The Barter Read Online Free PDF

tends to grimace and shrug and be generally dismissive. While Bridget tries not to take Mark’s tepid judgment of her friend as anything more than a lack of interest, she can’t help but feel betrayed, a little, in the sense that Gennie is exactly the kind of person Bridget is supposed to want to be now. Gennie is a choice, essentially, that she, Bridget, made in order to benefit all three of them, and Mark should at least try to be consistent in what exactly he’s after in a wife. If it’s not Gennie’s best qualities—her humor, her charm, her thinness, her creativity and patience on rainy days—then Bridget will have to admit something she’s not prepared to admit, beyond the obvious fact that Gennie is a person and not a symbol, a convenient one that Bridget herself has constructed. She’ll never be as good at this as Gennie, even though she is what Gennie is now, even if in her heart she suspects she’s not.
    Gennie checks her phone again for the time. “We have to go soon. You’re coming to the mommy yoga class, right?”
    â€œYep. My only exercise.”
    â€œYou get plenty of exercise just chasing her around,” Gennie says cheerfully.
    â€œDo I?” Bridget watches Julie plump herself down on the floor, in frowning study of a found, probably unclean plastic cup lid thatwill within moments make its way into her mouth. She honestly cannot think of a single occasion when she’s chased Julie around. Bridget thinks this is something that mothers of boys do and assume that all mothers do also, because otherwise they’d try to trade their sons in for girls.
    â€œWell, you’re doing something right. You look great.”
    Bridget manages not to roll her eyes, but as she removes the cup lid from Julie’s chubby fist, prompting a bellow from the girl, she is forced to acknowledge that this is precisely the sort of blithe, perhaps willful generosity that Bridget associates with Gennie, because Gennie is the one who looks great. She’s actually slimmer now than she was before she had Miles—Bridget has seen her wedding pictures, over at the house. Gennie has milkmaid skin, chestnut hair, and a twinkly air, and wears only delicate, handmade jewelry. Just looking at her makes Bridget happy. And, of course, jealous. But mostly happy.
    â€œGennie, you are a force for good,” Bridget says, again without quite thinking what she’s saying, but this time she means it.
    Gennie’s cheeks flush prettily, and she smiles with real pleasure. “So I guess that means I should go punch that huffy guy with the newspaper right in the neck.”
    *   *   *
    O h, it takes them many, many long minutes to gather all of their things, all of their snack cups and sippy cups and half-finished lattes. And the act of stuffing the rest of the apple crumb pastry that Bridget has forced herself to eat only half of into a paper sack and thence into the trash causes her a real pang (three dollars, plus think how delicious it would have tasted after yoga,warmed in the car by the sun), to add to the pangs already in process: The pang of guilt for poor Floppy Bunny, destined for some ghostly subsummation that Bridget can’t think about right now, not when an hour’s worth of normalness with Gennie and the kids have pushed the ghost to the back of her mind. An ongoing, aching pang of love, constantly tolling like a huge distant bell, for her darling baby. And with it, a similar, nonstop pang of low-level remorse or something like it for her old life and her old job, which wasn’t God’s work but was hers, in a way that she liked. Pangs for Mark, even, of the sexual, envious, and doubting varieties. Part of the reason she’s been going to yoga classes with Gennie is to try to recapture some of her own former spryness and energy, her
vim,
as they might have called it in the nineteen fifties, because some stubborn part of her