Three Women Read Free

and window frames. She had the downstairs with spacious rooms and deep closets. Marta had the upstairs and the tiny third floor, under the sloping roof. When they had bought the house together twelve years before, it had been lived in forever by two sisters and a brother, strange wizened spinsters and bachelor who had collected salt and pepper shakers, model trains that ran all over the top floor, matchboxes, postcards, and a great deal of junk. She remembered Jim finding a box labeled string too short to use . The last sister had died and the heirs—distant cousins—put the house on the market as it was, full of dust and old clothes and worn rugs and battered furniture, candle ends,and mismatched crockery. It reeked of sad genteel survival. Marta, Jim, and she had put a great deal of money into the house, dividing it into two apartments with modern kitchens, inviting bathrooms, air-conditioning, up-to-date wiring, while keeping the fine old woodwork, the fireplaces, the stained-glass windows, and the encircling porch. Their house sat upon a high hill, on the curve of Addington Road, a street of occasional brick apartment houses, a few Victorians, some modern houses, and many frame structures about the same age as their own, usually on lots too small for the houses—like their own small backyard sloping downhill to the garage. She had moved to Brookline from the South End of Boston after Elena’s disaster.
    Jim, Marta’s husband, was off at a therapists’ convention. When Suzanne ran upstairs to Marta, her friend was sitting at the table in her old plaid flannel bathrobe reading an article in the Yale Law Journal . Marta waved her hand at the plate of muffins and the pot of coffee. “I haven’t had breakfast,” she realized. “His E-mail has really thrown me off course.”
    â€œLook, so he told you he might be coming. He may feel that’s only polite. Maybe he’s just as nervous as you are.”
    At night Marta always braided her gray blond hair, now hanging in two long plaits over the shoulders of her bathrobe. Suzanne liked the way Marta looked before she was dressed up for court, for meeting clients. Marta was far more elegant than Suzanne, taller, with prominent cheekbones. They had been friends since law school. They had worked out of the same Women’s Law Commune in the late seventies and then gone into practice with their friend Miles. When they had bought the house together, Jim had still been teaching at Simmons. Now their children were out of the house—although Marta’s son, Adam, and Suzanne’s younger daughter Rachel still came home for school vacations.
    â€œYou think maybe Jake doesn’t really care if we get together?”
    â€œHe may have doubts too. Why wouldn’t he?”
    â€œSo maybe he won’t press me.”
    â€œSo maybe he won’t.” Marta grinned. “Will you be disappointed?” Marta was enjoying this conversation. In their long friendship, Marta had always been the volatile one; Suzanne was the more practical, the one who smoothed things over, the negotiator. Marta was deriving pleasure from seeing Suzanne discombobulated over a man, of all things. “Have you considered maybe you’re just an excuse to stay over Saturday night so he can get a cheaper airfare?”
    As they lingered over muffins and coffee, Suzanne regretted that she had not done her morning exercise routine. She would feel a little off her pace all day. Maybe if she got home at a reasonable time, she could make it up tonight. “I had one of those messages from Rachel that she knows I can’t relate to. It’s like she’s rubbing my nose in it.”
    â€œYou thought she’d go to law school.”
    â€œWell, why not?” Suzanne ran her fingers through her thick short hair, setting it on end. “She’s bright, she has a good memory, and she’s picked up a certain amount just by osmosis. Looks