Winter Moon

usual hour-long evening commute stretching into a two-and-a-half-hour ordeal.
        There was, after all, a bright side to being unemployed. She just hadn't been looking hard enough for it. No doubt, if she put her mind to it, she'd think of a long list of other benefits. Like not having to buy any new clothes for work. Look how much she had saved right there. Didn't have to worry about the stability of the bank in which they had their savings account, either, because at the rate they were going, they wouldn't have a savings account in a few months, not on just Jack's salary, since the city's latest financial crisis had required him to take a pay cut. Taxes had gone up again too, both state and federal, so she was saving all the money that the government would have taken and squandered in her name if she'd been on someone's payroll. Gosh, when you really thought about it, being laid off after ten years at IBM wasn't a tragedy, not even a crisis, but a virtual festival of life-enhancing change.
        "Give it a rest, Heather," she warned herself, closing up the carton of sherbet and returning it to the freezer.
        Jack, ever the grinning optimist, said nothing could be gained by dwelling on bad news, and he was right, of course. His upbeat nature, genial personality, and resilient heart had made it possible for him to endure a nightmarish childhood and adolescence that would have broken many people..More recently, his philosophy had served him well as he'd struggled through the worst year of his career with the Department. After almost a decade together on the streets, he and Tommy Fernandez had been as close as brothers. Tommy had been dead more than eleven months now, but at least one night a week Jack woke from vivid dreams in which his partner and friend was dying again. He always slipped from bed and went to the kitchen for a post-midnight beer or to the living room just to sit alone in the darkness awhile, unaware that Heather had been awakened by the soft cries that escaped him in his sleep. On other nights, months ago, she had learned that she could neither do nor say anything to help him, he needed to be by himself. After he left the room, she often reached out beneath the covers to put her hand on the sheets, which were still warm with his body heat and damp with the perspiration wrung out of him by anguish.
        In spite of everything, Jack remained a walking advertisement for the power of positive thinking. Heather was determined to match his cheerful disposition and his capacity for hope.
        At the sink, she rinsed the residue of sherbet off the scoop.
        Her own mother, Sally, was a world-class whiner who viewed every piece of bad news as a personal catastrophe, even if the event that disturbed her had occurred at the farthest end of the earth and had involved only total strangers. Political unrest in the Philippines could set Sally off on a despairing monologue about the higher prices she believed she would be forced to pay for sugar and for everything containing sugar if the Philippine cane crop was destroyed in a bloody civil war. A hangnail was as troublesome to her as a broken arm to an ordinary person, a headache invariably signaled an impending stroke, and a minor ulcer in the mouth was a sure sign of terminal cancer. The woman thrived on bad news and gloom.
        Eleven years ago, when Heather was twenty, she'd been delighted to cease being a Beckerman and to become a McGarvey-unlike some friends, in that era of burgeoning feminism, who had continued to use their maiden names after marriage or resorted to hyphenated surnames. She wasn't the first child in history who became determined to be nothing whatsoever like her parents, but she liked to think she was extraordinarily diligent about ridding herself of parental traits.
        As she got a spoon out of a drawer, picked up the bowl full of sherbet, and went into the living room, Heather realized another upside to being unemployed was that she didn't have to miss work to care for Toby when he was home sick from school or hire a sitter to look after him. She could be right there where he needed her and suffer none of the guilt of a working mom.
        Of course, their health insurance had covered only eighty percent of the cost of the visit to the doctor's office on Monday morning, and the twenty-percent copayment had caught her attention as never before. It had seemed huge. But that was Beckerman thinking, not