A Friend of the Family by Lauren Grodstein Page A

judging from her breath, had spiked her hot chocolate. She kissed me on the cheek. The kitchen had cleared out—open-house guests were like a tide, with their own hourly ebb and flow — and so it was just Iris, Elaine, and me in the room, each of us a little bleary from the night before and the frenzy of the party.
    “Happy New Year, Pete,” Iris said.
    “Happy New Year, Iris.” She was curled up in the breakfast nook, letting the mess in the kitchen build around her. She had a dusky voice—it was one of her innumerable charms—and a perfectly wonderful way of adjusting to chaos. Glasses and mugs piled up in the sink, stray pastries lined the counter, and the Crock-Pot of hot chocolate had spilled over and dribbled pools of chocolate on the floor, but Iris just sat back under the window, her grayish red hair pulled back in a ponytail, her cool green eyes half-closed. Once upon a time, I had loved her beyond reason.
    “This is a wonderful party,” I said, and I slid next to her in the breakfast nook.
    “Are you enjoying yourself?”
    “How could I not?”
    “Doughnuts and shots of scotch and people who admire him,” Elaine hummed. “These are a few of Pete’s favorite things.”
    Iris laughed. “I didn’t know we were serving scotch.” She leaned her head against the frosty window behind the breakfast nook. She was wearing a black turtleneck and bronze hoop earrings and looked as much like a graying bohemian as she did a commercial banker. There had been an article in the
Wall Street Journal
about her a few years ago, some dilemma she had had with unethical clients, a pixelated picture on the front page, her hair pulled back, severe glasses. The story had claimed her income was somewhere just north of a million dollars. According to my brother, the
Journal
underestimated it by at least half a million.
    “That much money? Come on, Phil. These are people who buy their sneakers at Target.”
    “Congenitally cheap,” Phil explained to me. “The quirks of the truly wealthy.”
    In half a lifetime of talking about everything, Joe and I never talked about the article. I was ashamed of my jealousy, and Joe, I think, was ashamed of how much money his wife made. He was ostentatious about frugality, liked to complain about his daughter Pauline’s J.Crew habit. But that year, when we went to the City Opera for a modernist staging of
Bohème,
Elaine poked me in the side. She was holding open the program, fingernail pointing at the tiny type in the back: the Sterns were in the Director’s Circle, one hundred thousand dollars plus. And when we needed a new lobby at Round Hill Medical Center, were looking for named sponsor opportunities, Joe quietly arranged for the thing to be built by some hip Manhattan architects and named for his dead father.
    “There’s scotch out on the deck, I believe,” I said. “Joe was keeping it for his closest comrades. Want me to get you some?”
    She shook her head. “Unlike some people, I can’t drink scotch in the afternoon.”
    “Who are you kidding, Iris?”
    “Oh, come on, Pete.” She winked at me. “Them days are long gone.”
    “Them days,” Elaine echoed. She sounded wistful. Them days, them days, them boozy, steely, wintry, pot-fueled Route 80 West days. Iris used to sit next to me in statistics. She wore short skirts, huge earrings, go-go boots, and low-cut peasant blouses in the dead of winter. She was from Allentown, where her parents ran a struggling butcher shop. She and I were both funded by the same scholarships. She walked me to organic chemistry and warned me about my future.
    “You better do well here, Pete. Med school exemptions are harder and harder to come by.”
    “So I’ve heard,” I said, and boy, had I heard: classmates were going to medical school in Mexico, Belgium, New South Wales. “But there won’t be another draft.”
    “There won’t be another draft?” She laughed. “Don’t be an idiot. Only an idiot would believe a goddamn thing