroom — and for half of what he used to be making within the same organization.

‘It’s like he’s throwing me a bone,’ he said to me on the evening it was offered to him. ‘A crappy consolation prize — and a way of soothing his conscience about having fired me.’

‘It wasn’t him who fired you. It was the boys upstairs. It was their decision to make the cutbacks.’

‘Yeah, but he carried out their dirty work for them.’

‘Unfortunately that’s his job.’

‘You sticking up for him?’

‘Hardly.’

‘But you want me to accept his offer.’

‘I don’t want you to take the job if it is something you absolutely don’t want to do.’

‘We need the money.’

‘Well, yes, we really do. Still, we would find a way to keep things somehow ticking over. ’

‘You want me to take the job.’

‘I’m not saying that, Dan. And I have asked the hospital if they would let me do ten extra hours of overtime a week — which would bring in around two hundred and fifty more dollars.’

‘And make me feel guilty as hell. ’

Now, as I was turning this all over in my mind, I headed down my road. It’s a country road, around a mile from the center of Damriscotta. A road that loops its way through slightly elevated countryside. though the realtor, when he first brought us to see it, referred to the surrounding landscape as ‘gently rolling’. When I mentioned this once to Ben (in a discussion we were having about the way salesmen inevitably pretty things up) he just shook his head and said:

‘Well, I suppose if you were a rabbit you’d think it was “gently rolling”.’

The fact is that, down towards the waterfront, the terrain is elevated, humpy. The town lawyers and doctors live on those wonderful prospects overlooking the Kennebec River. So does one rather successful painter, a reasonably well-known writer of children’s books, and two builders who have cornered the market in this part of mid-coast Maine. The houses there are venerable clapboard structures — usually white or deep red — beautifully maintained and landscaped, with recent SUVs in the driveways. Hand on heart I have never had a disagreeable thought about the people who are lucky enough to live in these elegant, refined homes. Hand on heart there is a moment every day when I drive by this stretch of waterfront houses and think: Wouldn’t it be nice if.

If what? If I had married a rich local doctor? Or, more to the point, had become that doctor? Is that a tiny little stab I always feel — and yes, it has been a constant silent prod recently — whenever I pass by this stretch of real estate, before turning upwards towards my far more modest home? Is midlife inevitably marked by the onset of regret? I always put on a positive face in front of my work colleagues, my children, my increasingly detached husband. Dr Harrild once referred to me (at a surprise fortieth birthday party two years ago) as ‘the most unflappable and affirmative person on our staff’. Everyone applauded this comment. I smiled shyly while simultaneously thinking: If only you knew how often I ask myself: ‘Is this it?’

My dad often sang a tune to me about ‘accentuating the positive’ when I was younger and getting into one of those rather serious moods I used to succumb to during the roller-coaster ride that was adolescence. But considering how often I caught him singing those upbeat words to himself I can’t help but think that he was also using the song as a way of bolstering his own lingering sense of regret. Dr Harrild actually heard me humming this once in the staff room and said:

‘Now you are about the last person who needs to be telling herself all that.’

Dr Harrild. He too always tries to accentuate the positive — and genuinely be kind. The trip I’m taking this weekend being an example of that. A radiography conference in Boston. OK, Boston’s just three hours down the road, so it’s not like being sent to somewhere really enviable like Honolulu or San Francisco (two places I so want to visit someday). Still, the last time I was in Boston. gosh, it must be two years ago. A Christmas shopping trip. An overnight with Sally and Ben. We even went to a touring production of The Lion King and stayed in an OK hotel off Copley Square. The city was under a fresh dusting of snow. The chic lights along Newbury Street looked magical. I was so happy that Ben and Sally were so happy. And I told myself then that I was going to find the money to start travelling a little every year; that life was roaring by and if I wanted to see Paris or Rome or.

Then, a few weeks later, Dan was out of a job. And the dream was put on permanent hold.

Still, thank you, Dr Harrild. An all-expenses-paid trip to Boston. Gas money. A hotel for two nights. Even $300 in cash for expenses. And all because he was invited to this radiological convention, but his eldest boy has a football game this Sunday and he wanted the hospital represented at the convention, and when I raised the concern that maybe I wasn’t senior enough (i.e. a doctor) to be attending, he brushed that worry away with the statement: ‘You probably know more about radiography than most of the senior consultants who will be there. Anyway, you deserve a trip on us, and a break from things for a few days.’

Was that his way of letting me know that he’d heard something about the state of ‘things’ at home? I had been pretty damn scrupulous about not telling anyone at the hospital or around town about Dan’s problems. Still, small hospitals and small towns breed small talk.

Not that Dr Harrild would ever really engage in such gossip. But he was right about me needing a break — even one that would last just under seventy-two hours. A change of scene and all that. But also — and this was a realization which, when it hit me a few days ago, truly shocked me — the first time I had been away on my own since Ben and Sally were born.

I have let myself stand still.

But tomorrow I am on the road. Alone. Even if it is a destination I already know — and one that’s just a small jump from the place I call home — travel is travel. A temporary escape.

I turned into our driveway. The reclining rays of an unusually bright autumn sun reflected off the new roof of our house. A two-story house, somewhat squat, finished in off-gray clapboard that I would love to darken by two shades if I could ever find the $9,000 our local house painter told me it would cost to redo the entire exterior (and it really needs it). Just as I’d love to landscape the half-acre of land that fronts it, as it has become rather scrubby. Behind us, however, is a wonderful oak tree that, right this moment, is almost peacock-like in its autumnal beauty. Sometimes I think it was the tree that sold me on the house — as we bought it knowing it was a fixer-upper, a starter place from which we’d eventually graduate.

But enough of that (as I tell myself most days). We have raised two children here. It’s our home. We worked hard to buy it. We continue to work hard to keep it (though the last mortgage payment falls in seventeen months — hurrah). It is our history. Only now can I honestly say that I’ve never warmed to the place. Nor has Dan. How I wish we’d talked ourselves out of ever buying it.

Our home.

I thought that as I pulled up our driveway and saw Dan sitting on the bench that covers most of the front porch, a cigarette between his lips. As soon as he spotted my car pulling up he was on his feet like an anxious schoolboy, dumping the cigarette onto the porch deck and then trying to hide the evidence by kicking it into the crabgrass below. Dan has been allegedly off cigarettes for six months — but I know he smokes several every day.