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  ALSO BY JENNIFER WEINER

  Good in Bed

  In Her Shoes

  Little Earthquakes

  Goodnight Nobody

  The Guy Not Taken

  Certain Girls

  Best Friends Forever

  Fly Away Home

  WASHINGTON SQUARE PRESS

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  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2010 by Jennifer Weiner, Inc.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to Redbook magazine, a publication of Hearst Communications, Inc., where “The Half Life” first appeared.

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Atria Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020

  First Washington Square Press edition December 2010

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  Manufactured in the United States of America

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  ISBN 978-1-4516-4062-5

  Contents

  The Half Life

  The Half Life

  “Can you believe this?” the man in front of Piper grumbled. The line, which they’d finally crested, had snaked through a half-dozen switchbacks and extended down the glass-lined corridor of the Philadelphia International Airport, past the white-painted rocking chairs and the flat-screen board listing DEPARTURES and ARRIVALS. Piper gave him a tight smile.

  “I get here two hours early for a domestic flight—domestic!” said the man, undeterred by Piper’s silence. “And still. Look at this.” He jerked his chin at the line, barely bothering to glance at her face and almost certainly not seeing her, not really, because if he did, he’d see a woman on the verge—if not of a nervous breakdown, then definitely of tears. Piper had tried hard with her makeup kit in the fifteen-minute cab ride from her row house in Center City to the airport, but concealer could do only so much to cover up the dark circles under her eyes. Liner and mascara couldn’t disguise the threads of red in the whites of her eyes; lipstick could brighten her mouth but couldn’t change the way it turned down in a trembling bow. When you come home from work and your husband meets you at the door, his bags neatly packed at his side, and says, “I won’t be here when you come back,” what do you do with that information? What do you do when you’ve got a four-year-old, when you’re the only one in the house with a full-time job, when you’ve spent the last two years trying to jolly him out of the black cloud that’s enveloped him since he lost his teaching position, when you’ve been paying all the bills, trying to keep everyone happy and clothed and fed? What do you do when he tells you that the night before you’re leaving on a business trip to Paris?

  It turns out that what you do is hiss the words “Not now” and attempt to step over his suitcase, and you almost succeed until you feel his firm grip on your elbow.

  “I’ve been trying to tell you,” Tosh said, having the good manners to look pained. Piper supposed that this was true. “We need to talk,” he’d said one rainy night back in September . . . so she’d filled the kitchen with cheery chatter, directed mostly at their daughter. “Piper, I’m not happy,” he’d said on New Year’s Eve . . . so she’d fetched him a dish of ice cream, handed him the remote, and slipped out of the den to return email from her office. When he’d started sleeping in the basement the month before, she’d told her daughter it was because she snored, and when he’d said he was in love with someone else—well, she’d simply ignored him. In love with someone else? It was ridiculous. They were married. End of story.

  “It’s a phase,” she’d said brightly to her best friend, Sarah, who’d looked at her with eyes brimming with unbearable sympathy. After that, Piper had stopped talking about it. Talking about it only made it real, and it couldn’t be. It was a phase, a bad mood, Mercury in retrograde or something like that. Tosh would get a job, he’d move his stuff out of the basement, he’d start wanting to sleep with her again, and everything would be fine.

  Except if that had been true, Tosh couldn’t have left. He couldn’t have piled his suitcase into the trunk of a taxi, crying, and ridden away from her. Yet that was exactly what he had done. All Piper could do was watch him go.

  This isn’t happening, Piper had told herself. She’d said it over and over in her mind, at increasing volumes, until she believed it. Not happening. Couldn’t happen. Then she’d gone inside, collected Nola from the babysitter, made her dinner and put her to bed. “Where did Daddy go?” her little girl had asked from the cozy depths of her bed (Nola slept with two down comforters, a cotton blanket, and flannel sheets, all of which would be kicked to the floor at some point during the night), and Piper had said, “Business trip.”

  She’d stayed up all night, zipping her toiletries into plastic bags, settling her suits in their dry-cleaner’s plastic into her suitcase, not checking her email, not listening for the phone. She’d shaved her legs and painted her toenails. She’d exfoliated. She’d reorganized her closet, bagging up pilled sweaters and two pairs of maternity pants for Goodwill. In the morning, she’d gotten Nola out of bed, supervised face-washing and toothbrushing and Cheerios with cut-up banana, then walked her to nursery school. Piper’s mother, who’d be staying at the house and helping Tosh look after Nola while Piper traveled, would pick Nola up at noon and take her out to lunch and maybe a movie. At two o’clock Piper would call for a cab of her own and head to the airport and then Paris. By the time she got home from the trip, she kept telling herself, everything would be fine. Tosh would have realized how much he missed Nola and missed her. Her mother would of course agree to stay an extra night to give them a chance to go out to dinner and maybe even spend the night in a nice hotel, and there, on anonymous high-thread-count sheets, she and her husband would make everything all right again.

  In the airport, the line inched forward, and the man in front of her was still intent on conversation. “You from here? Philly?” he asked. Piper nodded. “You like it?” he persisted, and she nodded again. She supposed she should be flattered that a man, any man, thought she was worth an effort. Dressed for work, with eyeliner and high heels, her hair twisted on top of her head, she could still get away with a sexy-librarian look. In the mirror, plucking her eyebrows, she could see the signs of age—the deepening fan wrinkles in the corners of her eyes, the odd age spot, and still the occasional zit. She was forty, with a four-year-old, a full-time job, and an unhappy and unemployed husband (whose defection she would not, could not acknowledge), and sometimes she felt every day of her age and more.

  Tosh, of course, didn’t seem to have aged a minute. His nut-brown skin was smooth, his hair still glossy, his body firm, the muscles supple, visible whenever he moved. Tosh was a sculptor
; he worked with his hands, with his body, heaving blocks of stone, while Piper, deskbound and increasingly, dismayingly flabby underneath her clothes, supported them.

  “Where you heading?” the man asked.

  My life is over, Piper thought dimly. But of course she couldn’t say that. That was the kind of talk that got you shipped to what her family inevitably called the Bin—as in, Bubbe’s in the Bin again. Dad’s spending spring break in the Bin. Mental illness ran through her family like the veins of mold in blue cheese. Maybe that was why Tosh had gotten cold feet. Maybe that was why he’d said . . .

  The man was staring at her expectantly. “Paris,” she said, surprised at how normal she sounded.

  “Ah.” The man’s face softened, and his eyes took on a nostalgic shimmer. Piper could imagine the airport, with its sterile beige walls and thrum of noise, staticky PA announcements, the sound of a thousand wheels moving across miles of tiled floor, dissolving, as he imagined . . . what? The Louvre, the Eiffel Tower, some romantic bistro, a stroll through the Jardins de Luxembourg or along the Seine, arm in arm with his beloved? “Paris in the springtime.”

  Piper felt the need to clarify. “I’m working.”

  “Oh, yeah?” he asked. “What do you do?”

  “Consulting.” Nobody knew what that meant. Tosh had told her that repeatedly after she’d gotten the offer. “Pipe, nobody knows what that means.” Once she’d taken the job (and really, with the money they’d offered, there was no way she could have not taken it), they’d gone away for a long weekend in the Bahamas, funded by her signing bonus. She’d spent one afternoon on the beach trying to explain the work that would fill her days, but Tosh just kept saying, “So you’re going to fire people,” until Piper was forced to concede that it was so. In reality, during the ten years she’d worked for Brodeur Williams, she’d never actually fired anyone herself. She went in; she observed. She sat in on meetings, listening and taking notes, fading into the background, and then she delivered a report to the managers who’d hired her as to how the company could best streamline its operations. She never stayed for the actual firing. That wasn’t in her contract.

  “Poor you.” Finally the man seemed to see her face, its pallor, her sorrow. He opened his mouth to say something else, but the line jerked forward again and split into six separate lines in front of six separate metal detectors, and her inquisitor was gone. Piper handed over her ticket and passport for a woman in a uniform to inspect.

  “This way, please. This way,” droned the security guards. Piper ended up behind a young mom pushing a baby in a stroller. A diaper bag hung from the handlebars, and the woman was fumbling with her purse and a bottle half filled with what Piper recognized as breast milk.

  “Can I give you a hand?” Piper asked.

  “Oh, no, I’m good,” said the woman, who seemed cut from a more competent cloth than Piper. She lifted the baby into her arms and plopped the car seat on the belt, along with the diaper bag and her purse. She tried to fold the stroller one-handed, with the baby balanced on her hip, before giving up and looking at Piper. “Actually, if you wouldn’t mind . . .”

  Piper figured she needed help folding the stroller, and was surprised when the woman handed her the baby. “Hi, honey,” Piper said, jiggling the warm weight of the baby in her arms, marveling at how fast it came back—the curve of a bottom in the crook of her arm, the jiggle. With Nola she’d felt all thumbs and left feet, flipping through the stack of baby books at her bedside, trying to decipher every cry and coo and whimper. If she could do it again . . . but she caught that thought in the steel jaws at her brain’s perimeter. She nipped it with her mental gardening shears, sending the bud tumbling toward the dirt. No more babies. Not for her.

  “Next!” called the guard on the other side of the metal detector. Piper handed over the baby, pulled her computer out of her bag, slipped off her shoes, and walked through the doorway. Something beeped. Of course it did. All night, all day, she’d clung to the idea that travel could help her—a reboot, a fresh start, a little time away from home, and Tosh would miss her enough to change his mind—but the certainty settling into her bones told her otherwise. Her husband was not given to changing his mind. A man of his word was her Tosh. When he was just twenty-three, he’d made up his mind to marry her, and he had. Now that he’d made up his mind to leave her, she could only expect that he’d do that, too.

  “Cell phone, jew’ry, iPod, BlackBerry, belt buckle,” the guard droned. Piper wasn’t wearing a belt or any jewelry besides a single gold bracelet, her wedding band, and her engagement ring. Her phone and iPod were in her bag, along with a letter from Tosh that he’d held out to her while the cab idled at the curb. “Read it when you’re on the plane,” he’d said. She hadn’t taken it, had turned away, refusing to open her hand, but he must have tucked it in her bag when she wasn’t looking.

  “Try again,” said the guard, and Piper, head bent, stepped gingerly through the doorway. More beeping. Back in line, a very important businessman gave a very important sigh. Instinctively Piper pulled off her bracelet and her rings, set them in a plastic dish, and pushed the dish through the belt. She walked through the doorway once again—no beep this time—and shoved her jewelry into her pocket as she made her way to the business lounge by the gate.

  At the Admiral’s Club, Piper handed her card to the uniformed woman behind the desk. “Very good, Ms. DeWitt,” the woman said. She pressed a button. The etched-glass doors slid open. Piper collapsed on a gray love seat, her bag beside her, her wedding rings in her pocket, a letter from her husband that she didn’t want to read in her purse. From the cash bar, she purchased a glass of white wine. She never drank when she flew—it only worsened the jet lag—but if ever a day called for wine at four o’clock in the afternoon, today was the day. Thus fortified, she pulled her phone out of her purse and dialed her mother’s number.

  Deborah picked up on the first ring. “Piper?” she asked. “Where’s Tosh?”

  Piper’s heart crumpled. “He’s not home yet?”

  “Is he teaching?” Deborah asked. (Piper had never gotten around to telling her that Tosh was no longer an employee of the Philadelphia College of Art.) She could hear her mother pausing, then plunging ahead. “Nola’s asking for him.”

  Piper thought it wasn’t possible to feel any worse. At the sound of her daughter’s name, she discovered that she was wrong. It was as if she was a piece of Wonder bread, and the world—no, not the world, just Tosh—had become a giant rolling pin that had gone back and forth over her until she was nothing, invisible, gone. She lifted her wineglass, empty now, and held it to her eye as her mother’s voice, full of concern, said, “Piper, what’s wrong?”

  He left me, Piper thought. He left us. The words rose in her throat, swelling like balloons, choking off her air supply until she couldn’t speak, couldn’t breathe. “Piper?” said her mother. She pressed her lips shut. If she spoke, if she let those words go free, then it would be true . . . but here, in the half-world of the airport, the Land of Between, a place where everyone was on his or her way someplace else, maybe she could keep it a secret. Eight hours on the airplane, two weeks in Paris, and then . . .

  “Piper?” Her mother’s voice, no longer concerned, had taken on a familiar nagging edge.

  Words burst out of her mouth like clear water flooding past a dam. “He’s got a seminar!”

  Deborah drew in a breath—a suspicious-sounding breath—but before she could say another word or ask another question, Piper said, “It’s in New York. At the New School. He’s probably going to stay with Jeff and Rebecca, you know, in Brooklyn, instead of going back and forth every day with his pieces . . . you’ve got his cell, right?” she babbled. “You can always call him. I’m sure he’ll be back by Friday night, maybe Saturday morning . . .”

  She could picture her mother, her short cap of straw-colored hair, loose no-color cotton tops and elastic-waist pants, barefoot even though Piper had warned her that sometimes there were tiny sh
ards and scraps of metal on the floor. Deborah had been resolutely single for thirty years, ever since she discovered Piper’s father had been seeing his secretary. She’d piled his belongings into suitcases, set the suitcases at the curb, and informed him that he was welcome to rejoin the family once he’d given up his extracurricular activities. Instead of giving up the secretary, her father had married her, and the two of them had settled in Oregon, and had twins . . . and how might things have worked out if, instead of giving him the boot, Deborah had tried to convince him to stay? Piper had never asked, but she knew for certain that her mother would have had little patience for Piper’s situation.

  “Call Carleen,” Piper said. “I meant to do it before I left. See if she can come help out.”

  Her mother’s tone grew marginally warmer. “Where’s her number?”

  “On the fridge.” Piper waited, the telephone clamped in one icy hand, until Deborah reported that she’d found the number and would call Carleen and then call Piper back. Piper hung up, turned her phone off, and tucked it into her bag beside the letter. “I won’t be here when you come back.” The words clanged in her head. She closed her eyes.

  Piper Garroway met the man who would become her husband just the way the self-help books said she would. She met him when she wasn’t looking for a man or, really, for anything at all.

  She was twenty-two years old. She’d just graduated from college. On a whim, she’d taken over her friend Sarah’s share in a summer house at the Jersey shore after Sarah unexpectedly got into the Teach for America program and had to pack up and ship out to Louisiana posthaste. Sarah had paid twelve hundred dollars for the privilege of being one of eight people in a three-bedroom house, but she’d given Piper a break, accepting eight hundred bucks, plus the tent Piper had bought for Outdoor Orientation freshman year and hadn’t used since.

  The house was a disappointment, even at its bargain-basement price: A tumbledown ranch with vinyl siding, it had thin walls, sandy shag wall-to-wall carpeting, a shower that produced a grudging trickle of rust-colored water that rarely made it past lukewarm, and a single toilet that flooded at least once per visit. Worse, Piper arrived to find out that her eight hundred bucks didn’t even get her into one of the bedrooms. Eight hundred bucks, she learned, got her a spot on the pullout couch in the living room, next to a stranger, a strange man with the strange name of Tosh.