Home Safe by Elizabeth Berg

“I'll understand if you don't want to do it, but would you just think about it? And let me make it easier: if you don't want to do it, you don't even have to call me back. I'll assume that if I don't hear from you by tomorrow night, you're not interested. Okay? I have other writers I can call, I know that Saundra Weller is dying to teach this workshop, but I just really think you'd be perfect for it. I think you'd enjoy it. We set the time to be in the late afternoon, from four until six, and from what I've read about you, you like to work in the early morning.”
    Right. When she was working. When she used to be a writer. But Saundra Weller! Helen can't stand her, with her endless self-promotion and her snotty attitude toward … well, toward Helen, for one thing. They were on a panel together at a book festival, and Saundra made no secret of the fact that she found Helen to be a vastly inferior writer. Oh, the way Saundra walks around with that tight smile! The way she gave Anne Jensen, a writer friend of Helen's whose lyrical prose raises the hair on the back of your neck, a scathingly bad review in The New York Times Book Review —the only bad one she got, incidentally, but so bad it made Anne weep for days. “I'll think about it,” Helen says, more to get off the phone than anything—she wants to call Steve and go.
    “I'm so glad,” Nancy says. “Thank you!”
    Helen hangs up, looks at the clock, decides to call Steve from the car. “What'd I forget now?” she asks, when he comes to the phone. She signals right and heads down Austin Boulevard toward the freeway.
    “Helen,” he says, “we need to talk. I'm wondering if we could get together, maybe this afternoon?”
    “I'm on the way to meet a friend downtown. We're having lunch.” No need to tell Steve about the kiss exhibit. He already finds Helen a little wacky, she knows this.
    “This is very important.”
    “Well, is it …” Some sense of dread begins to blossom in Helen's stomach. “Is it bad?”
    A pause, and then Steve says, “Are you aware of what your balance is at Morgan?”
    Helen gestures to another driver, letting him pull out ahead of her. “I think it's just short of a million, actually.” That was what Dan had told her last time they'd talked about it. They were fantasizing about what they'd do when Dan retired—he was thinking of taking an early retirement in two years. Helen had said she wanted a little one-level house in California with beautiful views and a garden full of flowers with intoxicating scents. He had said that what he would like to do was sail around the world. “You don't know how to sail!” Helen had said, and he'd said, “I've helped crew. I know a little. But that's part of the dream: we have a boat, we learn how to sail, and we go around the world. Wouldn't that be nice? We'd just sail around the world for the rest of our lives, living off our savings.”
    “Oh, no,” Helen had said. “I can't help sail. It's too much like math. Plus there are all those cockamamie terms: ‘starboard’ and ‘port.’ ‘Fore’ and ‘aft.’ ‘Coming about.’ Why can't boat people just speak English? Plus we're too old to learn how to sail.”
    Dan had leaned back in his wicker chair—they were on the deck, in late summer, watching a spectacular sunset—and he'd said, “Helen. In the paper not long ago, there was a story about a woman who learned to sail when she was seventy-nine, because she wanted to learn how before she turned eighty. A guy named Geoffrey Hilton-Barber sailed single-handedly across the Indian Ocean, and he's blind . Not only can you sail; I predict that you will—not help sail, but sail all by yourself. I can see it. Honestly, I see it like a vision, you sailing somewhere you've never been but always wanted to go.”
    “I'd rather have the little house,” Helen had said. “I really would. I want that more than anything, Dan.” She'd told him she wanted a house respectful of nature and of