When We Were Friends Read Free Page B

the baby gave astartled-sounding “Ah!” and Sydney glanced quickly at it, then turned back. “You know I read about you a couple years ago, in the
Gazette
. They were talking about actual canvas paintings though, right? Not murals.”
    The
Gazette
article had been my one brush with fame. They’d photographed samples of my work, and I’d immediately gotten calls from people interested in buying them or seeing what else I’d done. That “fame” had lasted less than a month—which I guess made it only
pseudo
-fame—but in that month I’d imagined that I’d finally be able to stop worrying about the cost of good toilet paper and the timing of shoe sales.
    “Murals pay the rent,” I said. “Not too many people buy abstract portraits from unknown artists, but I do still get calls sometimes from galleries that want to show my stuff.”
    “Guess I always knew you’d become an artist; you were so damn talented. A friend of a friend actually has one of your paintings in her living room, these little girls—I think they’re girls—at the beach? I recognized your signature.”
    I remembered that painting, tried to picture it in someone’s home. It always gave me a little thrill when I sold a painting or finished a mural, knowing some stranger would see it every day, and looking at it would briefly enter a world that used to reside only in my own head.
    “Anyway, Sara told me there was somebody coming to show their work, but she’s not here.”
    The baby’s voice rose to a whimper and then a full-fledged wail, and as Sydney turned toward it, waving distractedly at me in apology, I saw it. The scar, a pale white indentation that looked almost like a vein line. I looked down at the scar on my own palm, then made a fist as Sydney walked past me to the counter. She plugged a pacifier into the baby’s mouth with the indifference of someone stuffing bread crumbs into a turkey.
    The baby was wearing green overalls printed with ducks, had orange hair and a tiny snot-filled nose. I tried to deduce its sex, but came up blank. “It’s yours?”
    “Her name’s Jacqueline and yeah, she’s mine.”
    I gazed at the baby, feeling a pang. Starting a family, having a baby, seemed so straightforward to everybody else. Something they always assumed would happen and so accepted without surprise or gratitude once it did. Me, I would’ve celebrated every day.
    Sydney traced a finger over the baby’s shirt cuff and gave a distant smile. “She’s mine at least for now. David’s trying to say I’m unfit, but that’s just because it’s the only way he could think of to spite me for leaving him. You remember David? David McGrath?”
    I nodded slowly. “He was cute. And rich, right? The McGrath financiers.”
    “Which made him promising in high school, but now it doesn’t mean squat. We started dating after the ten-year reunion and we got married within a few months, which I can tell you is not ever a good idea.”
    So Sydney was divorced, beautiful Sydney a divorcée with a baby, which really was worse than never having been married. Divorce tainted you, made you moldy around the edges. “Probably not.” I smiled brightly. “Although with my husband, I knew I wanted to marry him within a few minutes.”
    Her lips twitched as she glanced at me. “You got kids yet?”
    “Kids? Well no, not yet.” I watched the baby suck furiously at the pacifier, her carroty hair mashed crooked against one side of her head, making her look somewhat demented. “But we’re trying for them, Keith and me.”
    Keith was a man I’d dated for six weeks, the longest-term relationship I’d ever had. I’d met him in SoHo, over the couple of months I’d lived away from home. He was—at least aesthetically—perfect: dark-haired, dark-eyed, dark-souled. He’d lived in a studio that used to be a warehouse, complete with cement-block walls and a garage door entrance. And with him I’d become someone completely different, exactly what I