So Milly simply didn’t reply for five days. That felt like the decent thing to do because she just didn’t know what to say.
“She’s probably waiting to hear from you,” Gallegos said when she told him about it the next day.
“I don’t know if she’s doing the right thing,” Milly said.
“Can I ask you, Milly? Can I ask you how you really felt when you heard the news?”
“I felt: Don’t tell me you’re going to do that to those kids,” she said to Gallegos. “Just for another book.”
Gallegos challenged her on that. “Here’s your best friend and it’s always been a certain way between the two of you and now it’s probably going to change. She’s probably not going to be able to come to New York as much as she used to. You might need to go out there to see her, help her with the kids.”
“Oh, I hate it out there. It’s still so fake and plastic to me, even though it’s all supposedly become like Brooklyn but with constant sunshine. But obviously some aspect of life out there appeals to her, because she’s never come back to New York.”
Gallegos rolled his eyes in that way that he did. “I’m asking if you’re afraid you’re going to lose the friendship.”
Milly laughed a bit. “I think I’ve told you the friendship’s already been fading the past few years,” she said. “She’s allergic to sadness. If you can’t just make lemons into lemonade and be grateful for whatever happens to you, Drew doesn’t have a lot of patience for you. It’s all about being grateful with Drew. Grateful, grateful! I’m sure she’s just grateful she’s having these kids, she’s thanking the universe, and she’s not thinking about these kids when they’re twenty or thirty.”
“Listen carefully to yourself,” Gallegos said. “You’re starting to cut the cord with your best friend of thirty years.”
For better or worse, that thought stuck with Milly over the next several days. She felt quite chastised by Gallegos. Finally, she picked up the tablet. But she could not figure out how she wanted her own voice to sound when Drew picked up or if it went to voice mail. So she pulled up a text box. “Oh my God!” she pinged. “Awesome news! Keep me posted! xo Mills.” And she sent it.
Five minutes later, Drew pinged back: “Uh. . that’s it? No call after six days?:(”
Oh, shit, thought Milly. “I was digesting,” she pinged back. Well, that was honest, right? Should she have to be fake?
Drew didn’t ping back, which Milly thought was pretty rude. She was probably too busy, Milly thought. She’d probably interrupted Drew while she was blogging to all the people who hung on her every word. And basically because Drew blogged or tweeted or CoffeeDated every single moment of her life, it was hard for Milly to avoid following the pregnancy in excruciating detail. It was so obvious she was building up content for a book. What Drew was eating and what special yoga Drew was doing to aid the pregnancy, how the pregnancy was affecting her and Christian’s sex life, and then, of course, every minute aspect of how she felt when they learned they were going to have twins. “Twice Blessed, Twice Yikes” that post was called. Yikes? Milly thought. Yuck.
This went on for months without Drew responding to Milly’s text. Milly thought Drew would break down and ask her to come out to L.A. for the delivery, but Drew didn’t. Suddenly Drew was blogging and tweeting pictures of her, Christian, and two baby girls named Erika and Fiona. The first picture of the four of them she posted, all huddled together like four peas in a pod, Milly just stared at, dumbfounded, for about fifteen minutes. Drew had had children. They were the two who’d never been through pregnancy when everyone else had, and now Drew had gone ahead and done it.
Milly told her dad about it over dinner uptown that night. “Drew had babies this week,” she said. “She had twins. Two girls.”
Sam nodded his head sagely, as though he had something to say about that. “That makes three kids for her now?” he asked.
“She’s never had kids before, Daddy. These are her first.” Milly pushed her father’s water glass away from the edge of the table, where it was sitting perilously near his elbow.
“No, no,” he said. Here we go, Milly thought. Her father was always doing this these days. “She’s got the kid who won the science award in Boston.”
“That’s Liesl,” Milly said. He was thinking about another old friend of hers from college. “Liesl had that kid sixteen years ago. This is Drew. Remember Drew, the writer Drew? She lives in Los Angeles.”
“The one that had the drug problem.”
“Right. The drug problem was twenty-five years ago, though.”
He looked at Milly like she was crazy. “She just went to rehab!” he insisted.
“She went to rehab twenty-five years ago, Daddy.”
Her father looked annoyed. He resumed eating the pasta she’d made him. “I hope she stays off that junk,” he said. “She’s a smart girl.”
Milly just smiled and shook her head. This was her dinner company these days. She loved her dad. Since Ava, her mother, had died of ovarian cancer two years ago, at only seventy-four, it was like a hush had fallen over her and her father. She and Sam could sit at the dinner table together most of the night, watch TV together later, and not say a word, and it was okay. There was a hush in her parents’ busy house after all those years.
And there was a bond. Because Milly and Sam were both empty vessels now. Ava had consumed their lives so completely. Milly had lived most of her life defining herself against someone she didn’t want to become, trying to be the un-her, only to find she had nothing left to work with once Ava was gone. Then came the identity void. The weirdest thing had been sitting with Sam at the memorial service that a bunch of the old downtown AIDS people had organized. Someone would get up to speak and Milly would whisper to her dad, Oh, so that’s the So-and-So she was always complaining about! And then Milly and her dad had heard all the tales. Like when Ava planned a “ceremony” to “honor” the city council speaker, but it was really just to get the speaker to come to Judith House and to trap her in the sitting room with all the clients, all the residents, and say, “Actually the reason we asked you here today was to show you what we’ll lose if you really cut the housing budget 30 percent in fiscal 2015.”
The whole memorial had cracked up when someone, a former Judith House resident who was now a social worker, told this story. “That was Ava!” people were cackling. “That was Ava! You didn’t fuck with her!”
Amid the laughter, Milly and her dad had looked at each other. Her dad shrugged, as though to say, I never knew that, and Milly put her arm around him. There were stories they never knew, or maybe stories they’d only half listened to, and they all belonged to a woman who was larger than the two of them, larger than her own family, who sucked it up and demonstrated heroism every day, and then often came home and had little left for her husband and daughter except perhaps to charm her husband into giving her a foot rub.
“She loved those foot rubs,” Milly’s dad said over dinner. “That’s why she needed me to stick around. I was the foot rub at the end of the day.”