Breaking the Bank Read Online Free PDF Page A

so tolerant; she missed the judgmental, scathing Stuart of her youth.
    M IA HAD, IN recent months, contemplated asking Stuart for a loan. He could certainly afford it. He was a corporate lawyer and lived with his corporate lawyer wife, Gail, in Greenwich, Connecticut. They both made serious money and owned a big, pretentious house with a big, pretentious swimming pool, to which Mia and Eden had been invited exactly once. Gail’s repeated attempts at in vitro fertilization—many thousands of dollars a pop, none of it reimbursed by health insurance, of course—eventually resulted in two sets of twins, a quartet of wan, fair-haired girls called Marguerite, Cassandra, India, and Skyler. In their coordinated hand-smocked dresses and velvet hair bands, they smiled frozenly out of the annual holiday card Gail sent to her two hundred and fifty closest friends and business associates. Mia knew that Gail wanted her precious, pampered daughters to have as little to do with their weird, child-of-divorce cousin, Eden, as possible.

    â€œShe’s terribly precocious, isn’t she?” Gail had said during that ill-fated visit. “Precocious,” in Gail’s lexicon, was code for “perverted little sex-obsessed tramp.” Her comment had been prompted by Eden’s having drawn purple pubic hair and cherry-colored nipples on Cassandra’s Barbie doll. Never mind that when presented with Eden’s handiwork, Cassandra had shown more animation than she had all day; the child was so without affect that Mia had secretly wondered whether she might be borderline autistic.
    Mia disliked her sister-in-law, a relentlessly organized achiever with streaked blond hair, waxed eyebrows, and a gumball-sized diamond engagement ring at which Mia had seen her gaze, rapt and besotted, as if into the face of her newborn child. Gail, Stu had confessed, was a person who actually scheduled sex with him into her iPhone.
    â€œAnd the reason you put up with this is . . . ?” Mia asked when he told her at one of their infrequent lunches near his Park Avenue law firm.
    â€œWe have a very powerful . . . connection,” he said. Mia thought he looked embarrassed; he took a nervous sip of his imported bottled water.
    â€œYou mean sexual?”
    â€œYeah. Sexual.”
    He turned pink with the disclosure. Mia had trouble believing his sudden modesty—this was the brother who used to make elaborate charts rating and ranking the various body parts of the girls he wanted to screw.
    â€œWhat, she’s so great?”
    â€œNot great.” He put down the water glass with a muffled but still emphatic thump. “Incredible.”
    Mia, both jealous and unconvinced, said nothing.
    Stuart’s defection to the corporate ethos and his marriage to the über-corporate Gail was an ongoing loss for Mia. Stu was only fifteen months her senior, and they had been inseparable throughoutchildhood and adolescence. Stu was the one who had shepherded her through all the major teenage rites of passage like cutting school, smoking pot, and drinking. The first boy she’d ever slept with, Josh Horowitz, was Stu’s best friend, and as soon as Josh’s breathing had slowed sufficiently to roll away from her, she had gotten up and found a phone so she could call her brother to tell him about it. When Stu went off to Oberlin, Mia spent the first couple of months without him in a kind of quiet mourning, but she pulled herself together and managed to follow him there the next fall. His decision to go to law school was initially puzzling, but it had not interrupted their continued closeness; when he came home, they still holed up in his room the way they always had, sharing a bottle of Heineken or a joint.
    Now it felt like there was a chasm between them. Stu still called her, though always from his cell phone or from work, never from home. But their lives had diverged, leaving Mia circling kind of forlornly at the perimeter