The Leftovers

“At the beginning I thought he might, but it was just wishful thinking.”
    “What do you mean?”
    “I don’t know. After the first few times, we stopped talking about it. It just kinda dropped off the agenda.”
    “You were okay with that?”
    “Not really.” Kylie tried to smile, but she didn’t look any happier. “I just wasn’t thinking straight. I mean, I know better than to get involved with a married guy. But I did it anyway. What’s that about?”
    Nora assumed the question was rhetorical. In any case, Kylie would have to work it out on her own.
    “I’m curious,” she said. “How did it start?”
    “It just kinda happened.” Kylie shrugged, as if the affair remained a mystery to her. “I mean, we flirted a little in the mornings, you know, when he dropped Erin off. I’d compliment his tie, and he’d tease me about looking tired, ask me what I’d been up to the night before. But lots of the dads—”
    “When did it turn…?”
    Kylie hesitated. “You sure you want to hear this?”
    Nora could hear music wafting out of the cafeteria—“Burning Down the House,” a song she’d always liked—but it sounded watery and remote, like it was emanating from the past, rather than from a room down the hall. She nodded for Kylie to go ahead.
    “Okay.” Kylie looked unhappy, like she knew she was making a mistake. “It was the holiday party. You took the kids home, but Doug stuck around to help with the cleanup. We ended up going out for a drink afterward. We just kinda hit it off.”
    Nora could remember the party—Erin hadn’t napped that day and spent most of the evening in tears—but she couldn’t remember Doug even being there, let alone what time he’d come home, or how he’d acted when he did. All that was gone, irretrievable.
    “You kept it up for a long time. Almost a year.”
    Kylie frowned, as if something was wrong with Nora’s math. “It didn’t feel like that. We hardly ever saw each other. He’d drop by once a week for an hour or two, if I was lucky, and then he’d leave. And I couldn’t complain, right? That was what I’d signed up for.”
    “But you must’ve talked about the future. What was gonna happen. I mean, you couldn’t just go on indefinitely.”
    “I tried, believe me. But he had no patience for relationship talk. He was always like, Not tonight, Kylie. I can’t deal with this right now. ”
    Nora couldn’t help laughing. “Sounds like Doug.”
    “He was such a guy .” Kylie shook her head, smiling fondly at the memory. But then her expression clouded over. “I think I just made him feel like he was cool again, you know? Mr. Dull Corporate Family Man, with a girlfriend like me. Like he was a secret agent.”
    Nora grunted, struck by the plausibility of this theory. Doug had been a bit of a hipster when she’d met him in college—he wrote music reviews for the school paper, cultivated scruffy facial hair, and played ultimate Frisbee—but he’d discarded that version of himself the day he started business school. It happened so suddenly and irrevocably that Nora had spent the whole first semester trying to figure out where the guy she’d been sleeping with had gone. Hey, he told her, if you’re gonna sell out, at least have the guts to admit it. But maybe he missed his old self more than he’d let on.
    “He loved my crappy apartment,” Kylie went on. “I have this studio over on Rankin, behind the hospital? Kind of a dump, but I just got tired of psycho roommates, you know? Anyway, it’s basically one big room, with a foldout futon and a little table with two chairs that I found in the garbage. Totally cluttered. Doug thought it was hilarious. He thought my car was funny, too. It’s like twelve years old.”
    “He could be a little snobby about stuff like that.”
    “He wasn’t mean about it. More just amazed that I could live that way. Like I had a choice, right? I mean, your house is so beautiful, he must have thought that everybody…” Her voice trailed off as she belatedly recognized her mistake.
    “You were in my house?”
    “Just once,” Kylie assured her. “During the spring vacation? You took your kids to your parents’ and Doug stayed home to work?”
    “Oh, God.” That trip had been a minor disaster. She and the kids had gotten stuck in a brutal traffic jam on the Garden State Parkway, and she’d had to pull over so Jeremy could take an emergency dump on the shoulder of the highway. She’d just stood there