Creatures of Habit by Jill McCorkle

is my very favorite time of the year.
    W HEN MY SON and I stood in front of the model of Lucy, it was as if the world stopped for just a second, just long enough for us to take note of how far we had come and how far we had to go. He waited until his classmates ran off in hysterical laughter and then—could he have sensed my great respect for this ancient little hominid?—took my hand and whispered, “I bet she was real pretty for her time.” Myheart leapt forward a couple of millennia. This boy, this future man, was evolution in action. I tell this story and the women all smile; they relax in a way that they haven’t all night long. It begins a whole ring of conversation around topics of love and warmth, desire and longing. I am easily drawn into the circle but a part of me is still thinking about bare breasts and day-old coffee, empty bank accounts and biopsies, neglected children and scar tissue. I am thinking of Lucy as she limped her way to the water’s edge seeking rest; I am thinking of her as she lay there millions of years ago staring out at this world for the very last time.

Cats
    A BBOTT IS OUT there again and when Anne hears his feeble attempts with his key at a lock long changed, she freezes, holds her breath, hopes that this time something will occur to him, some glimpse of something will snap him back into present time and his life with the woman he left her for one April afternoon twelve years ago. The kitchen was blue then, Wedgwood blue, the place mats were straw, a wedding present from a friend in her college dorm, someone she hasn’t seen since the day she married Abbott and everyone threw rice and blew kisses. As he told her the news “I’m leaving,” she thought of the friend who’d given her the mats all those years ago, and about how she had no idea where shewas living or what she was doing. How we let people slip from present to past, rarely looking back.
    â€œAnne,” he said. “Did you hear what I just said?”
    She remembers nodding as he told her what she had been waiting to hear. There was someone else. Though, he added, the someone was not, of course, the reason he was leaving. Their marriage would be ending even if there weren’t another woman. She wanted to ask a simple
then why?
but couldn’t get the words up and over her tongue. Their sons had been at school and the noon sun streamed through the very window that had made her want to buy the house to begin with, a big bay window—big enough for hanging plants —casting a warm patch of light in the center of the room. The boys were eight and ten then, and when they got home that day, they found her sitting in the kitchen, a pile of unraveled straw on the table in front of her. They told her she looked just like the girl in “Rumpelstiltskin” and then they made awful faces and begged her to guess their names. She missed their big fat cat, who used to curl up in the sunshine and sleep through the day. She missed the ease with which she could pacify the boys when they were babies, how she had once had the power to make everything in their lives okay.
    N OW THE BOYS are twenty and twenty-two, both in college, both with girlfriends. Now the divorced CEO of the hospital where she works as a physical therapist occasionally shares her bed. He would move in if she invited him. He would marry her in a second if she gave him the go-ahead, and her friends all issue warnings that she better not keep him waiting too long, that he is bound to give up one of these days and find another house in which to take up residence. Everyone thinks she is holding out so that Abbott has to keep sending money. The new wife tells anyone who will listen how Anne is intentionally bleeding them dry. That’s not true. Sometimes she isn’t sure what is true.
    T HOUGH SHE LIVES on in the same house, she sleeps in a different room, an addition she worked and saved to build after Abbott had