With Friends Like These: A Novel Read Online Free PDF

It’s true that when my birthday rolled around last month, Arthur wasn’t playing at four-star level. Not that a woman doesn’t appreciate an inflatable travel pillow, but she’d also like the trip to go with it.
    “I’m working on it,” I said as our food arrived. Quincy liberated two fries, then three more. Forget married; I’d settle for her metabolism. “Arthur strikes me as the type who’ll learn to respond to my powers of persuasion.”
    I have my own set of rules to follow—Jules’ Rules. I recognize what I want—which may explain why I’m self-employed and live alone—and recognize when I’m right, which occurs on an uncannily regular basis.
    “If you like Arthur, I like Arthur. You know I wish you only the best.” Quincy has proven this. When Ted dumped me, it was she who’d dragged me out of bed and listened day and night, in person, by phone, by text, and by e-mail, as I deconstructed where he and I had gone astray and figured out how I could reconstitute my granulated self-esteem. We have our differences, blah, blah, blah, but Quincy, Chloe, and Talia are true friends.
    “How’s the book?” I asked.
    “
Crazy Maizie
?” she said, stuffing more
frites
in her pretty little mouth. “Forget the book. Something much bigger and better’s happening.”
    “Oh, my God,” I said. She was pregnant. Quincy and Jake had been trying for several years. She’d had two miscarriages, and after each she’d retreated into a private funk. “Tell me all about it,” I said as I swiped a glance at her stomach. It looked as concave as ever.
    While it isn’t on my own to-do list, motherhood consumes Chloe and Talia. Quincy wanted to join their tribe, trading belly-button-baring maternity clothes and pontificating about kiddy joggers and organic teething biscuits. I’ve never been able to understand the gravitational pull most women feel toward wanting to reproduce—people say
I’m
narcissistic?—but I’ve learned the hard way to keep my big mouth shut. “Tell me everything,” I said.
    “It needs a complete gut job and isn’t huge, but the minute I looked outside I had that
Time and Again
sensation, like this was my destiny, as if I’d lived there in an earlier life. That’s how much I love it.”
    It took a few seconds for my wires to connect. “An apartment,” I said, like a cretin. I might have guessed. During the past year Quincy had Monday-morning-quarterbacked countless open houses whose apartments she blew off as either too dark, too small, or too graceless. This was when she wasn’t being outbid, which had happened to her every time she tried to buy something.
    “Not just
an
apartment,” Quincy mimicked. “
The
apartment.”
    “Which building?”
    Quincy had a look on her face that I could imagine on mine only if someone was begging for my hand in marriage. “Arthur’s,” she said, “and the apartment has a view of the reservoir.” Which Arthur’s does not.
    Everyone wishes they lived in a building like Arthur’s, collecting their mail alongside boldface names as well as those simply stinking rich. I’d stopped counting the times he’d retold the story of how perspicacious he was to buy his apartment two decades ago, because now its price tag was in the ozone. He’d rattle on. If he sold, he could make a killing, the number growing with each telling of the tale. The vexing question was, where would he move? Arthur had arrived in his neighborhood when it was a dump, but now he couldn’t bear the thought of migrating to a lesser address. He was trapped by entitlement.
    But I was confused. “Isn’t that building pricey?” Yes, I was indelicate, but Quincy is an old friend, and unless something had recently changed in her fiscal spreadsheet, Arthur’s building was out of her league.
    “That’s the other half of the miracle—we can afford this particular place.”
    Had Jake’s year-end bonus arrived with zeroes she’d forgotten to mention? Had another relative died