Parenthood was a persistent cruelty, a constant, simultaneous desire to be together and apart. She dreamed sometimes of violent deaths, her Subaru crushed beneath a semi; a swim in Lake Michigan that ended in slow downward slippage, her feet dusting the cold silty grains of its deepest point. And it comforted her to think about it, about how nothing was forever, how even the monotonous vise grip of her existence could be obliterated by the intervention of nature or circumstance.
