A Friend of the Family by Lauren Grodstein Page B

Nixon says.”
    “There’s no way anyone’s going to send me to Vietnam,” I said. “I don’t care what it takes.” I didn’t even know what Nixon had said on the matter. I was only sure I loved Iris Berg with every filmy corpuscle in my body.
    “You’re an idiot,” she said. And I was.
    From the deck outside, Stu Hurdy, red-cheeked from the winter and the booze and the pleasures of his emerging koi pond, banged loudly on the window. Iris turned and banged back.
    “What a bunch of fucking drunks. I’m too old for this kind of thing. Remind me why we keep doing this every year?”
    “Your husband enjoys playing Santa,” I said.
    “Playing Santa.” She sighed. “Of course he does. My husband, Kriss Kringle.” Iris often spoke this way about her husband, in tones of charmed exasperation or grim tolerance. They’d been married for longer than Elaine and me by four years, had four children, and had built a (very) prosperous life and suffered both normal and unique sufferings, yet still Iris often made it sound as if Joe was the little brother she’d allowed to tag along. At Pitt, after I’d introduced them, Iris would often shake her head at me and ask me how I’d let her get talked into this, “this” meaning a long-standing love affair with Joe Stern.
    “You should ask him,” I’d say, because I never had the courage to say, Well, Iris, because you wouldn’t have me.
    “So is everyone behaving themselves out there?” she asked me, raising a languid arm above her head. “Do I have to go outside and take charge?”
    “You don’t have to do a thing,” I said, patting her narrow knee. “I met Neal’s girlfriend, by the way. He seems quite enamored.”
    “Amy?” Iris smiled. “She’s a hoot, isn’t she? Straight from Kowloon to Cambridge, her father’s big in Red Party politics, supposedly. Her mother was raised in Singapore. She’s full of disdain for the American way of life but drags Pauline to the mall every chance she can get.”
    “She seems like she’s good at taking charge.”
    “Oh, she’s got a pair of brass balls on her.” Iris grinned. “Bosses my son around like a foreman. I’ve never seen Neal kowtow like this, not even when he was trying to sucker teachers into writing his college recommendations. I get an enormous kick out of it, to tell you the truth.”
    “I didn’t even know Neal was dating,” Elaine said.
    “They’ve been together for almost six months. Neal thinks he’s gonna marry her, I can tell. He’s probably right. Brace yourselves for a Jewish-Buddhist ceremony on some lucky-number date this fall.”
    “Really?” Elaine said. “That’s so exciting!”
    “Please,” Iris scoffed. “She’s only in it for the citizenship.”
    “Are we talking about Amy again?”
    I looked up. The voice was an echo of Iris’s, sardonic, grumbly, but still it took me a second to put it together.
    “Dr. Pete,” Laura Stern said. “It’s been a while.”
    My goodness.
    “Hello,” I said. “It certainly has.”
    I hadn’t seen her since the week they took her to Gateway House thirteen years ago, and Christ, the girl had changed in a million beautiful ways. Back then she’d been hollow-eyed, eviscerated by the trial and the confinement and everything that preceded it. A criminal, a teenager, depressed and hidden in oversized shirts. But now — now she was like Iris twenty years ago, only more so, or better, or right here in the soft pink flesh.
    “You remember Laura, don’t you, Pete?”
    “How could I forget?”
    But she was nobody I’d met before. Thick reddish hair falling over her shoulders, white skin, green brown eyes, a pale smattering of freckles, thin shoulders, white blouse. Benign smile, demure twinkle in her eyes. She’d spent the past three years tending goats. I stood.
    “Laura,” I said. “How are you?”
    “I’m well,” she said, and she leaned in to press her cheek to mine. She smelled like clean laundry. The girl who’d made