Why They Run the Way They Do Read Online Free PDF Page B

told her. “You’re going to break that thing (thing!) off, and we’re going to change and be better and happier and stronger people and we belong together and I’m not going anywhere.”
    Now she would have to leave him. She had to do it. It was the only thing to do. That night she lay in bed beside him. I’ll do it tomorrow, she told herself. Tonight of course I could not do it because he cleaned the house and made me dinner but I love someone else and that’s not fair to anyone and so tomorrow I’ll leave. The next night she lay in bed, thinking how much she liked her bed, how much she liked her bed room , actually, how much she would miss it, this room, which she and Dan had painted together because they were too cheap to hire a painter and so there were paint smudges on the ceiling, permanent evidence of their mutual sloppiness. The next night she lay in bed, thinking of how many books they had and how it would be hell, dividing up all those books, how they’d have to sit down for hours, days even, side by side going through everything: Was this his One Hundred Years of Solitude or hers? They’d taken The Contemporary Novel together in college and would have to look through the notes in the book and then they’d both remember what it had been like, sitting beside each other in that sunny classroom with the big windows, twenty years old, none the wiser. The next day the man in Phoenix sent her an email to which she did not respond. Two days later he sent her one that she deleted without reading. The next day he sent another, with a subject line that read:
    ?

    On Saturday one of Chloe’s preschool friends had a birthday party at Chuck E. Cheese. Chloe, with Michael the armadillo tucked under her arm, galloped into the restaurant with the other children and the attending parents. Carrie and Dan sat in the car in silence, until Carrie said:
    â€œPromise me we’ll never have a party at Chuck E. Cheese.”
    â€œI promise,” Dan said. He fake-grimaced. “I hate that mouse.”
    â€œHe’s creepy,” Carrie agreed. “More like a rat than a mouse.”
    â€œSo what d’ya wanna do?” he asked. Drop-off parties were a relatively new thing in their lives. Dan couldn’t think, now, what they would have done on a Saturday afternoon by themselves, before Chloe. How empty it must have been!—though they would not have known it, with nothing to compare it to.
    â€œWe could go have lunch somewhere . . . ?” she offered.
    â€œWe could do that,” he said. “People do that.”
    When they returned to the restaurant an hour and a half later all the children were in a state of anxious fascination because one of the boys had tumbled out of a plastic tube and was bleeding from the mouth. The birthday girl’s parents, mortified that blood had been spilled on their watch, rushed everyone out of the restaurant so the injured boy could be tended to without an audience of gaping kids and judging parents. Halfway home Dan realized that the armadillo was not with them, had been left behind in their whirlwind departure. A few minutes later he saw Carrie realize it; she turned suddenly to the backseat and then to him, started to say something but stopped, looked again to the backseat, pretending to stretch. Chloe had fallen asleep, slumped awkwardly against her flowery restraints. When they arrived home Dan carried her into the house and lay her on the couch in the family room. When she woke later they all played HiHo! Cherry-O and watched The Little Mermaid and then she went to bed, still groggy from the festivities, still unaware of her loss.

    â€œMichael!”
    Dan sat bolt upright in bed, heart pounding. A dream?
    â€œWhere’s Michael?”
    No. It was Chloe. Carrie stirred beside him as he swung out of bed.
    â€œDaddy?” Chloe called as he neared her room, and he was happy it was him she wanted, his