The Time of Her Life by Robb Forman Dew

her in the same way she had
     just shoved him away. He didn’t push her; he only placed a hand lightly over each of her breasts for a moment, long enough
     so that she felt the warmth through her blouse. Then he dropped his hands to his sides and moved away. Claudia stood in the
     doorway of the closet alert and tingling with the sensation of having been passed over by the ghost of a gesture, and she
     shuddered involuntarily from head to toe out of sheer yearning.
    Later that same day Avery was wrestling one of the twin-bed mattresses from the guest room down the spiral staircase just
     as she was coming up the steps. They stopped, both of them embarrassed; a mattress is a final thing. Avery was taking it into
     the garage, where he was gathering his belongings until he could leave. All at once he sat down on the steps, clasping the
     cumbersome mattress, and began to weep without a sound. She sat down beside him.
    “I don’t know how you expected this to be,” she said after a moment.
    “Shit!” Avery said. “Fucking shit! It’s not all my fault, you know.” And he paused, shaking his head in a loose, downward
     motion as though he were trying to jolt into his mind the words that would be what he meant. “It’s just not all my fault!
     We really aren’t good for each other. We aren’t any help to each other. It isn’t all because I drink!”
    Claudia looked at the mattress and wondered if Avery would rent a U-Haul. She had never thought that this had anything to
     do with the fact that he drank. She knew that however they were together was really beside the point. Being good for each
     other or not being good for each other—in their case those things were incidental. She was thinking of a maxim she had had
     to memorize in her seventh-grade science class. Mrs. Greenfield had made them learn this fact: Adhesion and cohesion are the
     two molecular forces of the earth. Without adhesion and cohesion everything would fly out into space.
    This was a principle of the natural world that Claudia had never doubted for a minute, and it had never crossed her mind that
     within that principle lay choice. The two of them were a unit, coherent each unto himself, and adherent one to the other.
     The universe yawned implacably infinite now that one particle of that entity was breaking the bond. It defied her imagination
     to picture what would become of them. She thought they might be lost forever, that they might, indeed, just float out into
     space.

3

    On that Saturday afternoon before the ice and while the exterminator was still roaming around her house, Jane phoned Diana
     Tunbridge to tell her that she was coming over after all. They arranged to meet halfway across the meadow so that they could
     walk back together to Diana’s. By the time she collected her things and packed her backpack she was overtaken once again by
     that familiar dolefulness that assailed her whenever she deserted her mother and father. It worried her to leave them to their
     own devices even when she was angry at them. They were still sitting quietly in the living room when she came downstairs,
     and she stopped in the doorway to say good-bye, but both Avery and Claudia were abstracted, and her mother was a little irritable.
    “All right, then, Janie. You are going?” Claudia raised her hand in a listless dismissal. “We’ll see you tomorrow. Have a
     nice time.” This was not a wish for Jane, or encouragement. It was what her mother said by rote while her mind was working
     on something else entirely, and as always, when Jane stepped outside her doorway, she was swept through and through with apeculiar kind of loneliness. She suffered a paring away and sparseness at the very core of herself that left her unhappily
     disburdened.
    She set out through the meadow, and as she wound down the path through the grass, she saw Diana already waiting under the
     cluster of trees where they always met. Without considering it Jane slowed her approach