Wish Upon a Star by Mindy Klasky

Something different.”
    “Is that what this is all about? You wanted a change?” I recognized his Lawyer Voice. He was questioning me as if I were on some cosmic witness stand.
    I forced my tone to stay even. “Sam, I wasn’t looking for a change.”
    Just the opposite, I thought. I’d tried to settle into something permanent. Something inescapable. Something I was increasingly glad had never come to pass.
    Sam glanced around the dining room, taking in the mismatched tables with their eclectic place settings. I saw his gaze linger on the woman at the table by the kitchen, on her collection of bags. I could calculate the precise instant when he figured out that she was homeless. He was quicker at leaping to the truth than I had been. He sounded incredulous as he said, “It looks like you found one, though, didn’t you? But I can’t begin to figure out why you’d want it.”
    And that was it. I was completely done with Sam.
    As much as it pained me to admit it, Amy was right. At least where Sam was concerned. Maybe where my entire love life was concerned. I had changed myself to be with him. I had adopted his ideas of what was right, what was good. I had fallen into life on the Upper East Side like it was something that I had chosen, something that I preferred.
    But I wasn’t an Upper East Side kind of girl. At least, not the type that Sam wanted me to be.
    Sitting there, in the middle of Garden Variety Café, I could hardly remember the first moment that I’d thought I was pregnant, the first instant that I’d started to dream about my so-called “happy ever after” with Sam. Had I really thought that I’d find complete fulfillment doing our laundry? Cooking our dinner while he advanced his career? Giving up my career in the theater to be his wife?
    And then, when Sam had called me that afternoon, just before my audition, I had actually started to slip back into those old ways of thinking. I had slid into habits so well-worn I didn’t even need to think about them. I had actually worried about being rude to him, about hanging up on him—when he had refused to take my calls for almost a week. Declined to phone me back, even after I had told him that the immediate threat was past.
    Amy was right. I needed the Master Plan—more than I’d ever thought possible. I needed to figure out why it was so easy for me to cave in, to shape myself to what a guy wanted me to be.
    Stunned at the truth I was seeing for the first time, I sat back in my chair. “Look,” I said. “This obviously isn’t working.” I waved my hand between us, futilely trying to encompass two years of a relationship gone bad. “ We aren’t working. We probably haven’t been for a long time, but we’ve both been too busy, too wrapped up in our careers, to notice.”
    “Careers?” He sounded absolutely incredulous. Not snide. Not nasty.
    Just completely, one hundred percent certain that I could never achieve my dreams.
    I wanted to tell him about the audition I’d had that afternoon. I wanted to tell him about Menagerie! About Laura Wingfield. I wanted to tell him that I was going to land the role of a lifetime.
    But why bother? Sam had already decided that I could never succeed. He wouldn’t—he couldn’t —understand what the theater meant to me. Sam had never understood anything at all about me.
    Now that I thought about it, though, that was only fair. I’d never understood him, either. I’d thought that he was a stand-up guy, the proverbial diamond in the rough. I’d figured that he’d finish playing someday soon, that he’d stop being a frat boy, that he’d be ready to man up sometime this century. I wished that I could invent a compatibility test, something as easy to use as a store-bought pregnancy test. Something to determine whether a couple had what it took to succeed in the long run—before they made the commitment to waste months on each other.
    I sighed and said, “Let’s just skip the rest, okay? Let’s pretend