Joy For Beginners Read Online Free PDF Page A

it.”
    “You know what’s going to be hard?” Caroline asked.
    “The beach house?”
    “Oh, hell,” Caroline said, “I haven’t even thought of that.”
    Behind her, Annabelle walked by, a stack of books in her arms.

    ON HER WAY out of the bookstore that afternoon, Caroline saw Annabelle motion to her from the new releases section.
    “I got a chance to go through a box or two before I got called over here,” Annabelle reported. “There’s a ton of marketing books. You could sell milk to cows after reading all those.”
    Caroline nodded and headed out to her car. Jack’s marketing books had been a part of her life for so long that she had ceased to register their presence, simply moving them from the couch to the coffee table, from the bed to the nightstand. Ten Ways to Sell Anything to Anybody . Eight Great Habits of CEOs . They all seemed to involve numbers, as if you could simply count yourself to riches, like following sheep to sleep.
    Jack hadn’t always been like that. When she first met him he had spent hours talking about his studies, fascinated by what he saw as the psychology of humanity playing out in the practicalities of people’s lives. His views were wide and expansive, his compassion clear; she had never thought of economics in that way and she found herself thinking that if he could make numbers this exciting, heaven knows what he could do with sex.
    Somewhere along the years, things had changed. They both had, she supposed, if she was honest about it. When she had gotten pregnant, Jack started joking that she had become a bird, she was taking the nesting thing so seriously. She turned into the queen of paintbrushes and projects, learning to stencil and buying miniature food grinders so their child could eat only ingredients she had touched herself. She had a stack of cloth diapers ready before the pregnancy was six months along and her fiction reading habits shifted exclusively to books that might have interesting character names she could claim for their child.
    She took Jack’s jokes with a smile, more than half of it sent, as so many things were those days, inward to the baby inside her. She had even tried to tease Jack in return, commenting on his own new behavior, which was more squirrel-like than avian, as if the world was suddenly filled with impending winter and nuts were few on the ground. But he told her it was important, and so she had dutifully looked over the retirement and college savings plans, the insurance policies for long-term disability. She had listened to his concerns about office politics and his thoughts about how the company could expand and she found herself wondering when the psychology of humanity had turned into a theory of how to get people to buy anything.
     
    IT SEEMED AS IF these days she was always standing on a stool late at night, Caroline thought as she pulled the last of Jack’s books from the top shelf of the bookcase. Caroline heard her cell phone, a rippling of notes she recognized as Kate’s ring. But Caroline would have known anyway; no one else would call her this late, not even Brad. Caroline got down from the stool and answered the phone.

    CAROLINE AND KATE had met almost twenty years before, a chance encounter at the coffee shop around the corner. Kate had recognized Caroline, who had been trying not to cry while standing in line at the coffee bar near the preschool where the two women had just dropped off their children. Everyone knew Caroline; her son was the howler, the one whose anguished cries at separation spiraled up the staircase of the school building, causing even the nonchalant middle-school students on the second floor to hang their coats a little faster, knock one another on the shoulder before heading into their classrooms. Caroline was the one leaving the preschool classroom with a resolute spine, which folded neatly in half when she reached the front door of the building.
    Kate’s drop-off at the classroom door was almost