With Friends Like These... by Gillian Roberts Read Free Book Online Page A

cure that sometimes actually worked.
    Lizzie was flushed from bending over a sauce pot. “I’m so sorry,” she said. “I felt like a jerk, but I couldn’t help myself. It was so…” And then the new calm was gone. Her wire whisk stopped moving. The muscles around her eyes tensed and she looked frightened and dislocated.
    “Lizzie?”
    She shook her head. “Even thinking about that feeling, about how I felt, and I start to feel it all over again.” She cleared her throat, shook her head, and turned around. “How’s the food so far? Is everything okay?”
    “I came in to compliment the chef. The crab puffs were superb. And I like the waiters, too. They don’t interrupt conversations.”
    Her golden freckles stood out against her blush. “Mr. McCoy came in and told me he liked the crab puffs, too,” she whispered. “You know him—he’s Dr. Sazarac on Second Generation.”
    I was beginning to understand what people who weren’t teaching or going to school did with their afternoons.
    “Actually, lots of guests came in. I was surprised and very flattered. People are so nice. Of course, some just wanted to see the kitchen, or to be sure I knew about their special menus. I showed them the list—I have it all written down.”
    I saw what she gestured toward, a roster of all the invitees, with notes next to perhaps a third of the names, including the no-radicchio-for-Reed nonsense. Sybil Z.—no meat. Fish okay. Richard Quinn—low cholesterol. It depressed me that he had gone from being a professional villain to a man with a mundane health problem. My father had requested low sodium. I’d probably get his salt-free meal.
    “But most people just said hi, and commented on the food or the building and the rooms,” Lizzie said.
    “You’re an excellent cook.”
    Lizzie made a rueful face. “All my life, food’s been the good news and the bad news. Well, for a while, once, other substances were the worse news. But food…that’s why I’m on a major, major diet. Once and for all, I want to prove I can do it.”
    “You look perfectly fine to me.” She did, but I felt creepy as soon as the words were out of my mouth. It’s a line best spoken by old relatives and people with no standards whatsoever, and never, ever, has it comforted a woman who’s convinced that she’s fat.
    “Fifteen pounds,” Lizzie said. “Not one delicious thing till then.”
    “Not even while you were making that?” A froth of white and dark chocolate curls enclosed an enormous fluff of birthday cake. “Didn’t you at least lick the spoon? Eat all the broken pieces of chocolate? I could never resist.”
    She smiled. I left her, justifiably proud of her moral superiority and handiwork, and I made my way back to the front parlor, where Tiffany was still center stage.
    I wondered whether somewhere in America less upscale offspring were named after, say, Wal-mart. Who would baby Walmart grow up to be?
    With astoundingly accurate timing, my answer—the spirit of the low-end mall—walked in. Walmartine’s borscht-colored hair clashed with her vermilion evening pajamas, their satin straining over her hips. Her face was heavy with makeup, all smearing or melting. I couldn’t decide whether she was trying too hard or not trying at all.
    Her companion looked familiar to me. I had seen that slight figure before. It had been lost inside an ill-fitting jacket that time, too, but I couldn’t place him. “My best friends in high school,” Lyle told the group. “Wiley and Janine. The Wileys, nowadays. Back when it was Janine Riley, the three of us were inseparable. The W.R.L.’s we called ourselves—even had jackets with the initials sewn on them. Wiley, Riley, and Lyle—sounds good together, doesn’t it? Nearly makes a poem.” He hugged each of them. They remained where they were at the entrance to the living room.
    “It’s been so long,” Lyle said to the couple. “Can’t tell you how surprised I was,” he said, now addressing