My Dearest Friend by Nancy Thayer Read Free Book Online Page A

softly. “You’re hurting Mommy’s ears.”
    For a moment mother and daughter looked at each other, frozen in a standoff. Then, with a smile that flashed radiance across her face, Alexandra said, “Sowwy, Mommy!” and put down the spoon. She crawled off her chair and up into her mother’s lap. She kissed her mother’s ears. “Lexi make boo-boo okay!” she said. Then she snuggled into her mother’s lap, put her thumb in her mouth, and let her eyes glaze over.
    “She’s a pretty little girl,” Daphne said gratefully.
    “Thank you,” Carey Ann said. “We think so. She’s awfully energetic. Sometimes …” She dropped her eyes and looked down at her daughter. Then she looked up at Daphne. “Sometimes I just don’t know if I can keep up with her,” she confessed.
    “I remember feeling that way myself.” Daphne laughed. “It never did seem fair to me that the babies got all the energy that the parents needed.” Although I had my child under more control than you do by a long way, she thought.
    “Where’s your daughter now?” Carey Ann asked.
    “She went to live with her father. In California.” Daphne felt pain shoot through her, and poison, as the bitterness within her flicked its tongue. She took a deep breath. “Well, she’s sixteen years old. And it was something she needed to do,” she said. “She hadn’t had a chance to get to know her father before.”
    “You must miss her,” Carey Ann said.
    “I do,” Daphne replied. “Very much.”
    “I know I miss my parents,” Carey Ann went on. “Especially my father. He always took care of me. Sometimes—”
    “Bottle!”
Alexandra yelled, popping her thumb from her mouth. She turned around and grabbed her mother’s face with her two small chubby hands. She wrenched Carey Ann’s face around to hers.
“Bottle!”
she said again, directly into her mother’s face.
    “Oh, dear, I didn’t bring her bottle,” Carey Ann said. She rose, letting her daughter slip to the floor. “Let’s go home, Alexandra,” she said. “Your bottle’s at home. Thank you for the tea,” she said, turning back to Daphne.
    “Perhaps she’d like a glass of milk?” Daphne offered.
    The little girl left her mother’s side and ran off into the living room, her hands flying out sideways to hit whatever she passed.
“Bottle!”
she yelled as she went.
    Carey Ann shook her head. “No,” she said. “It’s not really the milk she wants, you know, it’s the bottle. Maybe she’ll take a nap now. Then I’ll be able to get something done around the house. It’s so much work unpacking, isn’t it?”
    The two women moved, as they talked, into the living room. Alexandra had discovered the piano and was suddenly up on the piano bench, pounding out chords that would have made John Cage weep.
    “What I don’t understand is how you decide where everything goes,” Carey Ann said wearily. “I mean, the kitchen things go in the kitchen, of course, but where? I mean, should the dishes go in the cupboards next to the sink, or the food? I mean, they both have to be near the sink, right? Oh …” she said, a smile breaking out over her face. “That sounds like ‘Frère Jacques,’ doesn’t it? I wonder if we should get Alexandra a piano. She’s so smart that way.”
    Daphne thought that what the child was hammering away at sounded nothing at all like any organized musical notes she’d ever heard before, and she was amused and somehow strangely saddened that Carey Ann thought they should get a piano for the little girl now. “She’s only two,” Daphne said. “I think that’s really too young for a piano. Even if she is smart. Their hands have to be a certain size in order to reach the keys, or it’s frustrating for them, you know.”
    Carey Ann said, “But didn’t Mozart perform when he was three?”
    “It’s difficult to hear you!” Daphne said. “Perhaps we should—”
    But suddenly she sounded insane, as her voice, which had been raised to carry