No one said a thing in the car on the way home. Carrie and Keith got wordlessly into the car when Sheila picked them up from school. Sheila didn't even ask them if they had learned anything in school that day. Why ask, when she already knew the answer? ("Nothing.") Why ask when she didn't really care? Might as well be honest; they didn't care and neither did their mother, really. She was just making conversation, playing the role of a caring and compassionate parent, when in fact she didn't really care at all, only cared by default, so to speak, only cared because there was nothing else to care about, nothing else to occupy her mind. Well, maybe her mind didn't need occupying, not by them, not by anyone, anything. Really, wasn't all her stress just a result of caring too much, maybe not caring at all was the answer. Maybe this was the key to happiness. She already didn't care about her job, that was why she was so good at it, she recognized it as a time-filler and nothing more. And customers used to fawning clerks were confused by her apathy, desperate for her attention. They'd buy things just to get her to notice them. Not caring about her kids was the next step. Then she could stop caring about her husband, her home, the impression she made on others. Then she would be free.

It would be difficult, though.

Especially difficult to stop caring about the house. She was keen on renovation plans; looking at new fixtures for the kitchen had whetted her appetite. She wanted more. New colours in every room, new paint, new curtains, new carpeting. New furniture. New lamps.

Sheila thought about countertops while preparing dinner. Corian, with the pattern running right through it. She daydreamed about the houses that showed up on television; the crime scene houses on the news (was that a Moen faucet?), the grime scene houses in the ads for cleaning products (the bold look of Kohler!). A woman washed her hands with moisturizing soap in a tantalizing sink, one of the new-style ones that sit on top of the counter.

This was the first thing she'd been excited about in years.