A Friend of the Family Read Online Free PDF Page B

they not know? He’s an ob-gyn, for Christ’s sake! A high-risk ob-gyn! Their own daughter!
    And then, in quieter whispers: Did she really bash in the skull? Just bash it in like a Wiffle ball? And then, quietest of all: So who was the father, anyway?
    “She’d stopped talking to us, that’s what it was,” Joe said after a few minutes. He’d been fingering the table-side jukebox, just like our kids did when we brought them here for milkshakes. The songs were throwbacks, they’d never really been popular—B sides by Donovan, Freddy Fender, Gary Puckett and the Union Gap.
    “But everyone says that about teenagers — they just go silent one day—and what the hell did we know? Although now, looking back, Iris says she wouldn’t even let us touch her. That should have been aclue. She’d go to give her a hug, fix a button or something, and Laura would just shrink.”
    “Well, kids can—”
    “No, no. The psychiatrist said it’s one of the signs — one of the signs, a classic. They don’t want to be touched. They’re sure you’re going to be able to feel it. The baby.”
    “Joe, I don’t —”
    “She started wearing really baggy clothes — I don’t know. She always wore baggy clothes. She’s been stealing my old sweatshirts since she was twelve. She’s always been shy about her body.” He looked up at me as if for my approval. “Other girls in her class dressing up like Madonna, and there’s Laura in her huge flannel shirts and old jeans, her head in a book.”
    “She’s a modest kid.”
    Joe grunted. “So she’s not showing, of course she’s not showing. The end of her second trimester, she’s got the abdomen muscles of a seventeen-year-old, she’s hiding everything in flannel shirts. We’re supposed to chart her menstrual cycle or something? Count tampon wrappers in the bathroom?”
    “Of course not.”
    He waved me off. “That’s what New Jersey says. We should have known.”
    “Fuck New Jersey.”
    Joe shook his head. I paid closer attention than I should have to my coffee. Laura Stern—what did I know of her? It had been a couple of years since we’d spent time together down in Delaware, and even then she was so much older than the other kids, it had been easy not to see her at all. A heavy crust of teenage acne, flannel shirts, sure, and a precocious taste in literature, head always bent in something absurd,
Middlemarch, The Mill on the Floss.
Even at the beach. Whowas she having sex with? Back when I was in high school, nobody had sex with the Laura Sterns.
    “The thing is,” Joe said, “we always felt close to her. Or I did, I guess. The other three were the kids, but Laura, she was like our lieutenant. Second in charge. We were so young when we had her, and she always had that grown-up thing about her. A serious kid. So smart.”
    “I know, Joe.”
    “So then what did she think we would have done to her, exactly? If we’d found out? What would we have done?”
    “She was just scared.”
    “But why? Why would she be scared of us? Doesn’t she know us?” It was this, I knew, that was really breaking his heart more than anything, even more than the library delivery and the dead baby in the garbage. His own daughter felt she couldn’t tell him the truth.
    “Listen, you can’t—”
    “Why didn’t she trust us?” His voice cracked and broke.
    Back to my coffee. I heard morning regulars shuttle in, the local dentists, the cops, Tim, who managed the Chophouse. Joe was still waiting for an answer.
    “She wouldn’t want you to know that she had a boyfriend,” I said. “Or that she was, you know, sexually active.”
    Joe didn’t say anything until the waitress brought our food to the table. “A boyfriend,” he said. “As far as I knew, she didn’t even have any
friends.”
I looked down at the burnt edges of my toast.
    “She could get life in prison,” Joe said. “They’re going to have a hearing, see if she should be tried as an adult.”
    “Oh God,” I