Babylon Sisters Read Online Free PDF Page B

before he took charge of the men around here and I’m proud to call him a friend. He’s the reason I can be out here, walking in the moonlight,
thinking.
    Phoebe is going to have to get over herself. My solution may not have been the best one, but she’s always had one hundred percent of me, and she has a great godfather in my best friend Louis.
    Louis is the only other person who knows Phoebe’s real father, but he had been sworn to secrecy by me right after I told him I was pregnant. I knew I could trust him. We’d been keeping each other’s secrets for years. We first met as infants when our mothers, who were best friends and lived around the corner from each other by design, delivered us within a few months of each other. Louis arrived in the fall and I made my appearance on what is now Martin Luther King Jr. Day, but back then was only January fifteenth.
    We were thrown together immediately, and there is ample photographic evidence of us grinning in the bathtub, naked as jaybirds, or napping in the same crib, piled up together like puppies. Our mothers found these photographs endearing. As teenagers, we found them mortifying. As adults, they provided us with hours of teasing as well as evidence of our lifelong bond. We tried to go steady once when we were thirteen, but it was a disaster. We called it off after one excruciatingly awkward kiss, renewed our pledge to be friends for life, and never looked back.
    Louis was the only person I considered asking to go with me to the clinic. He was standing right beside me when they did the preabortion sonogram and showed me the little peanut-shaped
thing
that was, or was not, going to grow up to be a real live baby, depending on what I decided in the next few hours. He held my hand when we sat there, surrounded by every kind and color and class of woman, some with partners, some with friends, some grimly alone, all just waiting. He heard them finally call my name and felt my hesitation just like I did. And when I turned to him in tears and told him I didn’t want to do it, he just hugged me real hard and took me home so I could tell my mother.
    Her reaction didn’t worry me. My mother had been wealthy and unconventional all her life. She was only eighteen when she fell in love with my father, a professional gambler twice her age. Horrified, her parents disowned her and moved to Florida. She married my father immediately, and when she got pregnant with me two years later, he bought her this house. She spent most of my childhood traveling with my father while I stayed with a series of nannies until I was thirteen and convinced them I could stay by myself.
    Once she determined having a baby was really what I wanted, the idea of a grandchild delighted her. She encouraged me to give up my ratty little student apartment and move in with her. She had plenty of space and she was lonely in that big old house. For my part, I was talking a lot bolder than I felt. I knew raising a child alone was a huge responsibility, and I had sense enough to welcome her assistance. As for the identity of the father, she didn’t press me. My mother and I settled on a version of
don’t ask, don’t tell
that suited us both.
    Too bad she wasn’t around tonight, I thought, opening the door of the West End News and stepping inside. Maybe she could help me make her granddaughter stop asking the one question I was not prepared to answer. In the meantime, I’d grab the
New York Times
and a few fashion magazines for Phoebe as a peace offering. Maybe spending a few hours with the rich, famous, and disturbingly thin would take her mind off her troubles and my past. Otherwise, it was going to be a very long night.

5
    When I got home, my daughter had left a short note:
I’m at Louis’s house. I’ll be late.
She didn’t even sign it. To tell the truth, I was relieved. Louis had limitless patience for Phoebe’s dramas, major and minor. I probably wouldn’t have survived her adolescence without him, and