I'd Give Anything(41)

“Being your friend is so fun, Gin. It’s like one long party, really.”

“Come on. It’ll be cathartic.”

“Drinking wine is also cathartic.”

“Fine. I’ll bring wine.”

“Yay! And not to be insensitive, but did you inherit those super-huge Waterford goblets from your mom? Because you know how I like heavy stemware.”

“I did. And I do. But I think they’re for red wine, and all I’ve got is white.”

“Awesome. What better way to get revenge on Adela than use her glasses for the wrong wine?”

“Not to be insensitive.”

“God, of course not.”



My friend Kirsten has the reputation of being fundamentally unable to keep a secret, but that’s only partly true. She’s kept every secret I’ve ever told her since we were twelve years old, which is every secret I’ve ever had (minus one that I barely shared with myself before I erased it from my personal history forever and so doesn’t really count).

What she’s terrible—wretched, abysmal—at is keeping her own secrets. In high school, she cheated on every boyfriend she ever had, would tell me about it practically while her lips were still locked on the mouth of the forbidden guy, and swear me to secrecy. But within twenty-four (or four or two) hours, she would have spilled the story to everyone we knew, from her mother to her math tutor to Mr. Jones, the head maintenance worker at Lucretia Mott (who almost didn’t count because he was the most trustworthy human on the planet and the best listener and ended up on the receiving end of everyone’s secrets), to the poor, dumb, cuckolded boyfriend himself.

So it was not a surprise that we weren’t even halfway up the steep stairs to the garage apartment when Kirsten, two steps ahead of me, spun around, flung the back of her left hand in front of my face, just inches from my eyes, and screamed. I screamed, too, and grabbed her hand, and we performed a heartfelt, if highly, possibly life-threateningly precarious, dance for joy right there on the staircase.

“Isn’t it shiny?” she said, when we were settled on the couch in the garage apartment. She flipped her hand around in the air in the manner of a very enthusiastic conductor so that the emerald-cut diamond that used to belong to Tex’s grandmother scattered prisms all over the room.

“It almost blinded me. Literally almost put out my eye,” I said, and then I leaned over and kissed Kirsten’s cheek. “I’m deliriously happy for you, sugarplum.”

“There was a time, like twenty years, when I thought I’d have to ask you to be my matron of honor, which sounds so, you know, thick-waisted and dowdy, but now you can be my maid of honor, and I can be your matron of honor!”

“What about thick-waisted and dowdy?”

“I’ll be your newly married matron of honor, which is obviously totally different. Although if you don’t move fast, I might be sporting a baby bump under my matron of honor dress because the wedding’s in June, and we’re launching Operation Baby ASAP.”

“This June? Doesn’t it take forever to plan a wedding?”

Kirsten shrugged. “It’s possible that I got a jump on the planning a few months ago. Or six.”

“You started planning your wedding six months before you got engaged.”

“Only the location. And the caterer. And the florist. Anemones. Don’t you love anemones?”

“So you decided to hold off on choosing the napkins.”

“Pale pink damask, and I’m talking very pale, like the tights I wore for ballet when I was six. And don’t worry, I’ll share all my information with you for your next wedding. I’ve got a file as thick as a five-tiered Victoria sponge wedding cake decorated with sugared berries and floribunda roses.”

“That’s so nice of you,” I said. “But here’s a thought: Harris carried off his last box of stuff ten minutes ago.”

“Exactly. Times a-wastin’. Start dating, honey!”

“If by dating you mean going on dates, I’d rather poke needles—or three-carat diamonds—into my eyes.”

“You’ve always been a boy magnet. You’ll meet someone.”

“A boy magnet. My first boyfriend was gay and my second was Harris.”

“Third time’s a charm! Come on, there must be men you’ve been attracted to since the Harris blowup. UPS deliverymen. Or those cute newly divorced guys in the grocery store who are paralyzed in front of the peanut butter selection or stand there reading the labels of the egg cartons.”

To my horror, my face got hot, and I dropped my head before Kirsten could notice me blushing.

“Holy shit,” she said. “Who is he?”

“There’s no he, idiot.”

Kirsten folded her arms and looked at me, waiting. Kirsten, with her silver-dollar-size blue eyes, could win a staring contest with a dead person. I groaned.

“Shut up,” I said. “It’s not a big deal. My dog park friend, Daniel the vet.”

“The one you said you could say anything to?”

“Yes.”

“Is he good-looking?”

I pictured Daniel, backed by the green grass of the dog park, his gray eyes and dark hair and smile as heavenly as my dog Walt’s.

“He is. Very, actually. But it’s more that he’s so nice.”