The Secret Keeping Read Online Free PDF

Oh, ask the waiter for her name. But how would I explain it? I don’t think I could! What am I thinking?
    All this time Delilah had been gabbing away at her. It was when she stopped that Lydia suddenly remembered her friend again. She saw her posed with her legs crossed, her hands clutched around her knees, wearing an insightful smile that Lydia wished to avoid. She smiled weakly back at her.
    The music drifted over their heads and they sat eyeing each other, jostled in their chairs by people on missions to the dance floor or the bar. At their own table, their friends, oblivious, continued to shout and dare and cheer themselves on.
    “You’re being a Neanderthal, Liddy. I really mean it.”
    “I am?” A nervous laugh. “I don’t know what you mean, Del.”
    “No?” Delilah leaned forward and Lydia felt compelled to do the same.
    “Did you know, Dame Beaumont, that here on earth where most of us reside most of the time, that we are all perfectly safe from the destructive power of solar flares?”
    “Del, I don–”

    “That’s because I’m not done. But that if you were actually to be near one, my dear friend, act-u-al-ly near one, Lydia…Neanderthal…Beaumont…you’d be dead in a matter of hours. Huh? I’ll bet you didn’t know that. I want you to think about it while we both get drunk here. I want you to roll it over in your mind,” she said, raising her glass, “and I want you to respond in complete sentences.”
    Solar flares…Lydia sipped at her wine thoughtfully. The window seat was filled once more, this time with a loud and frolicking foursome. Neanderthal Beaumont, that’s kind of funny. How should she respond?
    Probably best to say nothing, since something clever was out of the question. I’m out of my mind. Is that a complete sentence? She glanced at Delilah as she filled her glass again. Up at the bar she saw Joe trying to make her feel naked. It was easy to ignore him tonight for some reason. Peering back at her from behind the counter Marlene Dietrich looked as cool as a cucumber in a big, black and white poster that boldly declared THE DEVIL IS A WOMAN. The devil a woman? Nah, Lydia doubted it. Pure nonsense. What could they possibly mean by that? She glanced at Delilah sipping her wine, waiting patiently. She’d know the answer.
    Lydia still had nothing to say. She gazed into Marlene’s steely eyes. There was another poster beside that one portraying the actress as BLOND VENUS. Blond Venus. So what’s so weird about that? Isn’t Venus blond?
    _____

    The women had met and become friends while finishing their MBAs. Delilah was the senior of the two.
    Now, over forty and solidly single, she managed her personal affairs much as she handled matters at the bank she ran. Lydia, on the other hand, had never been committed to such a lifestyle. It had simply developed in that direction with the financial markets her primary focus in life.
    It was in that capacity that she had met an underling named Joseph Rios, who quickly knocked her out of sorts, as Delilah liked to put it. Before then, no fraternizing. That had always been Lydia’s policy in the past.
    She had made a fatal exception. Prior to that unhappy event, the two women had seemed like philosophical twins, stoics, taking comfort in each other’s company whenever things got hairy, discussing and dismissing professional or personal difficulties as they occurred. A problem was a mere conundrum or a ridiculous quandary, never a quagmire like Rio Joe had become, faithless Rio Joe. The relationship had made Lydia different, changing her for the worse and even now it was impossible to be of any assistance to her because she refused Delilah’s confidence. She could only guess that Joseph Rios had devastated her friend as months had passed since she had broken it off and she was still not fully recovered yet. And recovery seemed nowhere in sight.
    There had never been any secrets between Lydia and Delilah, aside, perhaps, the sticky