With Friends Like These: A Novel (45 page)

Jules stood back to admire her platters and bowls destined for eggs, for roasted asparagus, for scones, and for a cartload of berries. Champagne was icing and a sour cream coffee cake rising, the mother-love aroma of cinnamon wafting upstairs to fill the tiny nostrils of Sienna Julia de Marco. As Jules straightened her smiling sunflowers, Arthur walked through the front door. “Want one?” he asked, hoisting a Dunkin’ Donuts bag, a grease spot catching the morning light. Jules bit into a doughnut, and raspberry glop oozed onto her lip. Arthur kissed it away. “Where’s my doll?”

“Jamyang is getting her dressed,” Jules said.

When Chloe had to let Jamyang go, she’d beseeched Jules to hire her. Since one of Jules’ Rules was to know when to throw money at a problem and whistle for help, she did, though she’d pictured a different sort of nanny, half Auntie Mame, half
matryoshka
doll. Jamyang was living now in a bedroom next to Sienna’s, and when she crept out of hiding, she went about her business for a remarkable number of uncomplaining hours. Like that day. Jamyang had been up since six, helping prepare brunch in honor of Quincy’s visit.

Jules and Quincy had called a truce. When Talia had told Jules that Quincy was moving, Jules thought Quincy had eaten one too many corn dogs at the fair. Minnesota might have ten thousand lakes, but what about the leeches on their slimy bottoms, the mosquitoes the size of nickels, the way folks—folks!—rhyme
roof
with
woof
? If you wanted to live where the sun set at four on a winter afternoon, why not move to Sweden and get universal health care? But Jules pulled a Chloe and sent Quincy a peace offering, knee-high moccasins with five layers of fringe, plus a tiny pair for the papoose. She was rewarded with an instant text from Quincy, who suggested that they have coffee.

The conversation was nothing baroque.

Jules said, “Quincy, I fucked up. I was wrong. I had no business telling Arthur about that apartment, or seeing it myself. I’m sorry. Can you forgive me?”

“I can,” Quincy answered. “I do. Let’s move on.”

It was enough for both of them. Jules didn’t see herself as magnanimous. She saw herself as sincere and happy, because there was no one in the universe as deliriously content as a forty-four-year-old who became the accidental mother of a daughter with eyes as dark as chocolate truffles, gazing at her with love. Sienna had brown hair curling around her scalp like miniature potato vines and chubby fingers that Arthur insisted were exactly like his.
Don’t all babies have short, pudgy fingers?
Jules wondered.
They will grow
.

She was about to order Arthur to sweep the front steps when she looked out the window and saw the Blues tumbling out of a rented minivan. A small warehouse’s worth of equipment was in Jake’s hands and Quincy’s held J.J. When she brought him inside, Jules could see he had large blue eyes that searched the room like headlights and a head as bald as an egg. Before the greetings were over, the doorbell rang again. Talia and Tom entered with Henry in tow, hurling himself toward J.J. like a bowling ball.

Ready or not, the party had started. Arthur hung coats, Jamyang put Sienna in her high chair, and Jules invited everyone to sit. She swept her
arm above the table, the gesture one of benediction. “
Benvenuto
. It’s been way too long,” she said. She looked at each of them, one by one, but reserved her most admiring glance for Sienna, plump and trussed, a small Jules who banged tiny starfish hands to the music of her mother’s voice, then squealed with delight. Either that, Jules thought, or the kid had gas.

“Hear, hear—I second that.” Not unlike his daughter, Arthur knocked the bare wood table with his knuckles. Talia and Quincy returned his smile. Being obnoxious, each privately concluded, wasn’t a crime after all.

Each of the women had grown in ways they couldn’t have imagined when they shared their walled paradise near the Hudson. Jules was basking in contentment delivered by accident. While she doubted that she deserved the richness of her life, she was grateful, almost ready to speak of her happiness out loud.

Quincy had unpacked her life, blue cradle and all (which Jake had refused to leave on the curb, along with hope), halfway across the country to fashion a family from fresh air and fresh starts—Quincy, Jacob, and James J. Blue, with Tallulah barking for attention. Whenever Quincy turned a corner, she could feel her mom’s spirit watching over her.

Talia was restless. She had begun to conjure her own gauzy fantasy of escape and longed for the salty air of Santa Monica, though for all its crumbling bungalows it was as out of her financial grasp as Fifth Avenue. Talia did not speak of this to anyone, especially not Tom, yet he knew his wife’s disappointment as well as he knew that he loved her and couldn’t fix what had gone wrong.

Proudly and privately, Chloe had learned to wear her resilience like a scarlet coat. But for that day’s brunch, she had sent regrets.

Regrets, there were plenty of those; the guilt in the room imperiled the oxygen.
If only I hadn’t
, Jules thought. From Talia:
What a fool I was to think that a friend, close and loyal, was as easy to find as a penny on the street
. And from Quincy, a realization:
Sometimes you need to blink and move on
. That morning the women recognized that being together was like rediscovering a pair of lost slippers. Their friendship still provided comfort that improved with time. They knew one another like a new friend never
could, with a shorthand that understood when to react and when to overlook, when to boost and when to protect.

“Henry has such lovely manners—and he’s gotten so tall.”

“J.J. is your little clone.”

“All I see is Jake.”

“Sienna’s got your eyes. Those lashes!”

They lavished honeyed words on one another’s children, determined to brush away histories as tangled as the roots of stubborn weeds:
Why did you do that to me? Did I mean so little? How could you be so careless with my feelings, my future? Will she forgive me, ever? What was I thinking?

“The house—show us those pictures again.”

“Three stories! It’s a mansion!”

“It’s not.”

“How far below zero does it get?”

“What’s the second
J
for?”

“Jubilee.”

How could she?

All of them instinctively made sure that everyone got equal airtime.

“I love what you’ve done with the dining room walls.”

“Matching paint to a Japanese eggplant? Who’d have thought?”

“How are your parents?”

Certain questions they would never raise. Why had Quincy abandoned them? Her move six months earlier had seemed impetuous, which their Quincy was not. Would Jake, Yankees fan, be able to root for a team called the Twins? What next, ice fishing? Had Talia started looking for another job? Would Tom ever finish his Ph.D.? Or Jules and Arthur surprise them with a wedding? Was there true love between them, or had Jules given up on that?

They knew better than to ask each other why Chloe hadn’t joined them. She was a greater presence in her absence than she might have been in the flesh. Jules thought that she could explain why Chloe had stayed away—she was still absorbing and adjusting to the shock of reduced circumstances, of deception, of disgrace. But Talia thought their
quarrel was to blame. Quincy, however, didn’t care about explanations. Having come all this way, she was trying not to take Chloe’s behavior as a rebuff. And so the three women splashed in the shallow end.

“Please tell me you didn’t bake this yourself.”

“I can’t even bake a potato.”

“What are we drinking? I love it.”

“Refill?”

“Sienna needs a change. Artie?”

“Listen up, folks. Henry is going to count backward from one hundred.”

“Did you read why Chinese kids are so much better in math—something to do with the way the numbers sound in their language?”

“Then tell me why Chinese Americans still do better in math when they’re taught in English.”

No one could.

“Your new business, Jules—genius.”

“No, buddy, you can’t go outside alone. Go play with your cars in the living room.”

“Seconds? If you don’t eat this, I will, and I have ten pounds left to go.”

That day they weren’t thinking,
She’s getting fat. She’s getting gray. She’s getting crow’s feet. She’s getting pissed
. Conversation swirled like milk in coffee, keeping their moods light while they sized each other up—kindly.
She’s already lost her baby weight. She’s wearing Arthur’s ring. She looks good with long hair
.

They were careful not to speak of newer friends claiming loyalties—the other mother and son Talia would be meeting at the park, the linguistics professor Quincy had started to run with along shady lakeside paths, the woman Jules had met for cappuccino after Little Maestros. Jules didn’t know what had made her feel the bigger fool, that at Little Maestros she was paying as much as the price of an opera ticket for Sienna to shake her diapered booty to Stevie Wonder CDs or that the other woman was the grandmother of the infant she accompanied, and had taken her for the same. At forty-four!

Mostly, they thought,
I’ve missed
her,
and
her,
and
her.
I’m homesick for what was, because try as you might, you can’t outsource love
. They regretted their cavalier actions and assumptions, these women who’d been casually arrogant enough to assume that friendship could blast—and last—through anything.

When they thought about the future, they were overcome with what might not be—the books and movies they might never discuss; the vacation photos they might not see; the shopping trips not taken to choose a dress for a milestone, one celebrated without them; the whoop of glee the other might not hear about promotions or a child’s college acceptances and first love. It was entirely possible that they might not know the woman next to them as she turned fifty, sixty, more, became a grandmother or a widow or a glittering success, when she lost her mother or found her passion; that they would not wind up, as they’d once imagined, as little old ladies sharing a house, making sure the next woman took her meds and didn’t break a hip. They wouldn’t be holding hands at the end, in a hospital.

Or maybe they would.

They were fragments, starting to forget how it felt to be young and whole, a vase balanced in its symmetry, ready for flowers in bloom. To play it safe, they paged through the old times, finding memories that felt more vivid than the morning’s headlines.

“Remember that first New Year’s Eve at our apartment, when we rolled out homemade fettuccini and hung it to dry on the shower curtain rod?”

“That pesto—I’ve never eaten any half as good again.”

“My God, we were insufferable. That’s when pesto was our definition of sophistication.”

“When we didn’t know pine nuts from a pair of balls.”

I liked us then
, they all thought.
I liked us better. Does every woman get a little harder with each year, her true self slicked by strokes of enamel dried to a diamond finish?

“What happened to the mix tape that boyfriend of yours made?”

“Dumped it along with him.”

“His name? It’s on the tip of my tongue.”

“The guitarist whose hair was longer than mine? Clive.”

“No, the tech guy.”

“Him! I can’t remember what he even looked like.”

“Daryl?”

“Darren?”

“Devin! He made it up. You would, too, if your parents named you Milton.”

“Hey, Milton’s my middle name.”

“Arthur Milton Weiner, open that last bottle, will you?”

“The chairs you found on Ninety-second Street—why did we leave them behind? I’m pretty sure they were Knoll.”

“Serves me right. I just thought they were ugly.”

“How about when we tried to form our own book club? Quincy, were you the one who insisted on
The Witching Hour
?”

“No, that would be me,” Jules said as she got up to clear the table. Talia and Quincy followed with armfuls of platters, but when they deposited them on the kitchen counter, Jules said, “You have to see Sienna’s room. C’mon upstairs.”

When they entered the baby’s bedroom, Quincy and Talia wondered whether, should they ever have daughters, they too would be taken hostage by the sugary rush that makes mothers of girls think they are raising a princess. The walls were covered in lilac-sprigged paper, the floor plushly carpeted. Obedient pastel bunnies and Steiff teddies lined pristine white shelves. Over the lace-swathed crib a mobile of iridescent purple butterflies dangled in the air. Quincy oohed and ahhed while Talia walked to Sienna’s library, which was tucked under the eaves, near the front window. Yes, there was her gift, a first-edition
Babar
.

Hearing a car, she pulled open the starched white curtains to peer outside. A taxi was pulling away. Then the doorbell chimed “Give My Regards to Broadway.”

“Arthur installed it for my birthday.” Jules shrugged. “Who knew he
was handy?” She laughed, but Quincy detected pride, and when Jules’ back was turned, she offered Talia a conspiratorial wink.