One True Thing Read Online Free PDF

incredulous. “My mother is sick,” I said to the managing editor, a stout, short man named Bill Tweedy, flushed from high blood pressure and hard drinking, who had worked in newspapers and had contempt for himself and for the rest of us because we had the luxury of having six days from start to finish in which to put out a publication.
    “Ellen,” he said, “not to be crass, but a sick mother means three weeks off and a very nice arrangement of flowers sent by the staff. You were doing good here. You did that nice short thing on the gay cop, the story on the girl who got murdered on Madison Avenue, that was a good piece. You did all the research on that kids-and-summer guide. If you quit, there’s no guarantee.”
    “I have to,” I said.
    “How about if I gave you a promotion?” he said. “More money?”
    “Mr. Tweedy, do you honestly think someone would come in and say their mother was dying of cancer to get a raise?”
    “Ellen, this is New York.”
    My friend Jules, my only real friend at the magazine or in New York, took me to lunch. Jules was fragile, physically and psychologically, too, but no one ever noticed because of the enormous aureole of black curls around her small pointed face, and the resonant timbre of her deep rich voice. Both made her seem like a big person, invulnerable and sure; the misapprehension that we shared those qualities had drawn me to her when we first met.
    But I came to know the real Jules, the one who pulled that hair back from her face and leaned forward to peer suspiciously at herself in the mirror, who fell in love, was broken by it, sat alone for weeks feeding herself on yogurt and show tunes, and fell in love again. I knew the Jules whose mother from her earliest memories had told her that she should never be disappointed by failure because failure was all you could expect.
    “This is a woman who would have told Abe Lincoln not to pursue a law degree,” Jules told me once.
    Jules loved me as I’d never been loved by a friend before, with full knowledge. She’d once been told by someone who had been a year ahead of me at Harvard: “Ellen Gulden would walk over her mother in golf spikes to succeed.” “Well,” Jules had replied, “I’m not her mother.” After I’d cleaned out my desk at the magazine she took me out for lunch and held my hand across the table.
    “Let them think we’re dykes,” she said disdainfully, glancing around at the buttoned-up men in deceptively wide and wild ties eating something tartar at the tables around us. “With the guys I meet, I only wish we were.” When I started to cry she passed me Kleenex filled with lint from her leather backpack. There was a green M & M stuck in one corner of the tissue. Jules was incredibly, proudly disorderly. There were often odd bits of old food and half-empty coffee cups on her bedroom nightstand. “Eat it,” she said of the M & M. “It will make you feel better.”
    “You have to do this,” she added, rubbing my fingers as though I was a child who had come in from the cold. “You would want your daughter to do it for you.”
    “Jules, what about my life?”
    “What about it? It’s not forever. Look, Ellen, I understand. Do you think in a million years I would want to move back into my mother’s apartment in Riverdale and listen to her go over all the ways in which Marvin and the floozy screwed up her life? But the truth is that she’s your mother, and she needs you for a while, and you get your life back at the end and you’ve done the right thing.”
    “My mother and I—”
    “Please,” said Jules, “okay? Just please. Your mother and you have a difficult relationship? Excuse me, but why wouldn’t you? Why should you be different from every other daughter in the world? Besides, she sounds like the only halfway decent mother in the world. Has she ever told you you need to lose weight?”
    “I’m a good weight.”
    “You see, there you go. The fact that you would think that you