Bird in Hand by Christina Baker Kline

the Junior League sponsored every spring; she organized the fall harvest bazaar at Noah’s preschool. She hired people to clean the house twice a month, to tend the yard, clear the gutters, paint the sunroom. She took the kids to school, Charlie’s shirts to the dry cleaner, took care of all the myriad details that gave her life, in some vague, intangible way, direction and meaning. In her former life, she had seen herself as one small part of a large and complex organism. There was freedom in that view. She was not responsible for, or to, anyone. Now she was at the center of a complicated universe of her own; she kept the planets spinning.
    But sometimes a small piece of her rebelled against the way her life had evolved. She wondered if maybe she should have tried harder to work out a balance. She knew women who did, who stayed at the magazine and had full-time help and lived in two-bedroom apartments in the city. Sometimes she envied their choices and their freedom, their ability to slide in and out of identities, to be different people at different times of the day. But she hadn’t wanted that life, the stress and conflict of it. She didn’t want the feeling of being yanked in several directions at once. Sometimes she wished she could lead two lives at the same time, or perhaps consecutively—one with children and one without, one in the city and one in the suburbs, one married to Charlie and one … Alison pulled up short. No—Charlie wasn’t part of the dilemma. She would want to be married to him, wouldn’t she, no matter what?
    They arrived home in the yellow-gray light of early morning. Stepping out of the car onto the familiar driveway felt strange and wrong, the way it feels, Alison thought, when you know you are dreaming and imagine that you could wake yourself at any time. Her head was clear, now, and she had a faint ache behind her eyes. She hadn’t really drunk enough to be hungover. The officer they’d spoken with at the station said that from what he understood about the accident, Alison didn’t appear to have been at fault. “We don’t normally charge people for not getting out of the way quick enough,” he’d said, looking down at the report and stroking his black mustache. “If that is, in fact, what happened. We’ll have to wait for the full report to find out.”
    As Charlie and Alison reached the back door, Robin pushed it open. “I heard you drive up,” she said, ushering them inside. She gave Alison a quick, gingerly hug and exclaimed over the bandage on her wrist.
    “It’s nothing,” Alison said. “It’ll be fine in a few days.”
    “Well, thank goodness. I’m sure it could’ve been a lot worse.”
    The compassion in Robin’s voice made tears spring to Alison’s eyes. She bit her lip and turned away.
    “It’s been a long night. We need to get this girl to bed,” Charlie said in what struck Alison as an actor-y voice. “We appreciate your coming over, Robin.”
    “Of course. Anytime,” she said as she turned the door handle, stepped outside. “What are neighbors for?”
    The kitchen was gloomy and shadowed, but they didn’t turn on any lights. A hazy glow from the motion-sensor floodlight in the backyard washed over the countertops. On the fridge the day before, Alison had posted a drawing of Annie’s with a teacher’s prompt—“I am happy when”—above Annie’s response: “Mommy and Daddy are hugging me.” In the drawing Annie was a blond-ringleted smiley face wearing a triangular pink dress, with two jellyfishlike giants looming over her, misshapen red hearts rising from their skulls. Noah was out of the picture.
    As Alison gazed blankly at the drawing, Charlie came up behind her. “She wanted me to sing lullabies tonight,” he said. “ ‘Bye Baby Bunting’ and ‘Mockingbird.’ I couldn’t remember all the words, but she knew every one of them.”
    “It’s funny that she wanted baby songs.”
    “She was missing Mommy.”
    “Did she say