Laura kept her eye on the clock as she moved around the kitchen, unpacking groceries, starting dinner. Her first husband had been late all the time, and early on with Matt she had arrived at restaurants and been amazed to see him there ahead of her; had even been taken by surprise, still choosing her outfit, when he showed up at her front door at precisely the time he’d said he would. He joked that she had the divorce equivalent of PTSD and needed cognitive restructuring. “Am I Adam?” he would say. “No. So there’s no reason to think I’ll behave like Adam.”It was forty-five minutes now—only forty-five minutes, but still. She looked at the face of her cell phone to make sure she hadn’t missed a call, then tried calling him again for good measure. There would be an explanation: an unavoidable delay combined with a cell phone breakdown. “I’d’ve stopped at a pay phone,” he might say, “but I couldn’t find one. What ever happened to pay phones?”It was a Monday, which meant tonight it was just the two of them and her girls—his kids were with their mother.
