Every Last One by Anna Quindlen

and enough life insurance to throw a dignified funeral and pay off a five-year-old car. But she still somehow believed she needed to hitch her grief to someone else’s tragedy.
    I have no excuse for my own tears. In the way of women my age, I increasingly count my blessings aloud, as though if other people acknowledge them they’ll be enough: three wonderful children, a long and happy marriage, good home, pleasurable work. And if below the surface I sense that one child is poised to flee and another is miserable, that my husband and I trade public pleasantries and private minutiae, that my work depends on the labor of men who think I’m cheating them—none of that is to be dwelled on. Besides, none of that has anything to do with my tears. If I were pressed, I would have to say that they are the symptom of some great loneliness, as free-floating and untethered to everyday life as a tornado is to the usual weather. It whirls through, ripping and tearing, and then I’m in the parking lot of the supermarket,wiping my eyes, replacing my sunglasses, buying fish and greens for that night’s dinner. If anyone asks how things are, I say what we all say: fine, good, great, terrific, wonderful.
    Even among women, we don’t speak of this. Only once did I catch Nancy, sitting on her patio with a glass of wine as the first leaves did a whirligig from the elm shadowing the yard. Fred had just left for college, and Sarah was at swim practice. I said, “Oh, Nance, Thanksgiving will be here before you know it.” But when she turned her face to me her eyes were blank, as though she couldn’t understand what I had just said. The next day when we drove to a brunch together she said, tartly, “At least you didn’t ask if I was having my period. When I was a teenager, I thought women were only allowed to cry every twenty-eight days.”
    How foolish we are sometimes. When we were first together, I once said to Glen, my hand on his thigh in that way that doesn’t survive marriage, “Do you ever just cry for no reason?” We were so alike, so compatible. Everyone said so.
    “I don’t think so,” he said, his face creased with thought. “I can’t remember ever doing that.” Now I wouldn’t think twice about that response. Now I wouldn’t even ask.
    “How was your day?” I ask.
    “Fine,” Glen says. “Did you have someone take a look at the roof?”
    “They’re coming tomorrow,” I say. “Do you want some wine before dinner?”
    “I think I’ll have a beer,” he replies.
    What if I were to tell him that that night, driving home late from weeding a garden, heading into a line of darkening pink and mauve where the sun had settled below the ridgeline, I had sobbed as though brokenhearted. “Why?” he would have said, and what would I tell him? Could I sit opposite this open-faced man, with his pink cheeks and his warm brown eyes (not clinicallysignificant), and say, “Loneliness?” Worse still, what if he said that he had done the same, felt the same? Then where would we all be?
    “There’s a six-pack in the fridge,” I say, taking dill from the crisper drawer.

On and off during July, we’ve gotten hang-up calls in the evening. “Hello,” I say, and then, louder, with a sharp edge of anger, “Hello?” There are three in quick succession one night in late July. Glen gets the third as we are undressing for bed and says, “Next time we call the police.” The fourth call comes just after eleven and wakes us both. “What?” Glen says like an expletive, sitting up. The phone is on my side of the bed.
    “Mom, don’t freak out,” Max says in a shaky voice, and I hear noise in the background and make out the symphonic blare of a hospital, a sound still familiar from Glen’s residency.
    “I’m so sorry he got you on the phone before I did,” says the camp director, who calls as Glen and I are deciding which of us will make the long drive.
    Max has fallen from a tree. His arm is broken. The X-rays look bad.