She looked familiar, although I didn’t remember meeting her. I thrust a few bobby pins at Charlotte and smiled. “If you need them,” I said, “I also have superglue and marine varnish. This isn’t our first year with the Nazi Skating Club.”
Charlotte burst out laughing and took the pins. “They’re four years old!”
“Apparently, if you don’t start young, they’ll have nothing to talk about in therapy,” I joked. “I’m Piper, by the way. Proudly defiant skating parent.”
She held out a hand. “Charlotte.”
“Mom,” Emma said, “that’s Amelia. I told you about her last week. She just moved here.”
“We came because of work,” Charlotte said.
“For you or your husband?”
“I’m not married,” she said. “I’m the new pastry chef over at Capers.”
“That’s where I know you from. I read about you in that magazine article.”
Charlotte blushed. “Don’t believe everything in print…”
“You ought to be proud! Me, I can’t even bake a Betty Crocker mix without screwing it up. Luckily, that’s not part of my job description.”
“What do you do?”
“I’m an obstetrician.”
“Well, that beats what I do, hands down,” Charlotte said. “When I deliver, people gain weight. When you deliver, they lose it.”
Emma poked a finger into a hole in her costume. “Mine’s going to fall off because you don’t know how to sew,” she accused.
“It won’t fall off,” I sighed, then turned to Charlotte. “I was too busy suturing to sew a costume, so I hot-glued the seams.”
“Next time,” Charlotte told Emma, “I’ll sew yours when I do Amelia’s.”
I liked that-the idea that she was already counting on us being friends. We were destined to be partners in crime, subversive parents who didn’t care what the establishment thought. Just then, the teacher stuck her head inside the locker room door. “Amelia? Emma?” she snapped. “We’re all waiting for you out here!”
“Girls, you’d better hurry. You heard what Eva Braun said.”
Emma scowled. “Mommy, her name’s Miss Helen.”
Charlotte laughed. “Break a leg!” she said as they hurried into the rink. “Or does that only work if the stage isn’t made of ice?”
I don’t know whether you can look at your past and find, woven like the hidden symbols on a treasure map, the path that will point to your final destination, but I have thought back to that moment, to Charlotte’s good-luck phrase, many times. Do I remember it because of the way you were born? Or were you born because of the way I remember it?
Rob was braced over me, his leg moving between mine as he kissed me. “We can’t,” I whispered. “Emma’s still awake.”
“She won’t come in here…”
“You don’t know that-”
Rob buried his face in my neck. “She knows we have sex. If we didn’t, she wouldn’t be here.”
“Do you like to imagine your parents having sex?”
Grimacing, Rob rolled away from me. “Okay, that effectively killed the mood.”
I laughed. “Give her ten minutes to fall asleep and I’ll get the fire going again.”
He pillowed his head on his arms, staring up at the ceiling. “How many times a week do you think Charlotte and Sean do it?”
“I don’t know!”
Rob glanced at me. “Sure you do. Girls talk about that kind of thing.”
“Okay, first of all, no we don’t. And second of all, even if we did, I don’t sit around wondering how often my best friend has sex with her husband.”
“Yeah, right,” Rob said. “So you’ve never looked at Sean and wondered what it would be like to sleep with him?”
I came up on an elbow. “Have you?”
He grinned. “Sean’s not my type…”
“Very funny.” My gaze slid toward him. “Charlotte? Really?”
“Well…you know…it’s just a curiosity. Even Gordon Ramsay’s got to think about Big Macs once or twice in passing.”
“So I’m the high-maintenance gourmet meal and Charlotte’s fast food?”
“It was a bad metaphor,” Rob admitted.
Sean O’Keefe was tall, strong, physically fierce-orthogonal to Rob’s slight runner’s frame, his careful surgeon’s hands, his addiction to reading. One of the reasons I’d fallen for Rob was that he seemed to be more impressed with my mind than with my legs. If I’d ever considered what it would be like to roll around with someone like Sean, the impulse must have been quickly squashed: after all these years, and all these conversations with Charlotte, I knew him too well to find him attractive.
But Sean’s intensity also carried over into his parenting-he was crazy about his little girls; he was deeply private and protective of Charlotte. Rob was cerebral, not visceral. What would it feel like to have so much raw passion focused on you at once? I tried to picture Sean in bed. Did he wear pajama pants, like Rob? Or go commando?
“Huh,” Rob said. “I didn’t know you could blush way down to your-”
I yanked the sheets up to my chin. “To answer your question,” I said, “I’m not even sure it’s once a week. Between Willow and Sean’s work schedule, they’re probably not even in the same room at night most of the time.”
It was odd, I realized, that Charlotte and I had not discussed sex. Not because I was her friend but because I was her doctor-part of my medical questioning involved whether or not a patient was having any problems during intercourse. Had I asked her that? Or had I skipped over it because it seemed too personal to ask that of a friend instead of a stranger? Back then, sex was a means to an end: a baby. But what about now? Was Charlotte happy? Did she and Sean lie in bed, comparing themselves to me and Rob?
“Well, go figure. You and I are in the same room at night.” Rob leaned over me. “How about we maximize that potential?”
“Emma-”
“Is lost in her dreams by now.” Rob pulled my pajama top over my head and stared at me. “As a matter of fact, so am I…”
I wrapped my arms around his neck and kissed him slowly. “Still thinking about Charlotte?”
“Charlotte who?” Rob murmured, and he kissed me back.
Once a month, Charlotte and I went to a movie and then to a seedy bar called Maxie’s Pad-a place whose name absolutely cracked me up, given the gynecological connotation, although I’m quite sure that was lost on Maxie himself, a grizzled old Maine fisherman who, when we first ordered Chardonnay, had told us it wasn’t on tap. Even when the only films playing were really awful slasher flicks or teen comedies, I’d drag Charlotte out for the night. If I didn’t, there were stretches of time when she’d never have left the house.
The best thing about Maxie’s was his grandson, Moose, a linebacker who’d been kicked out of college in the middle of a cheating scandal. He’d started bartending for his grandpa three years ago, when he was back home evaluating his options, and he’d never left. He was six-six, blond, brawny, and had the mental acuity of a spatula.
“Here you go, ma’am,” Moose said, sliding a pale ale toward Charlotte, who barely even flicked a glance at him.
There was something wrong with Charlotte tonight. She’d tried to back out of our standing date, but I wouldn’t allow it, and for the past few hours she’d been distant and distracted. I attributed it to concern over you-with the pamidronate treatment and the femur breaks and the rodding surgery, she had plenty on her mind-and I was determined to divert her attention. “He winked at you,” I announced as soon as Moose turned away to help another customer.