Book excerpt: “Same As It Ever Was” by Claire Lombardo

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“Same As It Ever Was” (Doubleday), by Claire Lombardo, the bestselling author of “The Most Fun We Ever Had,” follows the upheavals in the life of a complicated woman unprepared for a mid-life crisis. 

Read an excerpt below. 

“Same As It Ever Was” by Claire Lombardo

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It happens in the way that most important things end up having happened for her: accidentally, and because she does something she is not supposed to do. And it happens in the fashion of many happenstantial occurrences, the result of completely plausible decision making, a little diversion from the norm that will, in hindsight, seem almost too coincidental: a slight veer and suddenly everything’s free-falling, the universe gleefully seizing that seldom chosen Other Option, running, arms outstretched, like a deranged person trying to clear the aisles in a grocery store, which is, as a matter of fact, where she is, the gourmet place two towns over, picking up some last-minute items for a dinner party for her husband, who is turning sixty today.

This one is a small act of misbehavior by any standards, an innocuous Other Option as far as they go: choosing a grocery store that is not her usual grocery store because her usual grocery store is out of crabmeat.

Afterward she will remember having the thought—leaving the first grocery empty-handed—that such a benign change to her routine could lead to something disastrous, something that’s not supposed to happen. This is how Mark—scientific, marvelously anxious—has always looked at the world, as a series of choices made or not and the intricate mathematical repercussions thereof. Julia’s own brain didn’t start working this way until she’d known him for a substantial period of time; prior to that she’d always been content with the notion that making one decision closed the door on another, that there was no grand order to the universe, that nothing really mattered that much one way or another; this glaring difference in character is perhaps what accounts for the fact that Mark dutifully pursued a graduate degree in engineering while Julia neglected to collect her English and Rhetoric diploma from Kansas State.

Now, though, they’ve been together for nearly three decades and so she did consider—just a fleeting thought—that so cavalierly altering routine could result in some kind of dark fallout, but at the time she’d been envisioning something cinematically terrible, something she wouldn’t have encountered had she just forgone the crab instead of driving fifteen minutes west, a cruel run-in with a freight train or a land mine, not with an eighty-year-old woman assessing a tower of kumquats.

Julia doesn’t recognize her at first. She doesn’t consciously notice her, in fact, nor does she stop; she’s headed industriously past the organic produce to seafood, contemplating a drive-by to dry goods to see if they have anything interesting in stock; sometimes the stores in the farther-out suburbs have a more robust inventory. She’s considering taking a spin around the whole store, checking out what else they have that hasn’t been subject to the frenzied consumption of the usual suspects at her usual grocery, when it hits her; the woman’s face registers in her brain belatedly, clad in the convincing disguise—that invisible blanket—of age.

Hers has not been a life lived under the threat of too many ghosts; there’s only a small handful of people whom she has truly hoped to never encounter again, and Helen Russo happens to be one of them. So why does she find herself taking a step closer to the endcap of the dry goods aisle, getting out of the flow of traffic so she can turn to look back? It’s been over eighteen years, which is somewhat astonishing both given the fact that they used to see each other at least once a week and given the smallness of her world, a world in which—as has been established—something as small as altering one’s grocery plans can be considered a major decision.

       
Excerpted from “Same As It Ever Was” by Claire Lombardo. Reprinted with permission from Doubleday, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © 2024 by Claire Lombardo.

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