Chapter 1 — Tuesday Afternoon
I was standing in the checkout line on a Tuesday afternoon, holding a carton of milk, while my five-year-old, Sammy, sat in the cart seat swinging his legs and humming to himself.
It was an ordinary trip.
Milk, bread, the cereal Sammy would eat and the cereal I hoped he’d eat.
I was already half thinking about dinner.
And then Sammy stopped humming, went very still, and pulled hard on my sleeve.
There is a particular quality to a Tuesday afternoon that makes it feel immune to disaster.
The light is flat and unremarkable.
The store is half empty.
You are running the smallest of errands, the kind you don’t even really plan, the kind that barely counts as part of your day.
Nothing important has ever happened to me on a Tuesday afternoon in a grocery store, and I had no reason to think anything ever would.
That is worth saying, because it is the whole texture of the thing — how completely unbraced I was, how far my guard was down, how thoroughly I was just a tired woman buying milk and thinking about whether we had enough pasta at home.
Whatever armor a person wears against bad news, I was not wearing any of it.
I was as open and unprotected as a person ever is, which is to say: exactly as open as you are on an ordinary Tuesday, right before the ordinary Tuesday ends.
“Mommy, look.” He said it in the too-loud whisper of a child who has not yet learned what a whisper is for, and he pointed one small finger toward a woman standing near the bakery case.
“That’s the lady who comes to our house when you’re at work.”
Chapter 2 — The Bottom Drops Out
My heart went straight down into my shoes.