Love in Mid Air Read Online Free PDF Page A

husbands have found a way to avoid being home on book club night. Kelly is fanning out brownies on a platter when I walk into
     the kitchen.
    “Look at these,” she says. “Just like a fucking magazine, huh?”
    “You amaze me,” I say, and it’s true. Kelly is liquid—her personality takes on the shape of any container you pour her into.
     She only started cooking when she married Mark, and now she’s probably the best hostess of the group. She’s the kind who will
     see a certain dish on the Food Channel and spend the whole morning tracking down obscure ingredients at the organic market.
     Kelly throws her heart into things. Kelly knows how to fill a day.
    “How was Phoenix? You haven’t said much about the trip.”
    “I cut it really tight on my connection in Dallas. I wasn’t sure my bag would even make it.”
    She turns to me, spatula in hand. “You’ve told me that part twice already. Why do I have the feeling there’s more to the story?”
    “I’ll tell you, but not with everybody else on the way.”
    She nods, gives me a quick distracted hug, and runs upstairs to put on a clean shirt. I sit in her designer kitchen with its
     speckled marble countertops and shiny potted herbs and catch myself smiling at the sight of an avocado perched on top of a
     wooden bowl. Kelly hates the way avocados taste but likes the way they look. “The texture’s fantastic, isn’t it?” she asks,
     sometimes rubbing one against my cheek for emphasis. “They’re so slick and bumpy.” So she buys an avocado every week for her
     fruit arrangement and at the end of the week she throws it out to the birds, a fact that infuriates her husband. Once Phil
     and I were over here for a cookout and Mark took the avocado out of the bowl and shook it in my face and said, “Do you know
     how much these goddamn things cost?”
    “Yeah,” I said. I know how much everything in this house costs. I probably know a lot more about it than he does. “They’re
     a dollar eighty-nine.”
    “Did you know she throws them out in the goddamn yard?”
    “Women do weird things,” Phil piped up helpfully. He tends to agree with everything that other men say, one of the personality
     traits I didn’t notice until after we were married. Plus, I think he’s a little intimidated by Mark. We all are. He always
     seems to be on the verge of losing his temper and he makes so much money.
    “Humph,” Mark said, smacking the avocado back into the bowl. “She acts like they grow on trees.”
    For the record, I did not meet Kelly at the church. Kelly and I go all the way back to high school and she’s my best friend,
     even though I am too old to call anyone a best friend and we’re careful not to flaunt our closeness in front of the others.
     At least we try not to flaunt it, but I know they can tell. It’s always like there are two conversations going, the one that
     everyone hears and then there’s the one between me and Kelly, the one that is just beneath the surface. It’s this unspoken
     conversation that makes other people nervous. They think we’re laughing at them, and sometimes we are, but mostly we’re just
     trying to figure something out. It’s like Kelly and I share a secret that neither one of us can quite remember.
    And there’s one other thing. Kelly is beautiful, so beautiful that people stop in their tracks just to watch her walk by.
     Sometimes, even after knowing her so long, I forget this and then I see her coming toward me and I am like those strangers
     on the street. Shocked by her blondness, dazzled by her height. Amazed by the ease with which she navigates the world, and
     I remember how I’ve spent twenty-five years wondering why someone so tall and thin and perfect would ever have wanted to be
     my friend. Because me, me at fourteen, I wasn’t that cool.
    I never even would have made cheerleading if it hadn’t been for her.
    T hat’s where we met, at tryouts in the summer before ninth grade. I’d cheered