Winter Moon Read Online Free PDF Page A

payroll. Gosh, when you
really
thought about it, being laid off after ten years at IBM wasn’t a tragedy, not even a crisis, but a virtual
festival
of life-enhancing change.
    “Give it a rest, Heather,” she warned herself, closing up the carton of sherbet and returning it to the freezer.
    Jack, ever the grinning optimist, said nothing could be gained by dwelling on bad news, and he was right, of course. His upbeat nature, genial personality, and resilient heart had made it possible for him to endure a nightmarish childhood and adolescence that would have broken many people.
    More recently, his philosophy had served him well as he’d struggled through the worst year of his career with the Department. After almost a decade together on the streets, he and Tommy Fernandez had been as close as brothers. Tommy had been dead more than eleven months now, but at least one night a week Jack woke from vivid dreams in which his partner and friend was dying again. He always slipped from bed and went to the kitchen for a post-midnight beer or to the living room just to sit alone in the darkness awhile, unaware that Heather had been awakened by the soft cries that escaped him in his sleep. On other nights, months ago, she had learned that she could neither do nor say anything to help him; he needed to be by himself. After he left the room, she often reached out beneath the covers to put her hand on the sheets, which were still warm with his body heat and damp with the perspiration wrung out of him by anguish.
    In spite of everything, Jack remained a walking advertisement for the power of positive thinking. Heather was determined to match his cheerful disposition and his capacity for hope.
    At the sink, she rinsed the residue of sherbet off the scoop.
    Her own mother, Sally, was a world-class whiner who viewed every piece of bad news as a personal catastrophe, even if the event that disturbed her had occurred at the farthest end of the earth and had involved only total strangers. Political unrest in the Philippines could set Sally off on a despairing monologue about the higher prices she believed she would be forced to pay for sugar and for everything containing sugar if the Philippine cane crop was destroyed in a bloody civil war. A hangnail was as troublesome to her as a broken arm to an ordinary person, a headache invariably signaled an impending stroke, and a minor ulcer in the mouth was a sure sign of terminal cancer. The woman
thrived
on bad news and gloom.
    Eleven years ago, when Heather was twenty, she’d been delighted to cease being a Beckerman and to become a McGarvey—unlike some friends, in that era of burgeoning feminism, who had continued to use their maiden names after marriage or resorted to hyphenated surnames. She wasn’t the first child in history who became determined to be nothing whatsoever like her parents, but she liked to think she was extraordinarily diligent about ridding herself of parental traits.
    As she got a spoon out of a drawer, picked up the bowl full of sherbet, and went into the living room, Heather realized another upside to being unemployed was that she didn’t have to miss work to care for Toby when he was home sick from school or hire a sitter to look after him. She could be right there where he needed her and suffer none of the guilt of a working mom.
    Of course, their health insurance had covered only eighty percent of the cost of the visit to the doctor’s office on Monday morning, and the twenty-percent co-payment had caught her attention as never before. It had seemed huge. But that was Beckerman thinking, not McGarvey thinking.
    Toby was in his pajamas in an armchair in the living room, in front of the television, legs stretched out on a footstool, covered in blankets. He was watching cartoons on a cable channel that programmed exclusively for kids.
    Heather knew to the penny what the cable subscription cost. Back in October, when she’d still had a job, she’d have had to guess at