ELEVEN

6 a.m.

Katriina wakes up and she is alone.

The room is dark, and she can hear the ticking of her watch, a metronome that she unconsciously has timed her breath to match. She rolls onto her back and stares at the ceiling. Normally it would be starting to get light by now, but this morning is grey and dark, and she can hear rain pelting against the bedroom window. No one has turned on the air conditioner, and she can feel matted, sweaty strands of hair sticking to the back of her neck, the sheets damp as she frees one leg from her nest and kicks it up over the top. She feels oddly buoyant without Shawn’s weight beside her, drawing the mattress down.

Shawn’s side of the bed is still neatly made, in contrast to its usual chaotic mess – pillows askew, fitted sheet coming undone at the corner, duvet kicked down to the foot of the bed. He didn’t come home last night. She lets the thought roll around in her head for a few minutes, unencumbered by meaning. Is he having an affair? But she casts the thought aside – he would never give her the satisfaction. Maybe he spent the night at Victor Street, or at the restaurant, or at the hospital. All of those places, apparently, are preferable to coming home and spending the night with his wife.

Katriina wonders if she can stay in bed forever, if she could be one of those people who has a nervous breakdown. As if on cue, she hears Petey’s footsteps padding down the hallway towards the bathroom. She knows it is Petey – he is the early riser, the first one up in the morning, happily munching on cereal in front of the television before his brother climbs out of bed a few hours later, grumpy and bedraggled. Katriina’s mother claims this is because Petey was born in the morning and Tommy was born in the evening, but really it’s just the only time of day Petey can get any peace from his older brother. Katriina understands this – it is why, most mornings, she is awake before Shawn. Of course, now that he is gone, she wishes he were here, that they could linger in bed together for one more minute, one more hour, one more morning; that she could feel his presence, boisterous and all-encompassing even in sleep, his breath filling the room with each exhale, depleting it with each inhale. She hated that when he was here. She would like that back now.

She sits up abruptly, swings her feet onto the floor. She’s acting like an idiot. They had a stupid fight, that’s all. He has only been gone one night, just one night, blowing off steam. It’s not like their marriage is over. It’s not like he’s never coming back. Besides, she does not have the luxury of being able to have a nervous breakdown. She has children to care for and houses to sell, she has month-end and a mother-in-law in the hospital and a body to re-prime for pregnancy. She has things to do. She doesn’t have time to be depressed.

8 a.m.

“I want Froot Loops,” says Tommy.

“You can’t have Froot Loops today, bud, we’re all out. Have Cheerios.”

“Ugh. I hate Cheerios. They’re like fake Froot Loops.”

“Like the anti–Froot Loop!” Petey chimes in.

“Like evil twin Froot Loops!”

“Like ghost Froot Loops!”

“Like zombie Froot Loops!”

“You like zombies, bud.”

“Yeah, but not for breakfast. Come on.”

“Yeah, Mom, come on.”

The table is littered with breakfast detritus and her kids are still in pyjamas. Katriina pours herself a second cup of coffee – she usually allows herself only one cup at home, but she has made a whole pot out of habit because Shawn drinks coffee like it’s the end of the world, and now she feels bad about letting it go to waste. Her plan had been to hit the gym before going into the office, but Tommy and Petey had derailed that by insisting on finishing the stupid cartoon they were watching, and even though Katriina had been excited to get an early start on the day, she isn’t going to be that mother who won’t let her sons watch cartoons on Sunday morning. Now they are dragging their heels at breakfast, and seemingly making a new mess as quickly as she can clean up the last one.

“Well, maybe your grandma and grandpa have Froot Loops,” she says, even though she knows that her parents will have nothing in the way of cereal except All-Bran. She would rather leave Tommy and Petey almost anywhere other than with her parents, who have never really known what to do with children, not even when Hanna and Katriina were young. But Katriina feels like she has blown much of the goodwill she had stored with Hanna, and she doesn’t want to go to Victor Street for fear of running into Shawn.

“Can you pack me a lunch for Grandma and Grandpa’s?” Tommy asks. “I don’t want to eat their weird shit.”

“Tommy!” Katriina says.

“Weird stuff,” he says, blushing. “I don’t want to eat their weird stuff.”

“I don’t want to eat their weird shit either,” Petey says. Tommy laughs, rocking back in his chair, and then he is falling backwards, holding on to the tablecloth to try to pull himself back up, and before Katriina can even move, he is lying on the floor with the entire contents of the breakfast table on top of him, silverware clanging to the ground, glasses shattering, the sugar bowl spraying everywhere, Cheerios floating by on rivulets of milk like life rafts, converging with little streams of orange juice to make one big curdling puddle. Petey laughs, but Tommy starts to cry. Katriina leans her head against the cupboard and closes her eyes.

10 a.m.

Once the boys are dressed and their backpacks filled with granola bars and fruit and every Nintendo DS game they own, Katriina herds them out the door. The floor is now spotless, although everything from broken glasses and intact plates to the butter dish and the tablecloth has been stuffed into a garbage bag and left in the middle of the kitchen. Tommy has a cut on the back of his shin from the smashed sugar bowl that he won’t stop complaining about, even though Katriina has cleaned it and applied Polysporin and covered it with a Band-Aid that has robots all over it. He probably should have stitches, but Katriina isn’t going to be that mother who takes her kid to emerg the second they get a hangnail.

At her parents’ house, her mother tries to make her sit down at the kitchen table and have a coffee. “I’m running late, Mom,” she says, dropping the boys’ backpacks on the floor in the hall.

“Katriina, honey, just relax for a moment,” her mother says. “You look like you haven’t slept in a week.” Her mother is, as usual, dressed in an oversized wool sweater and thick wool tights even though it is the middle of summer. Inside the house, the air conditioner is cranked to walk-in-freezer temperatures. Katriina feels like she is trapped in the frozen food aisle at the grocery store, but Tommy and Petey don’t seem to notice. They run through the house in search of their ukki, who they know will pick them up and shout at them and wrestle them to the ground – which, as Katriina understands it, is really the main ability that eight- and ten-year-old boys value in a fellow human being. That, and feeding them junk food. Give her children a Happy Meal and they will love you for life.

“I’ll grab something on the way in,” Katriina says. “I’ve got a ton of work to do today.”

Her mother shakes her head. “It’s Sunday, for crying out loud.” Sunday has always been sacrosanct in the Saarinen house, which is why Kahvila has always been closed on Sunday, regardless of the massive amounts of business Shawn has repeatedly told her father they could be doing. “It’s ludicrous to close a pancake house on Sunday,” Shawn had said, and he was right, of course, although Katriina has noticed that over the years he didn’t seem to mind having Sundays off to take the boys fishing, or snowboarding, or mountain biking. Today, she tells her parents that Shawn is playing golf, which is one of the few officially sanctioned Saarinen Sunday events.

“The world doesn’t stop on Sunday just because you do,” Katriina says, more snappishly than she means to, and she instantly regrets her words. “I’m sorry,” she says, digging her fingernails into her palms. Be a better daughter. Be a better daughter.

“It’s okay, honey,” her mother says. “Go sell some houses or something.”

On her way out the door, her phone rings. “I got your text,” Hanna says. “What’s going on?”

Katriina glances back, but her mother has already shut the door – heaven forbid any of the cool air escapes outside. “Shawn didn’t come home last night.”

“Oh.”

There is a long silence on the other end of the line. Katriina gets into her car and turns the key in the ignition. The radio kicks in, playing AC/DC’s “TNT.” She turns the volume down, then waits, her hands on the steering wheel, the phone tucked in between her ear and her shoulder. “Are you still there, Hanna?”

“He’s here.”

“What?”

“Shawn’s here. He’s sleeping on my couch.”

There are a million places where Katriina has imagined Shawn to be, and none of them are at Hanna’s place, asleep on her couch. “What the fuck, Hanna,” she says, banging her head back against the headrest.

“I’m so sorry, hon. He asked me not to call you. I didn’t think you’d be so worried.”

“You didn’t think I’d be worried about my husband not coming home?” Katriina tries to steady her breath. She reaches for her elastic and snaps, hard, before she can say anything more. She tries to recall the times she has seen Hanna and Shawn together, how they acted with one another, whether they touched each other on the elbow, on the shoulder, on the inside of the wrist, all those places along the arm that are safe, those places you can touch and it doesn’t mean anything until it means everything. “Did you sleep with him?”

“Katriina! Of course not.”

Of course not. They are both too good for that. “Sorry,” she says. “I guess I’m just confused.”

“He showed up after the bar closed. He was drunk, and he didn’t want to go home.” There is another pause. “He’s worried about you.”

“Oh he is, is he?”

“Yeah. Hang on.” There is a muffled sound, and Katriina realizes she must be talking to Shawn. She resists the urge to scream, to bite the steering wheel, to slam her hand through the windshield. Instead, she yanks the elastic over and over again.

“Hanna,” she says. “Hanna.” But her sister doesn’t answer, so she hangs up and backs out of the driveway. Her breath is ragged and uneven, and her wrist thrums with pain, but she ignores it all and turns the volume back up as she pulls out into the street, determined to keep this day under control.

10:30 a.m.

There is no one else at the office when Katriina gets in, which is surprising for any Sunday, let alone month-end. In the quiet of the empty room she sits in her cubicle and stares at her blank computer screen for fifteen minutes before she shakes herself into action. Forget about it, she tells herself. It’s a new day, a clean slate. It’s time to get a move on, to get things done, to hit the ground running. She fires up her computer, flips through some paperwork. She feels more productive already. Time to make some coffee.

In the break room Katriina has taken the coffee off the shelf and filled the carafe with water before she realizes that Krista Shepherd is standing in the doorway, watching her.

“Good morning, Katriina. You’re here bright and early!” She checks her watch. “Well, sort of.”

Katriina has the urge to leave the coffee where it is and go back to her desk. Instead she smiles, just as sweetly and naturally as if she were smiling at her children, all the while imagining how satisfying it would feel to punch Krista in the face. The ability to do this is what makes her a good real estate agent. “You betcha,” she says.

Krista holds her hand out in front of her, examining her flawless gel nails. “It’s such a bitch having to come in on Sunday, isn’t it?” she says. “I mean, you could be at home all cuddled up in bed having breakfast with your husband right now, am I right?”

She knows! How could she know? She can’t know. She doesn’t know. “We do what we have to do,” Katriina says. She shoves the basket back into the coffee maker and jabs the On button, then turns around and leans against the counter next to Krista. They smile at each other.

“Yes,” says Krista. “Indeed we do.”

“Indeed we do,” echoes Katriina.

They stand there in silence. Behind them, the coffee maker gurgles and belches, spitting liquid out into the carafe. Katriina can hear movement outside the break room, the office coming to life. So much for her morning of solitude.

“So,” Krista says suddenly, smiling wider. “How’s the Paulsson house?”

Katriina feels a sick kind of churning in her stomach. “Great,” she says. “Just great.”

Krista crosses her legs in front of her, delicately, at the ankles. Katriina looks at those legs and imagines that Krista must do a lot of hot yoga. “I really admire you, you know?” Krista says. “That house must be a nightmare. But you just charged ahead courageously, throwing caution to the wind, and said, ‘I’ll take it,’ dead kid and all.”

Dead kid and all. The room begins to spin. “You know what?” Katriina says. “I think I’ll just come back in a bit for that coffee.” As she bolts from the break room, she can feel Krista’s Cheshire-cat smile beaming out behind her.

11:30 a.m.

Katriina stares at her computer screen. She had gotten as far as opening up the accounting software and bringing up her numbers before paralysis set in. Now, she feels all of her already waning optimism seep out of her slowly, as through a tiny hole in an air mattress. After a while the numbers don’t even make sense – they might as well have been entered into her spreadsheet by a baby mashing her fists on a keyboard. When she senses Paula, her boss, standing in front of her, she forces herself to pull her eyes away from the screen.

“Katriina,” Paula says. “Are you okay? You don’t look so great.” Her brow knits together under a straight-cut fringe of mahogany-coloured bangs. She is wearing a long black skirt and a gauzy printed kimono-type thing that hangs below her knees and falls open in front to reveal several heavy necklaces dangling over her ample chest. Just thinking about it makes Katriina start to sweat.

“I’m fine, just a little tired,” Katriina says, trying to appear like she is fine, just a little tired.

Paula picks up the mug at her desk. “You’re not drinking coffee, are you? That will just make it worse, you know.”

She smiles meekly at Paula. “You think so?” Tell that to ninety-nine percent of Canada.

Paula grabs Katriina’s arm, her wrists jangling with bangles. “Come with me,” she says. “I’ll make you a tea that will fix you right up.”

In Paula’s office, Katriina sits in an armchair upholstered in a dark green velvety material while Paula plugs in her kettle. It’s a chair that encourages false comfort, to make the person sitting in it relaxed enough to buy. Paula may seem like a flake, but Katriina knows that you don’t become as successful in this business as Paula has been by being flaky. Underneath all that earth mother stuff, Paula is shrewd. Not that she doesn’t like Paula – she does – but she would still like to get out of her office as quickly as possible.

“There,” says Paula, placing a thick pottery mug in front of her. “Siberian ginseng tea. It will boost your immune system and make you more mentally alert.”

Katriina takes a sip. It tastes like dirty socks. “Thanks,” she says.

Paula perches on the arm of the couch opposite the armchair and studies Katriina’s face. “You know I’m here for you, right, Katriina?”

“Of course,” says Katriina. “You’ve always been a great friend and mentor.” She takes another sip of the tea. “I’ve just got a lot on my plate right now.”

“Do you want to talk about it?” Paula asks. “Sometimes just being able to verbalize our stress and anxiety can help relieve some of the pain.”

“No, that’s okay.”

With both hands Paula takes the mug from Katriina and sets it on the table, then grasps both of Katriina’s hands in hers. “I heard about your mother-in-law,” she says, her voice barely above a whisper. She closes her eyes. “Something like that…I just can’t even imagine what your family must be going through.”

Katriina’s breath catches in her throat. She hasn’t thought about Kate once since she opened her eyes this morning. Her body starts to tremble, and she can feel the blood racing through her veins, as though they are too close to the surface, about to break through. All she wants to do is rip her hands away from Paula and pull on her elastic. Instead, she bites down hard on the inside of her cheek and seconds later feels the soothing warmth of the blood spilling into her mouth, the metallic, tinny taste coating her tongue. She swallows. “Thank you, Paula,” she says with as much sincerity as she can call up. “It has been difficult.”

“I’ve been meditating on something,” Paula says, letting go of Katriina’s hands. “I think we should transfer the Paulsson house to Krista. It’s the only house on your roster. You need some time off to be with your family.”

“No!” Katriina jumps to her feet. “Paula, you can’t.” Krista Shepherd can’t have that house. Krista Shepherd can’t have Claudia.

Paula stands up and wraps her arms around Katriina, hugging her close. “Oh, Katriina. Always so passionate.” She draws away, holding her by the shoulders and staring into her eyes in what Katriina assumes is meant to be a meaningful way. “This is why your clients love you. Because you will work for them through thick and thin. Because you take care of them. But let me ask you this. Who is taking care of Katriina?”

Katriina jams her tongue into the wound on her cheek, and a fresh pain bursts inside her head. She removes her tongue. “I think I take care of myself just fine.”

“Just let us take the Paulsson house off your hands –”

“I sold the Paulsson house.” The words come out before she can stop them.

“You did?” Paula’s face breaks into a broad smile. “That’s wonderful! Who did you sell it to? Why didn’t you tell me?”

“They, uh, just agreed this morning. I still have to finalize it. It was an anonymous buyer. A developer, I think. Yeah, a developer.”

Paula claps her hands in front of her like a little kid. “Hooray for you!” Her enthusiasm, Katriina realizes, is genuine. The house was probably almost as much of a burden to her as it was to Katriina. She claps her own hands weakly. Paula grabs her by the shoulders and spins her around, pushing her towards the door. “What are you waiting for, go finalize that sucker!”

“Okay,” says Katriina, feeling vaguely like she is going to throw up. She looks back at Paula, who pumps her fist in the air.

Seated again at her cubicle, Katriina puts her head down on her desk and closes her eyes. Beneath her desk, she picks away idly at her elastic, but she doesn’t even really feel like pulling it. She needs something bigger. A bigger punishment. With her head still on her desk, she reaches into her top drawer and pulls out her stapler. Then calmly, as though it is something she does every day, she staples the webbing in between her thumb and index finger, first on her right hand, then on her left. Be a better businesswoman. Then she picks up the phone and calls Fred, her mortgage specialist at the credit union to whom she filters business on a regular basis, and tells him she is going to buy a house.