The Half Life by Jennifer Weiner Page B

dismayingly flabby underneath her clothes, supported them.
    â€œWhere you heading?” the man asked.
    My life is over
, Piper thought dimly. But of course she couldn’t say that. That was the kind of talk that got you shipped to what her family inevitably called the Bin—as in, Bubbe’s in the Bin again. Dad’s spending spring break in the Bin. Mental illness ran through her family like the veins of mold in blue cheese. Maybe that was why Tosh had gotten cold feet. Maybe that was why he’d said . . .
    The man was staring at her expectantly. “Paris,” she said, surprised at how normal she sounded.
    â€œAh.” The man’s face softened, and his eyes took on a nostalgic shimmer. Piper could imagine the airport, with its sterile beige walls and thrum of noise, staticky PA announcements, the sound of a thousand wheels moving across miles of tiled floor, dissolving, as he imagined . . . what? The Louvre, the Eiffel Tower, some romantic bistro, a stroll through the Jardins de Luxembourg or along the Seine, arm in arm with his beloved? “Paris in the springtime.”
    Piper felt the need to clarify. “I’m working.”
    â€œOh, yeah?” he asked. “What do you do?”
    â€œConsulting.” Nobody knew what that meant. Tosh had told her that repeatedly after she’d gotten the offer. “Pipe, nobody knows what that means.” Once she’d taken the job (and really, with the money they’d offered, there was no way she could have
not
taken it), they’d gone away for a long weekend in the Bahamas, funded by her signing bonus. She’d spent one afternoon on the beach trying to explain the work that would fill her days, but Tosh just kept saying, “So you’re going to fire people,” until Piper was forced to concede that it was so. In reality, during the ten years she’d worked for Brodeur Williams, she’d never actually fired anyone herself. She went in; she observed. She sat in on meetings, listening and taking notes, fading into the background, and then she delivered a report to the managers who’d hired her as to how the company could best streamline its operations. She never stayed for the actual firing. That wasn’t in her contract.
    â€œPoor you.” Finally the man seemed to see her face, its pallor, her sorrow. He opened his mouth to say something else, but the line jerked forward again and split into six separate lines in front of six separate metal detectors, and her inquisitor was gone. Piper handed over her ticket and passport for a woman in a uniform to inspect.
    â€œThis way, please. This way,” droned the security guards. Piper ended up behind a young mom pushing a baby in a stroller. A diaper bag hung from the handlebars, and the woman was fumbling with her purse and a bottle half filled with what Piper recognized as breast milk.
    â€œCan I give you a hand?” Piper asked.
    â€œOh, no, I’m good,” said the woman, who seemed cut from a more competent cloth than Piper. She lifted the baby into her arms and plopped the car seat on the belt, along with the diaper bag and her purse. She tried to fold the stroller one-handed, with the baby balanced on her hip, before giving up and looking at Piper. “Actually, if you wouldn’t mind . . .”
    Piper figured she needed help folding the stroller, and was surprised when the woman handed her the baby. “Hi, honey,” Piper said, jiggling the warm weight of the baby in her arms, marveling at how fast it came back—the curve of a bottom in the crook of her arm, the jiggle. With Nola she’d felt all thumbs and left feet, flipping through the stack of baby books at her bedside, trying to decipher every cry and coo and whimper. If she could do it again . . . but she caught that thought in the steel jaws at her brain’s perimeter. She nipped it with her mental gardening shears, sending the bud tumbling toward the