Wife 22 by Melanie Gideon

front of the entire seventh grade. I was going to ask him to help me color my hair and now he hates me, and I’ll be stuck doing it myself.”
    “Why aren’t you going to Lisa?”
    “I’m trying to cut back.”
    “Alice, stop catastrophizing. Things are going to turn around. Does the beard have a name?”
    “Briana.”
    “Lord, I hate that name. It’s so—”
    “American, yes, I know. But she’s a sweet girl. And very pretty,” I add guiltily. “They’ve been friends for years.”
    “Does she know she’s a beard?”
    I think of the two of them nestled together. Her eyes half closed.
    “Doubtful.”
    “Unless she’s a lesbian and he’s her beard, too. Maybe they have some sort of an agreement. Like Tom and Katie.”
    “Yes, like ToKat!” I say. I hate the thought of Briana being duped. It’s almost as sad as Peter faking he’s straight.
    “Nobody calls them ToKat.”
    “KatTo?”
    Silence.
    “Nedra?”
    “I’m getting you another subscription to
People
, and this time you’d better damn well start reading it.”

27
    “Y ou are so sweet to let me stay with you until I get settled,” says Caroline Kilborn.
    I stand in the doorway, unable to mask my shock. I expected a younger version of Bunny: a blond, elegantly dressed and coiffed young woman. Instead a bare-faced, freckled redhead beams at me, her hair scraped back impatiently into a ponytail. She’s wearing a black formfitting skirt and a loose tank that shows off her toned arms.
    “You don’t remember me, do you?” she says. “You told me I looked like a doll. Like Raggedy Ann.”
    “I did?”
    “Yes, when I was ten.”
    I shake my head. “I said that? My God, that’s so insensitive. I’m sorry!”
    She shrugs. “It didn’t bother me. It was your debut at the Blue Hill Playhouse. I’m sure you had other things on your mind.”
    “Right,” I say, wincing, trying to shake the unwanted memory of that night from my head.
    Caroline smiles and rocks on her heels. “It was a great show. My friends and I loved it.”
    Her friends, her fellow third-graders.
    “Are you a runner?” She points at my dirt-encrusted sneakers, which I’ve thrown into a planter, which contains nothing but dirt because I can’t seem to remember to water anything I plant.
    “Uh, yes,” I say, meaning twenty years ago I was a runner but now I’m really more of a jogger, okay, a walker, okay, a person who strolls to her computer and counts it as her daily 10,000 steps.
    “Me, too,” she says.
    Fifteen minutes later Caroline Kilborn and I are going for a run.
    Five minutes later Caroline Kilborn inquires as to whether I have asthma.
    Five seconds later I tell her that wheezing sound I’m making is due to allergies and the fact that the acacia has just bloomed, and perhaps she should run ahead as I don’t want to prevent her from getting a good workout on her first day in California.
    After Caroline has sprinted out of sight, I step on a pinecone, twist my ankle, and fall, tumbling into a pile of leaves while praying,
please don’t let me get run over by a car.
    I needn’t have worried. A car does not run over me. A far worse thing happens—a car stops and a kindly old man asks me if I need a ride home. Actually, I’m not really sure what he asks because I am wearing my earphones and desperately trying to wave him on, in the way that you do after you fall, saying things like
I’m fine, I’m fine,
when it’s clear you’re not. I accept the ride.
    When I get home I ice my ankle, then head upstairs, but first make a detour into Zoe’s room. I see her latest acquisition from the vintage clothing store, a 1950s crinoline, thrown over the back of a chair, and I remember the pair of striped bell-bottoms I had in high school and wonder why I didn’t have the courage to dress like she does, in one-of-a-kind clothes no other high school girl has, because as far as my daughter is concerned following the trends is as bad a sin as saying “plastic” when