Every Last One Read Free Page B

morning.”
    “Let me call you back. There’s never only one chicken pock. He’s probably out of sorts because he’s three. I’m shopping for a prom dress with your goddaughter.”
    “Call me back as soon as you’re finished,” Alice says, and hangs up. “I am not one of those crazy older mothers,” she often says. She is one of those crazy older mothers. It’s good of me not to say so,especially since she told me I was certifiable when I was just twenty-six and discovered I was expecting Ruby. “He rushed you into it,” she’d said of Glen. “He absolutely did not,” I replied at the time, and it was true. Ruby was an accidental baby. We had been thunderstruck when I got the news three months after our wedding, as stunned as teenagers who had skipped sex-education classes. I have never been able to decide whether I should tell Ruby this someday, perhaps when she has children of her own. My firstborn, my girl, my happiest accident.
    Molly has a dress over her arm and holds it up for Ruby. It is a high-waisted dress in some filmy coral material. Ruby says so sweetly, “I have a problem with that color because of my hair, but thanks so much, Mrs. Martin, it’s really pretty.” Ruby likes to say that her hair is red, but it’s really brown with auburn highlights, a big wavy mass that she pulls at when she’s thinking and that makes a hair curtain around her pointed, slightly elfin face. She has outside manners and inside manners, company manners and home manners. Or lack of manners. You can see it in her brothers’ faces sometimes, as they think to themselves, Will Ruby offer to take me to the diner for breakfast or scream at me for leaving the shower dripping?
    Only with her father is she always the polite and thoughtful Ruby she presents to the world. Last year her favorite word was authentic . She says that Glen is utterly authentic. I suppose that this is true, and may have something to do with why I married him in the first place. Or maybe it was the loneliness, when college was over and Alice had found a place for herself in New York. I remember a weekend when I visited Glen at medical school, and we went to an Italian restaurant and walked back to his apartment through a fine mild rain and made love that night and the next morning and had pancakes and bacon for breakfast. I laughed atthe tiny earthquakes the elevated train made every few minutes as it silenced our voices. “I wish every day was like this,” I’d said, and Glen said, “Why couldn’t it be?” How young we were.
    The shopping trip is a failure. Ruby is putting on her own clothes, a long flowered skirt, a tank top, an Argyle sweater. From inside the dressing room, muffled by the sweater she is pulling over her head, I hear her say, “I’m thinking of breaking up with Kiernan.”
    “What?” I say. Because of the surprise, I have let my voice rise and sharpen.
    “Nothing,” Ruby says. “Forget I said anything. I knew you’d make a big thing out of it.”
    “All I said was ‘What?’”
    “Never mind,” Ruby says. “I don’t want to talk about it.”
    It’s hard, almost impossible, to imagine Ruby without Kiernan. It’s not just that he has been her boyfriend for more than two years but that they have been playmates since kindergarten. His mother, Deborah, was once my closest friend; Kiernan’s family once lived next door to ours. From time to time my husband says, “Does Kiernan ever actually go home?” But he says it in that weary indulgent way that men take note of things they think should bother them but really don’t. For his birthday, Kiernan bought Glen a pair of very old spectacles he found at a flea market, and although the rest of us thought it was a peculiar gift—the boys making faces, Ruby saying, “Aren’t they great?” in the extravagant fashion of someone trying to make it so—Glen spent a fair amount of time examining the lenses, the construction, the material, and the old glasses wound up on