My Dearest Friend Read Online Free PDF

to yourself to get your writing done. Do you like it?”
    “I love it, Carey Ann. This is really sweet of you. This is really thoughtful.” He kissed her.
    “Go on,” she said. “Sit down. Look at the view.”
    Jack sat on the old wooden chair in front of the card table and looked out at the sweep of valley. She just doesn’t have a clue, he thought. How could she imagine he’d ever have the time to write a novel when he was teaching such a heavy load at Westhampton? He didn’t want to hurt Carey Ann’s feelings, but God, didn’t she understand the first thing about his life? Now that he was married and had a child, now that his life was all turned around, he had to get tenure. He dreamed of tenure like Percival dreaming of the Holy Grail. Tenure meant security, a wonderful financial and emotional security that would set him free later to write his novel. If he could get tenure, he could get a sabbatical, and in seven years he’d have his year off to write. But getting tenure these days, especially at Westhampton College, was about as easy as getting hold of the Holy Grail. It required hard work and dedication and publications, not fiction, but critical essays in the best and most erudite journals. Publish or perish. If he did any writing, it had to be critical. And he wouldn’t have a chance to get to that sort of thing until Christmas vacation.
    No, he wouldn’t find time to write fiction for years.
    But now was not the moment to break this news to Carey Ann.
    Jack pushed back his chair, rose, took her in his arms again. “Thanks,” he said. “Thanks a lot.”
    They kissed, and moved closer to each other, and Jack would gladly have shut the door and made love to Carey Ann on the floor right then and there, but Alexandra came toddling into the room, waving a plastic elephant. Wanting to please his darling daughter, wanting to please his wife, he swooped Alexandra up in his arms and carried her upside down out into the living room. He roughhoused with her for an hour, giving her pony rides on his knees, tickling her till she howled, playing with her until he was exhausted. Then he gave her a long bath and put her to bed with her bottle.
    Later, though, when Jack and Carey Ann went up to bed, Alexandra awoke, as if from an instinctive alarm, called out, climbed out of her crib, came into their bedroom, and merrily climbed into bed with them. She sat between her parents, grinning happily.
    “I don’t know what to do.” Carey Ann sighed. “I can’t get her to realize she’s got to sleep in her own crib.”
    “Let’s just put her in there and shut the door,” Jack suggested.
    Carey Ann looked at him as if he’d just become one of the criminally insane. “We can’t do that! She’d cry. You know how she’s cried whenever we’ve tried it before.” She cuddled the baby against her. “Oh, Lord,” she said. “She’s wet again.”
    It was after eleven when they fell asleep, all three of them, in their chaste bed.
    The next morning was Friday, and Jack awoke at six-thirty. He had such a routine, had awakened so regularly for so many years now, that he almost couldn’t
not
wake up at six-thirty, except for a week or two in the fall and spring when daylight saving time threw him off.
    He looked over at Carey Ann, who looked dead. When she slept, her skin did the same weird thing Alexandra’s did: it paled out so completely that it seemed her heart had stopped pumping and had withdrawn all the blood in her body into a tight hot chamber in the center of her heart. If he touched Carey Ann now (which he wouldn’t—she’d cry with exhaustion if awakened so early), he knew she’d be hot at her stomach, burning at her crotch, but her face was so drained of color that it looked frosty. Her long blond hair was every which way all over the pillow, and her long eyelashes curled down onto her cheeks. She looked innocent, a child herself, too young and helpless to be taking care of another child.
    Alexandra lay