And the last . . .
How are you doing without Lauren?
Chances were low that he’d manage to ask that one. But he referred to the first index card, asked, and Sarah started talking in a friendly-enough way.
Lauren was the one who’d been good at this. With her, Josh picked up on cues, listened to her talk to people, watched her face as she smiled or frowned or nodded. He always felt more present, more at ease with himself and other people when he’d been with his wife. She was the key to his being fully engaged. He remembered to nod as Sarah paused, asked a follow-up question and tried to smile at the right places. He referred to card number two, then three when her answer was brief.
They ordered their dinners; fish for him, steak for her. Card number four.
He hated that everyone looking at them would assume they were on a date. He wished he could somehow communicate that he still loved his wife, that this was her friend, that he was absolutely not interested in her that way.
The food came. He took a bite of trout. It was pretty good. “How’s your steak?” he asked Sarah.
“Good. How’s your fish?”
“Good.”
The conversation was not exactly rapier sharp. How long had they been here? Two hours? Three? He sneaked a look at his watch. Thirty-nine minutes.
Aha! He thought of something to say. “I bought a vase the other day. From Hawaii.”
“Cool. What does it look like?”
“You know. It’s . . . blue. And it has white on it. Like a cresting wave.”
“Sounds pretty.” She cut another piece of meat.
“Yes.” It was gorgeous, in fact. One of a kind, handmade on Kauai, at the same shop where he and Lauren bought a sculpture on their honeymoon.
“You guys brought me a beautiful paperweight from Hawaii.”
“Did we?” Lauren had bought dozens of gifts, it seemed.
“Yes.” Sarah poured herself a second glass of wine. “So about all the shitty things you said to me, Josh.”
“Yes. Still sorry.”
“You know what? Everything was true. About how I was pissy and jealous.” She shook her head, her eyes getting shiny. “Lauren was . . . sparkly. You know? She sparkled.”
“Yes,” Josh said. It was the perfect word for her.
“And . . . well, it wasn’t always easy to be known as ‘Lauren’s friend.’ All through elementary school, and then even more in middle school and high school, I was sort of like this . . . appendage.” She pulled a face, then did her hair swoop, and Josh felt an unexpected little sunburst of affection for her. That hair swoop gesture . . . she did that when she was nervous. Now that he had that information, it wasn’t so annoying.
“You know, it’s depressing when you’re everyone’s second choice,” Sarah continued. “I only had her. Everyone else in our circle was Lauren’s friend. I was there, and I’d known her the longest, but I wasn’t in the inner circle. Never slept over at their houses, or invited them to mine. Lauren was my best friend, and I didn’t really need anyone else, you know?”
He leaned forward, setting down his fork. “I do. I understand completely.” How shocking, that he had this in common with Sarah. He’d never wondered about Sarah’s other friends. He’d had no reason to.
She smiled sadly. “Of course you get it. So anyway, Lauren was too loyal to cut me off, but I wasn’t . . .” She shook her head, started to do another hair swoop, then stopped herself with a half smile at Josh, silently acknowledging her habit. “Whatever. Everything came easily to Lauren. Friends, guys, grades. She was so pretty and fun. Everyone wanted to be around her.”
Josh nodded. “I felt the same way. She could’ve had . . . I don’t know.” Who was that character Lauren had so crushed on? “She could’ve had Jon Snow. But she picked me, and I’m still not sure why.”
Sarah smiled. “Ah, she adored you, Josh. Right from the start.”
“And she always thought of you as her best friend. When we first started dating, she never said your name without the title. ‘My best friend, Sarah. Sarah, my best friend.’”
Sarah wiped her eyes. “That’s nice to hear.” She swirled the remaining wine in her glass, studying the deep golden color. “When she got sick,” she said quietly, “I thought it had to be a joke. Like, if anyone should be the dying friend, it should be me. Like she was too golden to have anything but perfection.”
Josh stifled the urge to wish it had been Sarah. He’d already thought it a number of times, anyway. He felt ashamed of that, of thinking Sarah’s life was worth less. She was someone’s daughter, too. Someday, someone would love her the way he loved Lauren. She’d probably become a mom, and she’d be a really good one. He shouldn’t judge.
“I was going to dump her as a friend,” Sarah said quietly. “In college. She got into RISD . . . I didn’t get into Brown. She lived in the coolest student housing ever; I was at URI in a triple with the girl in the top bunk drunk-puking on me four nights a week. Lauren was here on the Hill, so happy and confident that the world was hers, and I felt completely unremarkable by comparison. It bugged me so much I was thinking about transferring somewhere.”
“Why didn’t you?” he asked.
Sarah shrugged. “I had a good scholarship at URI. In my mind, I was brave enough to go out west, to California or Seattle, but in reality, I was in Kingston, thirty minutes from home. Every time I saw Lauren, she was telling me how fabulous and interesting school was, how cool her professors were . . . she was majoring in clothing design originally. I don’t know if you knew that.”
“I did.”
“Yeah. So she was taking classes like History of the Little Black Dress or whatever, making her own beautiful clothes, while I was slogging through statistics taught by these sleepy adjuncts who never bothered to know my name. I didn’t even know what I wanted to major in.”
“That’s not uncommon,” Josh said. Good job, he could just about hear Lauren say. Good sympathetic listening.
“So. I was sick of her sparkliness. Her perfect life. Her happiness, honestly. I was tired of comparing myself to her and coming up short. Everything about her was cool. Her married sister, her hot brother-in-law, her field of study.” She poured the remaining wine into her glass. Her eyes filled again with tears. “I wanted something crappy to happen to her, because it seemed like nothing ever did. So you were right. I was bitter and petty.”
“Why didn’t you, um, dump her?” he asked, a little fascinated.