John Keegan

Here are the opening pages of Keegan's A GOOD DIVORCE:

On Sunday, I drove home from the ocean, constipated, still holding onto the last meal I'd eaten before Jude broke the news. And I feared for what she'd told the kids.

We'd met in a psychology class in our senior year at the University of Washington in the early sixties. I'd taken the course as a lark; she was minoring in psychology. The first time we walked over to the HUB after class I bought her coffee and the people in the next booth asked if we played bridge.

"Why not?" I said. It couldn't be any more perplexing than Jung.

With her textbook Goren and my cow town bluff, we had a little trouble communicating at first but Jude made a small slam in clubs and we won the first rubber. I was in heaven that spring. This sophisticated, big-city woman was interested in a kid who'd worked in the sugar beet plant and played basketball for the Quincy Jackrabbits. She thought there was something trustworthy about a man who grew up in a town with a grid street pattern and lived in a dormitory.

"We're going to have a big family," she'd told everyone when she found out she was pregnant.

When I reached the front door of our house on Broadway, I didn't know whether to knock or just go in. In the hope that our impasse was temporary, I slipped my key into the door and listened to the tumblers engage, all the while praying she hadn't changed the locks. Derek was on the floor petting Magpie, the kids' Labrador with dalmatian paws, and he looked up at me like I was an apparition. Jude had told them. A column of sunlight teeming with floating dust specks shone from the side window to Derek's rectangle on the rug.

"Hey, buddy, where is everyone?"

He stood up, out of respect it seemed, and brushed the dog hair off the front of his pants. Normally he would have given me a hug, but he seemed uncertain of the rules. "Mom's out in back."

I was still wearing the same clothes I'd left for work in on Friday, except that now the pants were creaseless and my wingtips were speckled with mud. I was grateful the kids hadn't seen me flattened against the sand in the rain like a page of newsprint. I'd promised to take them to the Bumbershoot Festival at the Seattle Center that weekend, and in my panic to get away it hadn't even occurred to me to bring them to the coast. Unconsciously, I'd already conceded them to Jude.

Derek drifted close and I gathered him in. He buried his head against me the way Magpie did when you snuggled her, and his knuckle-whitened hands clung to my jacket pockets. I had to concentrate to keep from crying.

"I better talk to your mom."

He let me go out the back door alone.