Friends from Home Read online

  Mark raked a hand through his hair. “Uh, sure. But football actually starts tonight. I was thinking maybe we could go over to Josh’s apartment and hang out with some of the guys later?”

  “The guys” meant Mark’s friends from Penn, who had all grown up in the tristate area and moved back the second they had their diplomas in hand. They had always been nice enough to me and I liked them fine, though I didn’t see us becoming best friends; more than a few of them read the Goldman Sachs Elevator Twitter account unironically. They tolerated me in about the same way I tolerated them, gamely asking a question or two about the books I was working on, but only until they turned their attention to the sporting event of the moment on TV. They correctly assumed I wouldn’t mind.

  “Yeah, sure,” I acquiesced as I sipped the dregs of my beer. Mark still spent a lot of time with his college friends, whereas I tended to be more and more interested in spending time under a blanket reading. But that was part of why our arrangement worked. When I needed time by myself, he seemed perfectly happy to go out with his friends and then pick up right where we left off once we’d had a weekend apart.

  This time, though, I actually wanted a break from being inside my own head. “You know, after this weekend, I could definitely use some time off from thinking about weddings. Let’s go,” I told him. “Bring on the dudes and the wings.”

  * * *

  • • •

  The next morning, I woke up at seven with Mark still snoring next to me. He and Josh had drunk five beers to my two while we watched the Giants beat the Panthers in a meaningless preseason game. I rolled over slowly and quietly crept out to the living room on my tiptoes. After grabbing my book off the coffee table, I lay down on the couch to read and drink coffee until I had to get ready for work, stretching out to take advantage of the full three cushions. The worn-in sectional sofa dominated the space nearly from wall to wall, but the room didn’t feel claustrophobic; like many of the old warehouse-style buildings in East Williamsburg, it had a high-ceilinged, airy quality that reminded me of Michelle’s parents’ house back in Alabama, despite being about a hundredth of the size.

  I splayed open the book on my lap and positioned myself perfectly under a beam of morning sunlight, happy that neither Mark nor Terry and Demi had stirred yet. Ever since the discovery of “Goodbye to All That” in high school, reading true stories about someone else’s life—biographies, essays, didn’t matter—had always been my favorite way to spend a lazy morning. It was the only time I ever felt all my other thoughts quiet themselves at once. But before I even flipped the first page, my phone buzzed on the coffee table beside me.

  The message came from Darcy Palmer, but it had been sent in a group text to all Michelle’s newly named bridesmaids. It contained a link to one of those BuzzFeed listicles, entitled “You Know You’re from the South When . . .”

  Almost immediately, my phone started to vibrate with responses from Rebecca and Ellen, all of which were some variation on “so true, y’all.” Suddenly, my empty apartment felt very crowded. I hadn’t stayed close with anyone from our high school group of friends other than Michelle, but my relationship with her meant they were still fixtures in my life, acquaintances I saw once a year but still never seemed to know how to connect with.

  “Love my ’Bama girls!” Michelle chimed in with a heart.

  I clicked the link and was decidedly unsurprised to see I didn’t relate to the list at all. I wasn’t from Alabama originally, and I didn’t have any southern family. In college at Cornell I had never dressed up for a road trip to the Carolina Cup or—thankfully—gone to an Old South fraternity formal. I hadn’t seen a band in Nashville for years, and, as Michelle had pointed out, apparently I had stopped saying “y’all” without noticing. And I didn’t care.

  But I realized that Michelle thinking I had left her behind—or vice versa—did still bother me. I sent back two laughing emojis in a small sign of solidarity, and then I sent my own group text to Ritchie and Dana.

  “Drinks tonight? I know you’re both busy and important but plz plz plz.”

  They responded immediately, just like I knew they would. Then my phone buzzed a third time, but it wasn’t Ritchie or Dana, or even Michelle. It was my mom.

  I put my phone on do not disturb and picked my book back up.

  * * *

  • • •

  Before Alabama, my mom and I had been incredibly close.

  I slept in her bed on the first night in Langham, in our new, tiny, unfamiliar house, and, if I remember correctly, for several nights after that, too. Hundreds of miles away from the only home I’d known in Cleveland, she’d pull us close together under the comforter and say, “Well, aren’t we just two peas in a pod?” I felt both deeply loved and paralyzed with fear, because “two” felt like a very small number against the world. It also meant that our third wasn’t coming back.

  It wouldn’t be accurate to say that I had ever really known my father well, or that I could miss him in any kind of specific way I could attribute to his individual characteristics rather than the general “dadness” he represented. In Cleveland, he had been in and out of our house regularly. He worked in sales, and he traveled for days or sometimes weeks at a time. I learned later that some of these trips had been for work and some had not. Of course, I had no idea at the time how disruptive it all was. At age four or five, I assumed that all fathers disappeared for long periods and then reappeared at random, popping through our front door like a jack-in-the-box and offering presents or fantastical stories before disappearing into the bedroom to “sleep off the jet lag.”

  He was a regional salesman, another thing I learned later. There were no time differences.

  The truth is, when he finally left us for good, I didn’t even notice at first. I assumed he had taken off on another long trip, and my mom didn’t correct me, at least not right away. It was May, so I remember waiting for school to end and playing tag with my neighbor Kyle, mostly. As May turned to June, my mom spent more time in her room, or in the bathroom on the cordless phone with the door locked. This wasn’t completely unusual—my mom had cycled through what we referred to back then as “her moods” ever since I could remember. But still, I must have known something was more wrong than usual, because I remember being afraid to knock on her door and ask her for a dollar for the ice-cream truck on a sweltering day at the beginning of summer vacation.

  Then one day my dad walked in the door, and I thought I had been silly to worry. But as it turns out, he was back just for a day. They wanted to tell me together that they were splitting up. We would have to give up the house, they explained, but it would be okay. As if it were that simple.

  “We’ll be getting a brand-new house!” my mom exclaimed, too much desperation in her enthusiasm for it to be convincing. “Won’t that be fun? Daddy can’t come right now because of work. He has to travel. But it’ll be an adventure for just you and me, Julie.”

  I didn’t cry when they told me, I am sure of that, but not of much else. I don’t remember what that moment felt like, not in the way that I can access so many other parts of my emotional life as easily as I can flip to a page in a book, and so I can only assume that I didn’t fully understand what was happening. My father stayed the day, just a few hours past that conversation, and then he was gone. At the end of the month, I was shocked to find out that we were moving to Alabama, where Mom had found a job through the old friend I’d never heard of. Just the two of us, peas in a pod. Dad would probably call soon, my mom said, as I struggled to fall asleep in her bed that first night in Langham. It was just that he was so busy.

  I was afraid to ask any more questions and afraid to start school, but I tried to believe that things would work out. My mom would take care of things; my dad would call. Maybe he would even come back. I could survive until then.

  Then two things happened at once: I met Michelle, and my mom met a man.


  Daniel. Close-cropped hair, tailored jacket, hulking frame. She met him at work, I think. He was the first, as it turned out, of many. There were so many short-lived relationships in the intervening years that it was hard to remember specifics about any of them. My main mental picture of him is of his suit buttons. They were what fell at eye level for me. My mom started to drop me off at Michelle’s house, grateful I had made a friend so quickly, for the free babysitting if for nothing else. I didn’t mind her dating. It was the irregularity that bothered me. I would beg for a sleepover at Michelle’s, and my mom would tell me no, that she’d be back to pick me up later that same night. Then, inevitably, she would call the Davis house to extend her date into the next morning, and Marcia would come into Michelle’s room to rumple my hair and say, “Guess what, pudding? Looks like you can stay the night after all.” Once or twice I caught her muttering something under her breath after she delivered this news, but Michelle and I would just grin at each other and rush to pull out the trundle from under her ornate canopy bed. I was in awe of Michelle’s dollhouse-style furniture. Marcia and Rich, Michelle’s dad, would both come into her room to watch us perform a dance or host a talent show, clapping at our antics as fervently as if they were at a Broadway performance.

  I wanted to be someone’s “pudding.” I wanted the trundle bed. I wanted that family. And when I was with Michelle, I got to pretend I had those things.

  But I missed my own family, too, sometimes. Finally, I asked to call my dad. It had been months since he’d left.

  “Julie.” My mom looked past me, staring over my shoulder out our kitchen window. “The number he gave me isn’t in service. But don’t worry, I’m sure he’ll call us when he has time.”

  “Let me try the number.”

  “No.” She walked past me into the living room, uncharacteristically brusque. I followed her.

  “Mom, come on. If it’s really out of service, then why can’t I try it?”

  Silence.

  “Where is he?”

  She either didn’t know or wouldn’t tell me.

  “It’s not fair!” I yelled, storming around the corner into my room and flopping down on the thin quilt covering my twin bed. I wanted a plush comforter like Michelle’s. Envy mixed with fear. I felt something unspooling inside me, the threads that had held my life together coming loose. “You can’t keep me from talking to him just ’cause you’re mad! What if he doesn’t even know we’re here? You’re lying about something!”

  “Julie, don’t you think if I knew exactly where he was I’d go there? There are things I need from him, too, you know!”

  I believed this at first. We had been a family once, eating Sunday-night dinners around our old, cramped kitchen table in Cleveland and picnicking in the park on my dad’s odd days off. My mom must have missed him, too. When I thought of it that way, I blamed my dad. But then I thought of Daniel, my mom’s frequent disappearances, how hasty our move had been. Maybe I couldn’t trust her. But for the time being, I just said, “Okay, I know,” and buried my face in my pillow until she left my room. Something changed between us then. I now know that, in her own way, she was trying to protect me. But I wonder if she’d been honest with me then, we might have had a different relationship now.

  And so David O’Brien, whose name I bore even as it caused confusion and whispers around Langham about my family, remained a mystery for almost ten years. My mom continued dating; I continued my twice-weekly sleepovers with Michelle. My father receded into the background. That is, until one day in the Langham High School library in the middle of my sophomore year, when a Google search finally turned something up. A David O’Brien, of the proper age and profession, was living in Chattanooga, Tennessee, just north of the state line. Maybe he had been there the whole time. I told this to Michelle in the hallway outside our English class, watched her eyes widen. I leaned against the lockers, arms crossed, trying to posture like I didn’t really care. It was just interesting information, I said.

  But Michelle saw through this immediately. She grabbed my hand. “Julie,” she said in a breathy voice. “When I get my driver’s license next month . . .”

  She didn’t have to finish the sentence; I knew. “And it’s only a two-hour drive,” I answered her.

  CHAPTER 5

  Dana met me outside my office on Twenty-First Street that night after work. We hugged hello, and she led the way down Broadway toward Union Square, dodging traffic while still typing furiously on her work phone.

  “Ritchie said she’s already at the bar,” I told Dana. Or, more accurately, I told her shoulder; she had three inches on me in flats, so she really towered over me in her workplace heels. Even wearing them, she outpaced me with her long stride, barreling down the street as I loped half a beat behind.

  “Well then, come on,” she said. “I don’t want to miss the one-dollar oysters. Happy hour ends at seven.” I kept pace as we crossed Nineteenth Street, and I looked over at her as we passed under the shadow of the multistory Equinox that stood at the intersection. With her glossy hair and Saint Laurent bag, it was easy to see her as a million “New York woman” clichés come to life.

  She had intimidated me the first few times I saw her on our freshman floor at Cornell, walking around in silk camisole pajama sets and a towel tied expertly around her head. Then I ran into her at an off-campus kegger and she hugged me like we were old friends, asked why we hadn’t hung out yet, and then gamely grabbed my legs to lift me into a keg stand. As it turned out, she was easy to be around—fast-talking, brash, loudly opinionated, and different in so many ways from most of the girls I had grown up with. It’s probably why I liked her so much.

  Even though she no longer intimidated me, her ambition was still cutting. She had signed on at Davis Polk immediately after graduating from NYU Law, and her first months of billable hours marked as much time as I had probably worked all year. It reminded me of something she’d said about New York when I had first moved there: “Everyone here is hungry for something,” she told me. “Ambition is the only thing we all have in common.”

  “They’re out for blood, is what it really is,” I responded, and she snorted. But the reality was that I wanted to be one of them. I wanted to build a real life in this city, a life greater than the one I had arrived with. I just needed to figure out how to do it.

  “Fuck this fucking phone,” Dana said, dropping the device into her bag as we walked up to the bar entrance. It was the first thing she had said aloud in ten blocks.

  “So it was a good day, huh?” I joked, pulling the door open for her.

  “Actually, I’ve had worse. This is the first time I’ve even tried to go anywhere before nine o’clock in a month.”

  “At least my version of overtime is reading in bed.”

  Ritchie waved at us from a high-top table next to the bar, having reserved us the last available spot in the place. She had her thick black hair pulled back in a sleek chignon, and she wore her recently purchased red-framed glasses—a trend she shamelessly admitted she had copied from Ali Wong, who happened to be both Chinese and Vietnamese like her. They looked chic paired with her artistic but serious wardrobe of sharp-cut suits and asymmetrical dresses. She held up her glass in a “cheers” gesture, and I could see that she was already halfway through her first bourbon.

  “You know a good way to get guys to stop hitting on you?” she said by way of hello as we sat down.

  “What?” I asked.

  “Telling them you work at Goldman.” When I met Ritchie in a humanities distribution requirement our freshman year at Cornell, she had been a graphic design major. She had the best eye for design of anyone I knew—her East Village apartment looked straight out of Architectural Digest—but by our sophomore year she had pivoted to economics with design as a minor. She signed on at Goldman right after her intern summer, with a plan to save up money for a few years and then strike out on her own to sta
rt a design firm. If anyone could do it, it would be her.

  “Wait, what happened?” Dana asked.

  Ritchie tilted her head subtly in the direction of the bar. “See that tall guy at the bar? He was over here hitting on me, asking what bourbon I’m drinking, whatever. And then he asks what I do. I tell him, and suddenly he remembers he was ‘meeting a friend at the bar’ and cuts me off midsentence.”

  “Maybe he was meeting a friend at the bar.”

  Ritchie snorted. “Is his ‘friend’ that twenty-year-old blond girl he’s chatting up now?”

  “Round of drinks says she’s a PR assistant,” Dana said. “I’ll ask.”

  “Nah, who gives a shit. Having a good job weeds out the weak. If they can’t handle it, then bye,” Ritchie said, as Dana waved her arm to try to flag down a waitress. “There’s nothing wrong with the PR girl. But there is something wrong with the guys who can’t date a woman who works more or makes more than they do.”

  “Hear! Hear!” Dana said. “But there are worse problems than complaining that we make too much money,” she added, shooting Ritchie a look as I gave a halfhearted smile. “Let’s get drinks.”

  Ritchie refilled her bourbon, Dana ordered a martini, and I, the perpetual lightweight of the group, got a glass of white wine. We caught up about work and traded stories about mutual friends from Cornell. But when Ritchie brought up a couple from the year ahead of us who had just gotten engaged, Dana told me it was time to spill the details about Michelle’s wedding.

  “So, maid of honor, huh?” Dana asked. “Good luck. I did it for my sister last year and it was . . . a lot. Remember?”

  After weeks of stress leading up to the wedding, Dana’s sister, Jane, had gotten so drunk at the rehearsal dinner that she had spilled a glass of champagne on her future mother-in-law and thrown up all over the front porch of the upscale bed-and-breakfast. Dana had stayed up the rest of the night doing damage control with the venue, and then we spent the next morning plying Jane with Pedialyte so that she wouldn’t be too hungover to make it through the outdoor summer ceremony.