The Cradle Robbers Read Online Free PDF Page A

and I was a Jersey girl who thought the sale rack at Abraham & Strauss was the height of luxury. It helped back then to cement our friendship that I was as smart as shewas. We competed on an even keel for a while, until I dropped onto the mommy track and she stayed on the bullet train to superstardom, becoming one of the most successful agents at International Creative Artists. What keeps Stacey and me together is loyalty and love. For all our differences, I know I can trust her with anything, even the grimmest and most repulsive secret of my life. She would stand by me through it all. And I feel the same way about her. Still, I can’t help but be jealous of the fact that we seem to be on opposite trajectories. Like a normal person, I get fatter and more wrinkled as we creep inexorably up the ladder of our thirties. Stacey gets thinner and ever more dewy and luminous. Pretty soon people are going to start thinking I’m her mother. And then, inevitably, her grandmother.
    “This is what I’m bringing,” she said, holding up a bottle of Château Guiraud Sauternes 1990.
    “Oh come on, Stacey. That’s a fifty-dollar bottle of wine.”
    “No, it’s a seventy-dollar bottle of wine that I’m getting for fifty bucks. If you tell the ladies that it was on sale, I’ll kill you.”
    Catering our book club has become something of a competitive sport. I lay the blame squarely onStacey. The first night she was hosting, she had to work late to close a deal, and instead of whipping up a pot of pasta or picking up some cheese and crackers at the supermarket, she instructed her assistant to arrange dinner for twelve. It was the young woman’s first and last week on the job, and I can still taste the poached lobster in ginger sauce. And that was just the first course. Since then, each hosting member has felt the need to ratchet up the level of hysteria, and the books we read are fast becoming beside the point. Pretty soon we’ll be dipping truffle fingers into foie gras. We’ve already done the blinis and caviar.
    The guests were each responsible for a bottle of wine to complement the hostess’s largesse, which explained our little shopping excursion. I picked up a bottle from the sale bin. “I’m bringing this. Long Vineyards Johannesburg Riesling. Eighteen dollars. Perfect. Generous, even. Maybe I can find something for under ten.”
    “Just buy the wine, Juliet,” Stacey said, tottering off in the direction of the cash register. I gazed longingly at her shoes. I think one of the things I miss most about working full-time as an attorney is the freedom to spend ridiculous sums of money onshoes. It’s hard to rationalize the expenditure when your days are spent on the playground or in a garage in Westminster. I fantasized for a moment about doing a worker’s compensation stakeout in a pair of Marc Jacobs slingbacks. I inevitably end up peeing in the bushes at least once or twice during a long day trapped in my car outside a malingering employee’s house, and I somehow doubt the designer took squatting and spraying into account when creating his satin prints. He definitely didn’t construct them for climbing up to the top of a play structure to retrieve a stranded toddler. And they aren’t finger paint–repellent. I’ve actually proved that. Or rather, Isaac has.
    Book club was in full swing by the time we arrived. Mine was by far the cheapest wine offering and, to Stacey’s dismay, hers was not the most expensive. Someone had left the $140 price tag on a bottle of Perrier-Jouët. I was quite relieved that I’d scraped off all evidence of my parsimony. Still, I don’t think my mother has
ever
spent even eighteen bucks on a bottle of wine. In my family, if it’s over $7.99 and has a cork, we keep it for a special occasion.
    Our hostess for the evening was someone I’d introducedto the book club. I’d met Frances at this little swim school I’d been taking the kids to for the past few years, way over in West L.A. The