Rise and Shine Read Online Free PDF Page B

his face reflected in the glass. He looked exhausted, maybe even ill.
    “Ev?” I said.
    “Bridge?” he replied. We’ve known each other a long time, Evan and I. Meghan tucked her hand through the crook of his arm. His bony fingers began to play a tattoo on the leg of his tuxedo pants. But still he kept his head turned away.
    “We’ll be in the Caribbean in a week,” Meghan said. “A week of no calls and no meetings and no snow. A week of reading and tennis and snorkeling.”
    “Sounds good to me,” I said.
    “I wish Leo could come. He gets back from Barcelona and goes right up to Amherst to work on some big English paper. His life is as crazy as ours.”
    “His life is great,” I said, still looking at the back of Evan’s head. His hair had gotten thin on top. I hadn’t really noticed it before.
    I tripped over the curb on the way to my apartment building, fumbled for my key in my clutch bag. “Bridge,” Meghan called, leaning forward. “Bridget!”
    “What?”
    “Paillettes.”
    “What?”
    “The things on the dress. That’s what they’re called. Not sequins. Paillettes.”
    “How did you finally remember?” I asked.
    She shook her head. Meghan describes her hair color as auburn. She hates it when anyone says it’s red. Her hair is red. So is mine. “I had someone at the office look it up. P-A-I-L-L-E-T-T-E-S.” And as if they heard their names called, the sparkling circles undulated as she leaned forward, Northern lights in the backseat of a Town Car.
    “Accepted and acknowledged,” I called as I unlocked the door.
    “It was like the end of an era,” I said several days later to Irving as footage of Meghan in the dress ran over and over on the news.
    “Get a grip, kid,” he replied. “We’re not talking World War Two here.”

         
     
     
    B AD NEWS COMES to you in strange ways in New York. Before a friend can tell you about the lump she found, you’ve run into a friend of a friend at the pharmacy, and you already know about the suspicious mammogram and the exploratory surgery. Before someone has gotten to your name in the Rolodex to tell you he’s leaving the rat race to spend more time with the kids, you’ve overheard gleeful associates talking at the next table about how he was canned, his office cleaned out in less than an hour. You see the hook and ladder and learn of the fire, the yellow tape and know about the murder.
    I got my bad news at the home of the nicest rich people in New York, Kate and Sam Borows. They had written a city restaurant guide that made them wealthy, and in the process they had become the best sorts of philanthropists, with not a hint of “get out the ball gown” self-congratulation. When I’d first met them through my sister, they’d lived in the same building they live in now, in a spacious apartment that had become an enormous one as they’d annexed a studio and two one-bedrooms on either side and a three-bedroom apartment above. When I’d gone to work for WOW, Kate had done some variation on the wish-there-was-something-I-could-do lament, and I’d told her she could come up to the Bronx a couple days a week and teach nutrition and cooking. It had been five years, and she’d placed at least fifty women in good jobs in restaurants and caterers, and she never mentioned it in interviews unless we wanted her to thump for WOW for our own purposes.
    “Bridget,” she said when I walked in on Monday evening and struggled out of my coat for the catering guy–cum-actor. “I didn’t think you’d come.”
    “I told you last Saturday night that I was coming,” I said as I handed her a bottle of red wine, which she handed off along with my coat.
    “Oh, my God,” she said, hugging me, and then the elevator was back, emptying directly into her foyer as the elevators of the wealthy do, so that no one will be subjected to the shared space of the hallway, the smells of strange cooking, the sight of strangers with their keys in the locks.