A Clean Slate. Laura Caldwell

which came just as easily. A second later, an inflectionless voice informed me that I had a nice chunk of money in my account, more than I’d ever had at one time. Laney had been right, after all. I hadn’t blown it. I didn’t have to work right now if I didn’t want to.

      But what did people do if they didn’t work? I put the phone on the counter with a clunk. Most women I knew who were officially unemployed were unofficially working their asses off in their own homes, raising their kids. I didn’t have kids, obviously. Wasn’t even on the path to eventual children. So what to do?

      I could do anything I wanted with my life, I realized. It was mine to shape. I suppose that had always been true, but before, I’d felt the invisible constraints of the need for money, or my relationship with Ben, or the partnership track I thought I was on. Yet none of those concerns existed anymore.

      My life was a clean slate. What did I want to do with it?

      

      I found a pad of paper in Laney’s desk and settled on the couch again. “New Possible Careers,” I wrote at the top. I sat there for a full five minutes staring at the paper. Why wasn’t anything coming to me? Anything, I told myself, write anything that comes to mind. I shook my hand to relax it and scribbled the following list:

      Journalist

      Clothing Store Owner

      Music Video Dancer

      Ambassador to France

      A good list, excellent really. These were the jobs that I’d always thought so glamorous and cool. I could almost see myself as a political journalist, a pen tucked behind one ear, the president at the podium, pointing to me and saying, “Kelly,” because of course I’d know the president. The problem was that in reality I had no writing skills to speak of and it probably took twenty years of hard-core newspaper journalism to get on the White House beat.

      All the other possible careers I’d listed had impediments, too. I’d love to have my own clothing store, to be able to change outfits in the middle of the day just because I could, but I knew that owning a store was a massive amount of hard work. And as much as I’d been interested in the retail stocks and my own shopping, I really couldn’t envision myself standing in the same shop day after day.

      As for the music video career, well, I couldn’t imagine what would be more fun than wearing a don’t-fuck-with-me face and shaking my thing behind J. Lo or whoever, but I could dance about as well as I could remember the last five months. Ditto for the ambassador to France gig. I couldn’t speak French.

      I crossed out the list and tore the paper off, giving myself a fresh sheet. I would concentrate on the things that I could do, the activities that truly gave me pleasure, whether or not they could lead to a career.

      The thing that came immediately out of the pen was “Photography.” Ever since my stepfather, Danny, had given me that Nikon, a gift I later heard my mother say was “probably hot,” I’d loved taking pictures. As a kid, it was something to do, something to play around with, a way to let myself be part of a crowd while still hiding behind the safety of a lens. As I got older, I realized that I was a natural at it. I could study the light on a sidewalk and realize how it would appear as a pattern in a black-and-white photo, and I knew how to take portraits from different ranges and angles to make the subject appear more studious or glamorous or thoughtful. Ben had even given me classes at a local university as a gift, and for the last few years I’d been taking them weekly. Was I still taking those classes?

      I made a note to follow up on this issue, then wrote, “Shopping.” Definitely one of my great loves, something I’d already made into a career of sorts, but I wasn’t a retail analyst anymore, and I’d already done enough shopping on Saturday. I could probably get an analyst job at another investment firm—I knew enough people in the business; I could work my way up again—and eventually I’d be a partner somewhere else, just like Ben. Yet, even as I thought this, the realization came to me that I didn’t have to work right now, and that knowledge took away all my drive to be in the market again. Maybe I’d never had the drive, or I’d only been driven by money.

      What else? I lowered my pen and scribbled, “Walking.” I wasn’t much of a runner. I hated the way my breath came ragged and hard when I tried jogging, but I loved to walk. Again, I couldn’t imagine why I had holed myself up in my apartment during an entire summer in Chicago, a city that was made for walking along the lake and through the zoo and down the Mag Mile. That’s what I would do today, I decided. I’d take a huge walk.

      But first I wanted to finish my list. What else, what else? It came to me, the answer, but I had a hard time putting it on paper. Finally, I wrote in small letters, so fine that you could barely read them—“Family.” My mom had given me the best life she could muster, but it was one filled with random men, alternating cities and a series of small apartments. For as long as I could remember, I’d been jealous of the typical family—the husband and wife in the country with the 2.5 kids—and I’d sworn I’d get that for myself someday. And so I’d always been concerned about the ticking of my so-called biological clock (although to be truthful I couldn’t hear a peep), pointing out to Ben time and again that if we were going to get married and have kids, we had to do it soon—a belief that led, in part, to the ultimatum I’d given him. But now I didn’t really have any family at all. Dee was gone in an instant, in a tangle of metal and rubber on the Dan Ryan Expressway, and Ben was gone now, too. And the children I was supposed to have one day? Far, far away.

      My mom was still around, of course, but she and I had been family in name only since Dee had died. We’d handled Dee’s death differently, to say the least. Me, well, I had my tantrums, my not-so-occasional flashes of anger when I tossed picture frames and broke dishes. Ben, after quietly watching me shatter more than half of my Pottery Barn bowls, had bought me a big brown candle and taken me into the bathroom one day.

      “Throw it,” he had said, opening the shower curtain and pointing to the wall inside the tub.

      “What?” I looked from the candle to Ben and back again, irritated at this cryptic directive.

      “Look.” He took the candle from my hand, hurling it at the wall. It bounced off, a mere dent in the brown wax. “See? You can throw it and smash it. Do whatever you want, but it won’t break.”

      “I want it to break.”

      “No, you don’t.” He kissed the top of my head. “You just want the feeling.”

      He was right. I turned to that candle often. I threw it against the bathtub wall over and over until the wall was splotched brown and the candle beaten into a misshapen lump. And one day I put the candle away, tucked it far under the sink, just in case. But I hadn’t needed it anymore.

      My mom, on the other hand, broke nothing, smashed nothing. She’d seemed to shut down after the accident. She didn’t want to talk about it, she said. She wanted to leave Chicago and forget. And so off to L.A. she went, only one month after the funeral, and without Dee’s death to talk about, all our conversations felt like disingenuous, twenty-first-century versions of the “Emperor’s New Clothes.” They were five-minute chats we both looked forward to ending. I had no idea when I’d last spoken to her.

      I looked down at my watch. Right now, Sylvie Custer was probably at her desk on the set of The Biz, an entertainment “news” show that reported on the minutiae of celebrity activity—“Tom Cruise considers sideburns! Tonight on The Biz!”

      I called information to get the general number, and the receptionist routed me through to my mom’s desk. She answered with a crisp, “Sylvie Custer.”

      “Mom, it’s me.”

      A little stretch of silence followed, and I knew what had happened. She’d been taken by surprise, and she’d thought for a moment it was Dee.

      “Kelly,” I said in a softer voice.

      “Hi, honey. How are you?” Her words were mothering, but her tone slightly formal. It was the way we talked to each other now.

      “I’m okay.