lizabeth stood in the middle of her walk-in closet, trying to decide what to wear. It seemed that everything she owned was wrong. A row of ornate belts hung from pegs on one wall.

But now, in what she depressingly referred to as the metabolism-free years, they were useless. Her old belts might wrap around one thigh. As her weight had blossomed, she'd gone from belts to scarves. She had dozens of hand-painted silk scarves, designed to camouflage a bulkier silhouette, but a flowing scarf didn't seem quite right for the passionless set.

An ankle-length forest-green knit dress caught her eye. Without wasting any more time, she grabbed it and got dressed. At her bureau drawer, she chose a hand-hammered pewter and abalone necklace, a relic from her jewelry period.

"There. Done." She didn't look in the mirror again. Instead, she walked downstairs, got her handbag off the kitchen table, and left the house.

At the college, she paused momentarily outside the closed classroom door, then went inside.

The faces were familiar this time, and welcoming. Mina, dressed in another floral polyester housedress, stood talking to Fran, who seemed to be listening intently. Cute little Joey, the waitress from the Pig-in-a-Blanket, was talking animatedly to Sarah. Kim stood back at the coffee table, fiddling with a pack of cigarettes.

At Elizabeth's entrance, Joey smiled and made a beeline across the room.

"I didn't think you'd come back," Joey said, taking a bite of bagel, chewing it like a chipmunk.

Elizabeth was surprised that anyone had thought about her at all. "Why not?"

Joey looked pointedly at Elizabeth's left hand. "Big diamond."

Elizabeth glanced down at her wedding ring--a one-and-a-half-carat solitaire on a wide gold band. She didn't know what to say.

"Most of us were dumped. A few, like me, landed on our heads. On concrete floors. From ten stories." Joey grinned. "Fortunately, I bounce."

"All women bounce," Elizabeth answered, surprising herself. "It's either bounce or splat, isn't it? My husband has worked in about eight cities in the past fifteen years. Believe me, I've done my share of bouncing."

"Wow. Military?"

"No." She didn't want to pinpoint his career. The last thing Elizabeth needed was for everyone to know she was married to Jackson Shore. It always sparked a round of how-lucky-you-are conversation, and that definitely wasn't what she needed from these women. But she had to say something. "He has trouble staying focused on one thing."

Joey giggled. "Well, he's got a dick, doesn't he? They're all that way."

At the front of the room, Sarah clapped her hands together. "Good evening, ladies. It's great to see so many familiar faces."

Joey grabbed Elizabeth's arm and led her to side-by-side chairs, where they sat down.

Sarah was in the middle of her opening remarks when Mina popped to her feet. She was smiling so brightly her face was scrunched up like a dried apple. "I drove here!" Her lower lip, made fuller by pink lipstick, trembled. "I can go anywhere now."

The applause was thunderous.

Elizabeth was surprised by how deeply those few words affected her. I can go anywhere now.

What a feeling that must be. How was it that she'd never imagined such a thing, though she'd been driving for years? Freedom had always been there for her, available every time she started the car. Available to any woman who dared to look up from the preplanned route and wonder, Where would that road take me?

When the applauding died down, the women returned to their seats. This time, because there were no "new" faces, Sarah led the group in a discussion that delved into previously expressed dreams.

Joey was the first to speak. "I took the kids to the dentist yesterday. I just love all that clean space." She sighed. "The dental hygienist just bought a brand-new Volkswagen Bug. Can you believe it? I'd love to drive that car."

"Have you ever thought about becoming a hygienist?" Sarah asked.

"Yeah, right. I barely got through high school. I think my grade point average was a negative number." She tried to smile, then bent down and rifled through the huge diaper bag at her feet. "I did think about someone's dreams this week, though. One of my customers left this on the table last week." She pulled out a paintbrush and handed it to Elizabeth. "Is that, like, karma, or what?"

It was a Big K quality paintbrush, probably from a child's paint-by-number set. A cheap little brush no self-respecting artist would ever use.

So, why did Elizabeth feel like crying?

"Thank you, Joey," she said, taking the brush. When she touched it, her heart did a funny little flop.

"Tell us about your painting," Sarah said.

Elizabeth took a deep breath. "In college, my professors said I had talent. I was accepted into several fine-arts graduate programs."

"Did you go?" Joey asked, her voice hushed with awe.

"No. After the girls were born, there wasn't time. Later, when Jamie started first grade, I tried to go back to my painting, but when I picked up a brush, nothing happened. I just sat there." She looked around at the women's faces. Every one of them understood. Sometimes you missed your chance.

And yet... when she looked down at the paintbrush in her hand, something happened. Nothing major, no Voice of God or anything, but something.

She remembered suddenly how it had felt to paint. It was like flying... soaring.

Suddenly, she couldn't think about anything else.

After the meeting, she parked in her carport and ran for the house. Without bothering to turn on the downstairs lights, she went up to her room. In the back of her closet, she shoved the clothes aside and dropped to her knees.

There it was: a cardboard box filled with old supplies. She pulled it toward her, inhaling the long-forgotten scent of dried paint. On top lay a single sable brush, its fine bristles a glossy chocolate brown. She reached for it, brushed the tender underside of her chin.

Smiling, she got to her feet and walked into the bedroom to the pair of French doors that opened out onto the second-floor balcony. She pressed a finger to the cool glass, staring out at the night-darkened sea.

If there was anywhere she could paint again, it would be here, in the safety of this yard. She closed her eyes, daring for just a moment to imagine a shiny new future.

Jack drove slowly down the twisting once-gravel and now-mud road that led to his house. Although Stormwatch Lane ran for almost a half a mile, there were no other dwellings along the way. For most of its distance, the road was bordered on the west by a sheer cliff. Below it lay the windblown Pacific Ocean.

He pulled into the carport and parked, then grabbed his garment bag and headed for the front door.

A single light fixture cast the porch in orangey light. In the corner, an empty Adirondack chair cast a picket-fence shadow on the plank floor.

Inside, the house smelled of the cinnamony candles Elizabeth burned at Christmas. She always said she was going to save them for the holidays, but she never did. She burned them night after night, until the wicks were blobs of charcoal stuck to the bottom of the jar.

"Elizabeth?"

There was no answer.

The front door opened onto a small entry area. To the left was the living room, to the right, the kitchen. Both rooms were empty. He walked down the middle of the house, past the dining room--Had he told her how good the doors looked?--and headed up to their bedroom.

She stood at the French doors, with her back to him. She touched the windowpane with her finger. Light from the bedside lamp made her look almost ethereal. There was a sad wistfulness in her gaze, one he could see even in the pale lamplight.

"A penny for your thoughts," he said.

She spun around. When she saw him, she laughed. "You scared the shit out of me."

"I caught an earlier flight."

She glanced out to sea again. "That was lucky."

Already he'd lost her attention. But his news would get it back. He started to say something, but her voice stopped him.

"It's such a beautiful night. There are so many colors in the darkness. It makes me want to paint again." She turned to look at him, finally. "I went to this meeting tonight, and--"

"I have a surprise." It flashed through his mind that maybe he should do this differently... maybe give her the good news after a great dinner at L'Auberge. But he couldn't wait. "Remember Warren Mitchell?"

She sighed softly, then said, "The horniest running back in New York? Of course I remember him. He's what... a studio analyst for Fox now?"

"He was. He had a scare with his heart and decided he needed to change his life. When he tried to quit, the guys at Fox offered him a cushy one-hour, once-a-week gig. Sort of a sports talk show."

"God knows we need more men talking about sports."

Jack was taken aback by that. "This will be a whole new kind of show. They've contracted for twenty-six episodes. They'll be filming in the Fox studio in New York, so no more traveling to the games and stuff."

"That's great for Warren."

"And for us."

"Us?"

He grinned. "I'm going to cohost the show."

"What?"

"That's why I really went to New York. To audition."

"You lied to me?"

She made it sound worse than it was. "I didn't want to disappoint you again. But this time I got the job. I wowed the network guys, honey. Think of it, we'll start over. It's almost like being young again."

"Young again? What are you talking about?"

"It'll be great, you'll see. Maybe we'll even hook up with some of the old gang. And we'll only be a few hours from D.C. You'll be able to take the train down to see the girls at school."

"A few hours from D.C.? What are you talking about?"

He winced. This was the tricky part. "We have to move to New York."

"What?"

Guilt reared its ugly head. "I know I promised this would be the last move, but they offered me so much money you wouldn't believe it. I even got a new agent--a real Jerry Maguire type. Everything can be ours now."

"Everything you want, you mean." She was angry; there was no mistaking it. "You don't give two shits about what I want. I've poured my heart and soul into this place."

"It's just a house, Birdie. Four goddamned walls with bad plumbing and windows that leak." He moved toward her. "Does this house mean more to you than I do? You know how long I've dreamed about this."

"What do I dream about, Jack?"

"Huh?"

"Good answer. I'm supposed to put your dreams first always. When is it my turn?"

"How in the hell is anybody supposed to know that you even want a turn, Birdie? You spend your whole life on the sidelines. You want a turn? Then take a chance like the rest of us, step up to the plate, but don't rain all over me because I have the guts to go after what I want."

The color faded from her cheeks, and he knew he'd gone too far. With Birdie, you could rant and rave and scream; what you couldn't do was get too close to the truth.

She took a step back. "I'll be back. I have to think."

"No, damn it, stay here and talk to me. Don't run away." He knew it wouldn't do any good, though. She always walked out in the middle of a fight and came back later, calmed down. She couldn't stand the intensity of her own emotions.

He touched her chin and forced her to look up at him. "Think about this, Birdie. I've spent two years in the middle of nowhere. I've commuted three hours a day so you could have your dream house. All this time, you've known I was dying here. I did that for you." Then he added softly, "I thought you'd be happy for me."

She sighed heavily. "Oh, Jack. Of course you did."

He didn't know what to say to that. In silence, he watched her walk out of their bedroom. He didn't bother following her; he knew there was no point. Instead, he went to the window and waited.

Sure enough, a few moments later, he saw her emerge from the porch. She walked across the darkened yard, toward the prow of their property, where an old, weathered fence ran along the cliff's ragged edge. She stood at the top of the stairs and stared out to sea.

He had no idea what she was thinking. Yet another sign of how far apart they'd drifted.

Finally, she came back into the house. By then, he'd made a fire in the fireplace and put a frozen lasagna into the oven. The house smelled of baking tomatoes and melting cheese.

She hung her down coat on the hall tree in the entry and came into the living room. For an eternity, she stood there, staring at him, her face streaked by dried tears. Very softly, she said, "I suppose we could live in New York again--for a while."

He pulled her into his arms, swinging her around. "I love you, Birdie."

"You'd better."

"It'll be great this time, you'll see. No kids to keep you housebound, and no job that keeps me out of town." He could see that she was skeptical, but also that she wanted to believe it.

"Okay. But I want to rent out this house, not sell it. This isn't a permanent move. I want that agreed upon, or it's no deal."

"Deal."

"Someday we'll come back here. We'll grow old in this house."

"Agreed."

"And we'll live outside of Manhattan. Maybe Westchester County. I'll start calling realtors on Monday. They should be able to find us a place by summer."

"I start work on Monday."

"What?"

"That was the deal. They want the show to air quickly."

"What in the hell were you thinking?" She pulled away from him. "We can't move by Monday."

"They offered me a contract and I signed it, Birdie. With my past, what was I supposed to do--negotiate?"

"You can't find a decent place to live in New York that quickly. Last time it took us six months."

"We can use their corporate apartment until we find our own place. I'll fly back on Sunday. As soon as you get this place closed up, you can come and pick out your dream house. Money's no object this time." He smiled. "Come on, Birdie, don't look so pissed off. This is an adventure."

"Let me make sure I understand this correctly." She was speaking slowly, as though she thought he'd gone brain-dead. "You have accepted a job without consulting me, accepted use of a corporate apartment I've never seen, arranged for us to move across the country, and, as the cherry on top of this sundae, I get to close up the house by myself."

She made it sound so bad. It hadn't seemed that way to him. Hell, they'd done it this way lots of times. "We'll give it a few years. If we don't like it, we can always come back."

She walked toward the window.

He came up behind her, placed his hands on her tensed shoulders, and kissed the back of her neck. "We were happy in New York, remember?"

"No," she said, "I do not remember being happy in New York."

He shouldn't have said that. Bringing up the past was a bad call. "We'll be happy this time."

"Will we?" There was a wistful quality to her voice that matched his own deep longings. A subtle hope that a new location could return an old emotion.

"It's closer to the girls," he reminded her, knowing it was his best argument. "You could take the train down to see them anytime you wanted."

"That's true."

"Trust me, Birdie, it'll be good for us."

"I'm sure you're right," she said at last, not leaning back against him the way she once would have. She stepped aside. "I guess I'll need to get started. There are a million things to do. We'll have to call the kids. I'll call the movers tomorrow...." Stress made the beautiful southern lilt in her voice more pronounced.

"We'll be happy," he said again. "You'll see."

She sighed heavily. "Of course we will."

For the whole weekend, Elizabeth felt like a death-row inmate with a Monday morning execution date.

Jack, on the other hand, was like a kid at Christmas, so excited that sometimes he broke into laughter for no reason at all. This job represented everything he'd ever wanted.

There was no way Elizabeth could raise her hand, clear her throat, and say, I don't want to go.

There was no reason for them not to go. He was right about that. And it was an adventure.

It was simply someone else's adventure; Elizabeth was just along for the ride. A companion fare. Buy one get one free.

On this Sunday night, their last together for several weeks, she found herself edging toward depression. Everywhere she looked, she saw something that mattered to her, something she hated to leave behind. This house meant so much to her, more than she could quite express or understand. The thought of leaving it made her sick to her stomach.

After waking up every morning for two years to a picture-postcard view of the Pacific Ocean, how could she waken, go to her window, and see the building across the street? How could she live without seeing the stars at night, or hearing the roar of the sea on a winter's day? How could she live in a place that was never quiet, where millions of people lived stacked to the sky?

Unfortunately, she had no other option. She was Jack's wife.

On their last night together, she set the table with care, using her best dishes and silverware. For dinner, she served Coquilles Saint-Jacques on the translucent Haviland china that had belonged to her great-grandmother.

As she and Jack sat across the table from each other, it seemed that miles separated them. They were like some sad scene in a foreign film, a tableau of marital regret, people who had come together in love long ago and become this... pale shadows of who they'd once been and paler illustrations of who they wanted to be.

He cocked his head to the left, his fork poised in midair. She knew he was listening to the television in the living room. Howie Long was pitching phones for Radio Shack.

"Maybe someday you'll get to do an idiotic TV commercial, too."

He grinned. "Wouldn't that be great?"

She wanted to smack him. "Yeah, great."

"So, what will you do in New York?"

Nice of you to finally ask. She forced the thought aside and said instead, "I don't know. I would have said gardening, but there isn't a lot of that in the city."

"Maybe you can plant window boxes."

She thought of the garden in her backyard. She'd spent the last eighteen months designing a plan for it. She'd researched exactly what plant went where. Last spring, she'd planted three hundred bulbs. Daffodils, crocuses, hyacinths, lilies. She'd placed each one carefully to maximize seasonal color. "That's a great idea."

After that, they fell silent. When dinner was over, they went into the kitchen and washed the dishes together. Elizabeth rinsed; Jack loaded the dishwasher. It was a routine they'd perfected over the years.

When the counters had been wiped clean, he said, "I'll be right back."

True to his word, he returned momentarily, carrying a big, flat box that was wrapped in iridescent pink paper. He took her hand and led her into the living room. "Come on," he whispered, and she was reminded of the day, all those years ago, when he'd held out his hand and offered her his heart. There's nothing to be afraid of, he'd said then; I'm the one you want.

He grabbed the remote off the coffee table and muted the television.

She tried not to think about this room, her favorite, as she sat down on the sofa. She'd poured her heart and soul into every square inch. Don't think about it.

He knelt in front of her. "I know I threw you a long bomb on this one."

She didn't answer, afraid that if she said much of anything, her anger would show. "Yes," was all she dared.

"I'm sorry."

The apology deflated her, even embarrassed her. She truly wanted to be the kind of woman who welcomed change. At the very least, she wanted to be happy for her husband's success. "I'm sorry, too. I guess I've forgotten how to be adventurous."

"We'll be happier now." The ferocity in his voice surprised her, reminded her that he had been as unhappy lately as she was.

He pushed the package toward her. "I got this for you in New York."

"It's too big to be a diamond," she joked, opening the box. Inside lay a pair of gray sweats and a hooded sweatshirt that read: Fox Sports. It was a size medium. Apparently Jack hadn't noticed that she'd paddled into the "large" pond.

"You used to love your college sweats, remember?"

I was nineteen years old. She smiled at him. "Thanks, honey."

He leaned toward her, put his hands on her thighs. "We can do this, Birdie. We can move to New York and start over."

She sat very still, holding in her middle-aged hands the favorite clothes of her teenaged self. He could dream all he wanted. She knew the truth. Things would change for Jack, but not for her. In a few weeks, she'd fly to a new city and settle into her old marriage.

"It'll be great," she said.

"It will be." He was grinning now. She could see how relieved he was.

Her anger resurfaced.

He slipped an arm around her and pulled her to her feet. "Let's watch TV in bed. Like the old days."

They climbed into their king-sized sleigh bed and watched Sex and the City and The Practice.

When the programs were over, Jack turned off the light and rolled onto his side.

"I love you, Birdie," he said, kissing her. His hand moved down her back and pushed up beneath her flannel nightgown, coming to rest on her naked thigh.

She kissed him back. They made love in the quiet, familiar way that had evolved over the last decade. When it was done, he rolled away from her and went to sleep.

Elizabeth inched away from him. She laid her head on her pillow and listened to the ordinary rhythm of his breathing. She couldn't help but remember how wonderful their lovemaking used to be. For years, even as the marriage had begun to go stale, their passion for each other had remained. Now, even that spark had gone out.

Still... they'd been married so long. More than half of her life had been spent with Jack. She'd thought they'd grow old together in this house. Foolishly, she'd believed his promise to live here forever.

Even last week, when she'd looked into her own future, she'd seen them on the porch together, white-haired and smiling, sitting on the wrought-iron garden bench, watching their great-grandchildren play.

Now when she looked into their future, she couldn't see anything at all.