Together Alone Read Online Free PDF

modestly.
    Celeste watched the waitress leave. “Seems like yesterday our kids were taking the orders.”
    Emily knew what she meant. “It was, almost.”
    “It’s weird waking up to an empty house. I keep looking into Dawn’s room, just to make sure she’s gone.”
    “Do you miss her?” Emily wanted to know she wasn’t the only one who felt all hollowed out.
    “She just left.”
    “So did Marilee,” Kay said, “still I miss her. We’ve been separated before, and for longer periods of time than two days, but college is different. It’s significative.”
    Emily thought that sounded right.
    “It’s also about time,” Celeste avowed. “Dawn’s been my responsibility and mine alone—which is nice, when you think that I haven’t had to pander to her father all these years, and not so nice when you think of the work. I’m the one who’s had to nag and pester and bribe her to keep studying. That’s the down-side of single parenthood.”
    Just as Emily was thinking it, Kay said, “It’s the down-side of motherhood. ”
    “Do I miss her?” Celeste asked. “Emotionally, yes. Practically, no. I feel relieved, like I got her where she is, and now someone else is sharing the responsibility.”
    “Who?” Emily asked, eager for reassurance. She trembled to think of Jill alone in Boston.
    “Whoever—the school, the adviser, the RA. Her. She ’s responsible for more of her life. Finally.”
    “Do you think she’ll do okay?” Kay asked, with good cause. Of the three girls, Dawn was both the brightest and the most impulsive. More than once, Jill and Marilee had kept her from doing things she would have come to regret.
    Emily hoped she would find new friends to guard her like that. She worried about it even with Jill, who was eminently sensible. Jill thrived on being surrounded by friends. In the rush to align herself with a group in college, she might make a mistake. For all Emily knew, the girls on her floor, who had seemed so nice, might have been waiting for their parents to leave to show their true colors. For all Emily knew, they might want to drink themselves drunk every night, buzz-cut their hair, and snort coke. For all Emily knew, the guys would be cute and polite and thoroughly lecherous. For all Emily knew, serial killers staked out the cafeteria lines.
    Celeste didn’t seem worried. “Dawn will be fine. She knows what I expect. God only knows I’ve drummed it into her enough. Actually, her father is making noises now. Isn’t that a hoot? The shadow takes form, after all these years. She got her brains from him, and now he’s footing the bill. Little did he know when he agreed to pay her college tuition in his rush to be free of me, what it would cost.”
    “Little did any of us know,” Emily remarked. “It’s tough.”
    Celeste eyed her strangely. “Doug does well.”
    “Doing well barely meets the cost of the tuition.”
    “But he’s a single-practitioner. He markets his mind and works out of the den. He has no overhead to speak of.”
    “He has huge travel costs.”
    Celeste remained skeptical. “To look at him, you’d never know he’s anything but loaded. He was like something out of a magazine the other night.”
    “Clothes are his weakness,” Emily allowed. “Clothes and cars. But he doesn’t gamble, and he doesn’t come home with lipstick on his collar.”
    “He doesn’t come home, period.”
    “Sure, he does. He’s home most weekends.”
    “Will he come home more, now that you’re alone?” Kay asked.
    “How can he, with Jill’s bills? He has to work harder than ever.”
    Celeste made a noise. “Doesn’t it get you down, that he isn’t there more? At least I have an alimony check to warm my cold hands.”
    Yes, it got Emily down. She and Doug had been inseparable, eons ago. But she couldn’t dwell on the past. “It’s not so bad,” she said. She yawned and stretched, then set her elbows on the table and grinned. “I have the bathroom all to myself.