KAREN’S HOUSE was large and gracious, with a carefully landscaped yard and a gleaming Volvo parked in the driveway. As I climbed out of my ugly van, brushing crumbs from my clothes, I felt rumpled and underdressed.
It wasn’t an unfamiliar feeling. My friendship with Karen had always seemed unlikely to me, like one of those cross-species bonds people make videos about: a gazelle becoming best friends with a tortoise, for example.
Quick, beautiful, magnetic Karen—the gazelle, obviously—was now standing in the doorway, motioning me inside her Better Homes and Gardens Victorian.
“Hurry!” she called. “Sophie gets home from kindergarten in an hour and I’ve got news that she can’t hear.”
We hugged each other hard. “Really, she’s old enough for school already?”
Karen smiled. “I can’t believe it either. Come in, come in. Do you want to shower and change?”
I surreptitiously sniffed an armpit. “Do I need to?”
“No.” She laughed. “I was just trying to be hospitable. You look—and smell—perfect.”
“Well, I wouldn’t go that far,” I said.
She led me through the house and onto the screened-in back porch, where she got us each a seltzer from a silver ice bucket. “Six years since I’ve seen you. How can that be?” she asked, settling into a wicker rocking chair.
“It’s terrible, I know,” I said. “But I’m so happy to see you now. You look exactly the same.”
“Well, if you add fifteen pounds,” she said lightly. Then her tone changed. “I’m so sorry about your house.”
I waved this away. “Let’s not talk about it. I’ve decided my coping strategy is denial.”
Karen folded her long legs beneath her and leaned back in her chair. “All right then. Maybe you want the dirt on our old classmates.”
She’d always been a fount of social knowledge, and I its willing recipient. “Of course,” I said.
“Leah Larsen got divorced, for one thing.”
“It happens to the best of us,” I said wryly.
“Absolutely. So then her husband took up with the neighbor after Leah left him, which basically started a chain reaction of divorces in the ol’ hometown. Dan Smith—you remember him, right?—is in jail for marijuana possession, and his ex, Dodie Scheffer, is running for mayor and no one even finds that ironic. Jennifer Meyers and Jacob Sales finally got together after years of secret, seemingly unrequited love for each other, and they spent the summer following Eagles of Death Metal around on tour.”
I laughed. “It amazes me how you still know what’s going on with everyone.”
“Some people stay in touch when they move away,” she said—a bit pointedly, I thought.
“But I wasn’t friends with all those people,” I said. “You were.”
“Well you could have been,” she said. “Instead you were always disappearing into the darkroom. The rest of us were living in the actual world—and you were living in what you could see through your camera’s viewfinder.”
I sighed. “I’m coming to realize that.”
She smiled. “It’s nothing to regret. We are who we are.”
“Well, I am trying to branch out a little,” I said. “I told you about my book project.”
“Your best story,” Karen said, nodding thoughtfully. “Like the time we stole all the lawn ornaments from Bob Ubbin’s yard? Or maybe when we went hot-tubbing in January and then got pneumonia at the same time and missed the winter formal?”
“Right, which would have sucked anyway,” I said, laughing. “Those are funny anecdotes—but they’re not a best story.”
Karen looked out over her pretty lawn and shook her head. “No, I guess not,” she said. “The answer’s easy, though. Sophie’s my best story.”
I could hear the love and awe in her voice. But Sophie wasn’t a story; she was a person. “Sorry—narratively unsatisfying,” I said, nudging Karen playfully.
“I could tell you about giving birth. That’s a story.”
“Well…”
“Yeah, you probably don’t want to hear it. It’s rather gruesome. All right, let me think.” She frowned lightly. “But Anne, you already know all my stories. You’re in them.”
“Tell me a secret, then,” I said.
Karen looked down at her hands for a moment, and then she looked up at me. “All right,” she said. She took a deep breath. “Do you remember that beautiful velvet dress you had in college?”
“That slate-blue one?” I asked. “I loved that dress. But then one day it just vanished. I always wondered what happened to it.”
Karen bit her lip, then spoke. “I’m about to tell you,” she said.
Chapter 12
I FELT a jolt of surprise. “Oh. Okay.”
“You’d gone home to see your dad for his birthday. There was a dance that weekend, and I didn’t have anything to wear, so I went into your closet and there it was. I knew it was the prettiest thing you owned. I knew you’d bought it with your own money and that you wouldn’t really want me to borrow it. But I also knew that if I asked, you would have said yes. So I took it. And I wore it to the dance.” She glanced over at me and seemed to wince a little. “But the problem was I got drunk. Really drunk. And halfway through the dance, I threw up all over it.”
“My beautiful dress,” I half whispered.
She nodded. “I took it to cleaners all over town, but it was utterly ruined. So for a while it lived in a paper bag under my bed. And then one day I threw it in a Dumpster behind the dining hall.”
“And you never said a thing!” I said, shocked. I was kind of mad, too. What a stupid, mean secret to keep! But then a memory flickered in my mind. It was dim at first, and then it grew bright and clear. “Wait a second,” I said. “That was the spring of the magic money, wasn’t it?”
All that spring I’d kept finding cash—five dollars here, ten there—in the pockets of my jeans or crumpled at the bottom of my messy backpack. Once a twenty appeared in my makeup bag. When I told Karen about these exciting discoveries, she’d brushed them off. “You’ve never been able to keep track of anything, Anne,” she’d pointed out. “Why on earth would your money be any different?”
But now I finally understood. “You were hiding all that money in my stuff!” I said.
“I was trying to pay you back,” Karen admitted.
“I can’t believe it,” I said. “Is that why you took that second work study job?
She nodded again. “I swear, I’ve felt bad about it for fifteen years.”
I leaned forward and put my hand on her knee. The flare of anger I’d felt had vanished. “Honey,” I said. “When my mother was dying, you moved into my house. You slept on the floor of my bedroom for most of our senior year in high school because I couldn’t bear to be alone. My whole life I’ve been able to count on you.” I felt tears prick at the corners of my eyes. “You’ve always been there. You can throw up on every single thing I own, and I’ll still love you forever.”
Now I thought Karen looked like she might cry, too. “That’s good,” she said quietly. “Because actually I might throw up.” She smiled. “You see, I’m pregnant. And it’s twins. That’s what I wanted to tell you.”
I just about fell out of my chair. But when I’d recovered from the surprise, I hugged her tightly. “Oh my God, I’m so happy for you.”
“Me, too,” she said. “I think,” she added. Then she got up and motioned me to follow. “Perfect timing—I hear the school bus.”
Out front, we watched a dozen kids dash off the bus, and then one small blond girl came running toward us. She practically leaped into Karen’s arms, and as she clung to her mother, her words came out in a rush. “Mommy I read all of Are You My Mother? today out loud and I’m starving and can I have a playdate with Clara because she got a guinea pig and will we have dessert tonight or is it a night I only get fruit and how many days is it until my birthday?”