Through Thick and Thin Read Online Free PDF

the first ring, her logic being that if she always picks up the phone on the first ring, then maybe so will everyone else. Eventually, it’ll have a domino effect. Everyone will pick up the phone right away, it will be what people do, and she won’t ever have to sit idly waiting, listening to a ringing phone. And maybe next, if people start picking up their damn phones on the first ring, inspired by her good example, if she ever manages to improve the world in that way, she thinks she’d like to tackle being put on hold. Call waiting in general. She always feels as if there is so much to do, and she likes that feeling; sometimes she feels bad about it though, sometimes she feels as if she’ll never accomplish enough.
    “Hello?” she says. She hears a new sort of urgency, an acceleration in her voice, and it occurs to her that she’s worried, worried that it might be Josh calling to cancel.
    “What are you wearing?” Stephanie asks. Their conversations have never been hindered by the need for introductory “how are you?”s and “what’s new?”s , since there used to be so many of them. Meredith looks down at her painstakingly selected but resultantly uninspired ensemble. It seems almost too boring to describe, she’s disappointed at that.
    “What do you think I’m wearing? I’m wearing black,” she says.
    “Snappy,” Stephanie observes. Stephanie’s right, she’s snappy. She should be more excited than snappy. Shouldn’t she be more excited? Shouldn’t she be, frankly, head over heels excited that the man with whom she used to be head over heels in love with (at least she’d thought that’s what it was) has called and asked her out for Valentine’s Day?
    “Yeah, no. I’m fine,” Meredith says,
    “Are you nervous?” Stephanie inquires.
    “No, I’m just . . .” Meredith begins but doesn’t finish because she doesn’t know what should come next. She doesn’t know what she is right now, and hopes maybe this small feeling of dread that’s in the place of where the excitement should be, could actually just be nervousness after all. Nerves , she thinks. Nothing at all to worry about.
    “Look, if nothing else, it’s dinner at Bouley,” Stephanie offers cheerfully, the time-tested consolation to daters. If nothing else it’s dinner at, insert name of admired/sought after/artfully selected /hard-to-get reservations at/expensive restaurant here. People, even Stephanie it seems, forget that it’s not the same for Meredith, who can go to any restaurant she’d like, and pretty much does.
    “Right, dinner at Bouley is always nice,” Meredith agrees, because right now she wants to agree with Stephanie, wants to be of the same mind-set as Stephanie, for whom things so often work out nicely. She’d like, as she embarks on her evening, to bring some (if not quite a lot) of Stephanie’s goodwill, and good luck, along with her.
    “But, Steph,” Meredith says next, because she thinks maybe she should check, “how does it work?”
    “What’s that?”
    “How does it work?” she repeats. “I mean, can people really just come back?”
    She asks because she really would like to know, even though she doubts that Stephanie could be the one to tell her. Stephanie, who has been with Aubrey for so long, and who Meredith doesn’t think has any idea what it feels like to be left. As she waits for Stephanie to have a good answer—to say something along the lines of Sure, of course, look, they have, right? —she wonders about people coming back, and if you can in fact believe the things they tell you when they do.
    “Just see what happens. Really. Try not to think about it all so much,” Stephanie says, with a certain degree of earnestness, and Meredith considers it as an option, though not seriously. Meredith never listens, Stephanie knows this. Meredith thinks instead about what can and can’t be forgotten. “Really,” Stephanie adds, wanting to make her point, “it’s as good advice as