all the dating fumbles she’d had before stumbling upon the diminutive Dr. Alec Katz, who had proposed to her in less than six months with a diamond roughly the size of a disco ball.
“Honey, you’re just in a slump,” Meg said to me gently while shooting Jill a dangerous look. “And this isn’t the day for us to pick you apart.” She could always be counted on to dispense motherly nuggets of irrefutable wisdom. Sometimes I forgot she was only thirty-five and not sixty-five, an observation I had thus far refrained from sharing with her. She even
looked
like a concerned grandma sometimes, with her dark hair cut short for practicality’s sake, and her affinity for collared shirts with khakis. And she wore aprons at home when she cooked, for God’s sake. Aprons!
“Easy for you to say,” I grumbled. After all, she was married, too. Darned Marrieds. Going on like they knew what they were talking about.
Hmph. Well, maybe they did.
It was just too early in the morning to deal with that possibility.
Then again, Meg had always seemed to know everything. Maybe it was time I started listening to her. After all, she had been right about pretty much everything in the twenty-nine years I had known her.
In what was a particularly unusual feat for four Manhattanites in their mid-thirties, Meg Myers, Jill Peters-Katz, Emmie Walters, and I had been friends since grade school in Ohio and were still as close as sisters—even if we didn’t always see eye-to-eye on everything.
Meg and I had been best friends since the first day of first grade, when she sat down beside me and announced that she had Band-Aids, Children’s Tylenol, and Neosporin in her backpack, should I ever fall on the playground and scrape my knee. Twenty-nine years later, she
still
carried Band-Aids and Neosporin, although the Tylenol had been replaced by Advil. She has always been the one I turned to when I had a problem—whether it be the time that Bobby Johnston stole my lunch in the second grade (Meg gave him a very threatening speech about respecting other people’s property) or the day my parents told me they were getting a divorce, when I was eleven (“They’re not divorcing
you
, Harper,” she had explained patiently while I punched her pillow and bawled my eyes out. “And neither of them loves you any less.”), or the time my first boyfriend, Jack, broke my heart by dumping me over the phone when I was eighteen. (“He didn’t deserve you anyhow,” Meg had sniffed while handing me a tissue.)
Emmie had come along two years after Meg and I met, a perky blonde whirlwind of energy whose parents had just moved east from LA. She arrived at James Franklin Cash III Elementary School midway through November with a dark tan and a necklace made of seashells, and all the third-grade boys fell immediately in love with her. Meg stood up for her one day when big Katie Kleegal tried to steal Emmie’s lunch, and the three of us had been close ever since.
Jill Peters had been the last addition to our little group. She had moved in down the street from Emmie the summer before junior high, and despite being a year younger, she was the only one of us who knew how to put on foundation, wear a bra, and French-kiss boys, which of course made her immediately indispensable to our little group.
“Girls in Connecticut, where I come from, are
so
far ahead of girls in
Ohio,
” she had said with a withering expression of boredom that made us all feel just a bit embarrassed about our affiliation with the Buckeye State. From the day we met her, she had been talking about finding Mr. Right, which baffled Meg and me. We had both been late bloomers, and the summer before junior high we still thought boys were kind of icky.
(Come to think of it, though, maybe we’d been right all along, before the teenage hormones took over our brains. Guys
were
kind of icky, weren’t they? Why was it that I was just now coming to this realization at the age of thirty-five? Clearly, I
“Honey, you’re just in a slump,” Meg said to me gently while shooting Jill a dangerous look. “And this isn’t the day for us to pick you apart.” She could always be counted on to dispense motherly nuggets of irrefutable wisdom. Sometimes I forgot she was only thirty-five and not sixty-five, an observation I had thus far refrained from sharing with her. She even
looked
like a concerned grandma sometimes, with her dark hair cut short for practicality’s sake, and her affinity for collared shirts with khakis. And she wore aprons at home when she cooked, for God’s sake. Aprons!
“Easy for you to say,” I grumbled. After all, she was married, too. Darned Marrieds. Going on like they knew what they were talking about.
Hmph. Well, maybe they did.
It was just too early in the morning to deal with that possibility.
Then again, Meg had always seemed to know everything. Maybe it was time I started listening to her. After all, she had been right about pretty much everything in the twenty-nine years I had known her.
In what was a particularly unusual feat for four Manhattanites in their mid-thirties, Meg Myers, Jill Peters-Katz, Emmie Walters, and I had been friends since grade school in Ohio and were still as close as sisters—even if we didn’t always see eye-to-eye on everything.
Meg and I had been best friends since the first day of first grade, when she sat down beside me and announced that she had Band-Aids, Children’s Tylenol, and Neosporin in her backpack, should I ever fall on the playground and scrape my knee. Twenty-nine years later, she
still
carried Band-Aids and Neosporin, although the Tylenol had been replaced by Advil. She has always been the one I turned to when I had a problem—whether it be the time that Bobby Johnston stole my lunch in the second grade (Meg gave him a very threatening speech about respecting other people’s property) or the day my parents told me they were getting a divorce, when I was eleven (“They’re not divorcing
you
, Harper,” she had explained patiently while I punched her pillow and bawled my eyes out. “And neither of them loves you any less.”), or the time my first boyfriend, Jack, broke my heart by dumping me over the phone when I was eighteen. (“He didn’t deserve you anyhow,” Meg had sniffed while handing me a tissue.)
Emmie had come along two years after Meg and I met, a perky blonde whirlwind of energy whose parents had just moved east from LA. She arrived at James Franklin Cash III Elementary School midway through November with a dark tan and a necklace made of seashells, and all the third-grade boys fell immediately in love with her. Meg stood up for her one day when big Katie Kleegal tried to steal Emmie’s lunch, and the three of us had been close ever since.
Jill Peters had been the last addition to our little group. She had moved in down the street from Emmie the summer before junior high, and despite being a year younger, she was the only one of us who knew how to put on foundation, wear a bra, and French-kiss boys, which of course made her immediately indispensable to our little group.
“Girls in Connecticut, where I come from, are
so
far ahead of girls in
Ohio,
” she had said with a withering expression of boredom that made us all feel just a bit embarrassed about our affiliation with the Buckeye State. From the day we met her, she had been talking about finding Mr. Right, which baffled Meg and me. We had both been late bloomers, and the summer before junior high we still thought boys were kind of icky.
(Come to think of it, though, maybe we’d been right all along, before the teenage hormones took over our brains. Guys
were
kind of icky, weren’t they? Why was it that I was just now coming to this realization at the age of thirty-five? Clearly, I
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