The Most Fun We Ever Had Read Free

with an androgynous gal Friday.
    But then: no.
    She would remember, in her car on the way home, after having tipped the valet for a third time, the swelling she’d felt in her chest, a crystallization of something. It wasn’t that she recognized him. That was the wrong word. And it wasn’t anything poetic, no lightning bolts through her temples, no ice in her veins. She barely caught a glimpse of him, really, because he’d only turned halfway in his seat, so her field of vision included little beyond his left ear and the outline of his nose. But it was enough, apparently, on some molecular level, not like the biological recognition she felt when Wyatt and Eli were born but significant in its own right, a sharp uterine tug that almost made her double over. She didn’t recognize the boy so much as absorb him. And in her head, in the car, after she’d fled the restaurant and her sister and the person she’d given birth to fifteen years earlier—a boy who now had dark hair that flopped in front of his eyes—she would imagine all of the things she could have said to Wendy. Big things, cinematic things, how dare you do this to me; you’re dead to me, you fucking psycho; how dare you, how dare you, how dare you. All the reasons it was okay that she left before she really saw his face.
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    —

    B efore Wendy left for the Lurie fund-raiser she went onto the deck to have a cigarette with Miles. She let herself out the back door, Grey Goose in hand, dress hiked up to her knees because she’d settled on an ill-advised black mermaid cut, one Parliament in her mouth and another on the table.
    “Today went as expected. Violet booked it before I could introduce them.” She lit her cigarette and sighed. “I need your absolution. I didn’t know what I was doing when I did it. But he’s actually a sweet kid. You’d like him.”
    Miles didn’t reply.
    “I’m wearing the dumbest outfit. Your mom would’ve liked it.” She leaned her head back. “I saw my dad yesterday. Retirement seems like kind of a disaster. He told me he was thinking about bird-watching. Can you imagine? I can’t picture him sitting still for that long.”
    She’d been doing it since he died. She would talk to him—to some ethereal indication of him that sometimes she felt but most times she didn’t. Today was one of the most times, so she just leaned into the side of her chair and smoked.
    “Tonight will be a total shitshow,” she said after a minute. “The vultures are probably hammered already. Hopefully they won’t grope anyone. I, personally, make no promises.” She looked upward for some cosmic sign that he was listening to her. There was nothing to see; the sky was overcast and grayish and the stars weren’t out yet. Instead she held her cigarette upward, toward where she thought he might be, and exhaled a deliberate jet of smoke. “I hope you’re proud of me, dude,” she said after a minute. “Because I am really trying to keep on around here, okay?” Somehow she had been without him for nearly two years. She lit her backup cigarette. “I wish I could kiss the inside of your elbow right now,” she whispered, almost inaudibly because the people next door sometimes kept their windows open. “But instead I might have to find a Greek shipping heir tonight and let him ravish me a little bit. Not too much. I swear. Fucking fuck, my darling. Man, do I miss you.”

    She took a few more drags, speaking to him in her head about all of the things she’d done that day, and then when she had one drag left she performed her ritual, which was to inhale as deeply as she could and exhale I love you over and over again until she ran out of breath.
----
    —
    A few hours later a man in a tuxedo had his hand on her left breast. She fitted her knee between his thighs and he staggered back, bumping into a table, upsetting a calla lily arrangement.
    “Careful,” she said.
    “My bad,” he replied. He was, upon inspection, perhaps more boy than