That Summer by Jennifer Weiner (free e reader txt) 📗

It was closer to a year and a half, but she wanted to make it clear that she’d married Hal because she wanted to, and not because she’d needed to.

“Mazel tov,” said Hannah, and licked her fingers.

“How old are you?” asked Daisy.

“How old do you think I am?”

Daisy took her honest guess and revised it downward by two years. “Thirty?”

“Ha! I’m thirty-five. A crone!” Hannah patted her lips with her napkin and looked around for their waiter. “Do they have ice cream here?”

They ended up at Scoop DeVille, where they shared a banana split, and when Hannah said, “Do you want to meet up and go for a walk tomorrow?” Daisy hadn’t even had to think about it.

“Yes,” she’d said.

Daisy knew that she and Hannah were going to be friends. She’d hoped that Hal and Hannah’s husband, Eric, would like each other; that they could be couples who did things together, but they’d never really meshed as a foursome. Hal said he liked both of the Magees, but Daisy could tell that he was irritated by Hannah’s loudness, her brassy voice, the way she never wore makeup or heels and would ask anyone anything. Her house was comfortable in Daisy’s opinion, “a mess” in Hal’s (and Daisy had to admit that there was a certain amount of dog hair on, and in, things at the Magees). As for Eric, Daisy figured her husband would dismiss a male nurse as a man who hadn’t been able to make it through medical school, a man who probably wasn’t as smart or accomplished and who definitely wasn’t as well-off as he was. “If you like them, that’s what matters,” he’d said after an uncomfortable dinner at the Shoemaker house, where Eric had done his best to act interested in bass fishing, and Hal had barely tried to act like he cared about European League soccer, which was Eric’s passion. “They’re your friends, not mine.”

It turned out that the group that clicked didn’t involve Hal at all, but Daisy and her brother and Danny’s husband, Jesse. Jesse worked in an art gallery and taught dance, and Danny was a counselor at a high school in Trenton. Every month or two, they’d all meet for dinner, sometimes in the city, sometimes in Lambertville or New Hope, or at Daisy’s house, where Daisy could cook. For years, Daisy had been trying to coax the Magees out to the suburbs. “Forget it, I’m not going to the dark side,” Hannah would say. Still, every time Daisy saw a listing for a house she thought would work, she’d text the listing to Hannah, and Hannah would text back GET THEE BEHIND ME SATAN.

And then her friend had died. “Bad news, kiddo,” Hannah had said on the phone one afternoon, her normally ebullient voice so muted that Daisy almost hadn’t recognized it. “The docs found a lump.” She’d named it—of course she had—but even after Larry the Lump had been excised, even after a round of radiation and three months of chemotherapy, there’d been more lumps. Son of Larry, and Return of Larry, and Larry Two: Electric Boogaloo. Then they’d found masses in her liver, and spots on her lungs, and Hannah had stopped making jokes.

“I don’t think I’m going to beat this,” she said. She’d lost her hair and thirty pounds by then, and was sitting in bed, her tiny frame swimming in a flannel nightgown, with thick fleece socks on her feet. “To the extent that it was ever a battle or a war, I’m pretty sure my side isn’t winning.”

“Yes, you are. Don’t say that!” Daisy had taken her hand. “Zoe needs you. Eric needs you.” She’d swallowed hard. “I need you.”

“Oh, kiddo.” Hannah had squeezed her hand, but her eyes were far away, and Daisy thought, She’s already only mostly here. Part of her is already gone. She’d thought Hannah had fallen asleep, but then her friend had licked her lips and opened her eyes again.

“I need you to promise me something,” Hannah had said.

“Of course,” Daisy said. “Of course. Anything.”

With a visible effort, Hannah rallied herself. She’d licked her dry lips again and said, “I’ve already given Eric permission to remarry,” she said. She stared up into Daisy’s eyes, her cold hands feeling claw-like as she pulled Daisy closer. “But you have to promise—and this is my sincere dying wish, so you have to swear to me—to keep him away from that whore Debbie Conover.”

Daisy started laughing. Then she’d started crying. Sniffling, she’d squeezed her friend’s hand. “I promise,” Daisy said. “I promise.”

Three days later, Hannah had died. A few months after that, Eric had put their row house on the market, and he and Zoe had moved to Wisconsin, to be closer to his parents. Daisy missed her friend with a pain that felt physical, a wound that refused to close. She had plenty of acquaintances, other moms she could call up for coffee or a barre class, but Hannah had been her only real friend.

In preparation for her meeting with Diana, Daisy had done her googling, but she hadn’t learned much. Diana.S@earthlink was Diana Starling, the founder and principal of a business called DS Consultants. She had a website, but it was full of lingo that Daisy, as a non-businessperson, found completely incomprehensible. We help our clients transform and evolve in our fast-moving modern age and embrace transformation and disruption as a continuous way of working. She knew what each of those words meant, on its own. Combined, though, they might as well have been a language she’d never learned.

There was a picture of the other Diana on the website, a headshot of a middle-aged white woman with dark hair and a confident look about her. The “about our principals” page listed her degrees: undergraduate from Boston University, MBA from Wharton, and no information about when those degrees had been awarded. From what she knew about the working world, Daisy supposed it made sense. Young women were seen as ditzy and clueless