“Hi, Mom.” John picks right up, and a smile stretches my face for the first time since Thomas came home a day early to ruin my life.
“Hey, son. I was just thinking about you,” I respond, working to keep my voice from cracking with joy. “You have a few minutes to talk?”
“Yeah. I’m actually glad you called. I need help with something. Cal was a blast for undergrad, but the first year of law school here is kicking my ass.”
I roll my lips together to keep myself from bursting into an ear-splitting “Yahoo!” that my son still needs me. Instead, I coolly reply, “What’s up?” and move into the left lane to pull a U-turn and head home before being caught gawking at the group of young mothers and adding “stalker” alongside “unemployed soon-to-be divorcée” to my name.
Chapter Five
February 1990
“Morning, Charles,” my voice croaked, bone dry from cheap beer and lack of sleep.
“Fun night?” Charles whispered to me, politely conscious of our roommates. No longer able to sneak out, he sat down by my feet and gave them a shake before he laced up his Timberlands. I adored this guy; I had from the moment I met him, and not just because he was built like a nineteen-year-old Zeus.
“Not as fun as yours, I’m sure.” I liked to keep Charles on his toes when it came to him dating my roommate. If my comforter was folded over the back of the common-room couch, that meant the sofa was where I would sleep that night and the morning was when Quinn would fill me in on the details.
“You know it.” Charles nodded with an enormous grin, like the guy just found out he won the girlfriend lottery, which he had.
“Look at you two snuggled up on the couch,” Quinn yawned, leaning against the door to our shared room. While I felt like a carpet had been installed in my mouth and my skin itched from dehydration, Quinn looked almost radiant arising after a late night, like the less sleep she got, the brighter she glowed. Both the T-shirt and pair of boxers left in our room long ago by Charles draped off her lean, athletic body in supermodel perfection. Charles devoured her with his eyes like he wasready to rip them off her. Again. I coughed conspicuously to remind them I was still there.
“I gotta go. Winter lifting sessions start today, and I need to shower before Coach smells me.”
I had been lucky enough to ride Quinn’s social coattails as the girlfriend of Princeton’s surprise freshman-team quarterback phenom. Charles had been unrecruited for Princeton football, mostly warming the bench at the beginning of the season. But when the starting quarterback fractured his elbow in the second game, forcing him to sit out the season, and the backup QB choked, leading to two straight losses, Charles stepped in and stepped up with his ability to quickly read the field and react. The team never looked back with him in control of the ball.
Ripped football players weren’t my type; I was more into lithe, brooding bookish boys. Fact was, there weren’t too many of either around my all-girls high school, so being friends with a quarterback who had already declared engineering as his major and could tutor me through my required freshman fall math course was a boon. In return for him dumbing down the calculus class I unfortunately didn’t place out of, I edited Charles’s papers, and Quinn dragged him to art shows and theology lectures to make sure he avoided soaking too long in the meathead marinade that was the freshman football atmosphere.
“Cool if I grab a Pop-Tart?”
Panicked, Quinn and I immediately caught each other’s eyes. We were unreasonably protective of our Pop-Tarts. They served as emergency breakfast when the minutes between waking and making it to class were few and there was no time on the hangover agenda to swing by Mathey Dining Hall.
“What’s ours is yours.” Quinn skipped over and planted a long, luscious kiss on Charles’s eager lips, and even with his creamy coffee skin, I could see a blush rise. “But take the blueberry one; Callie hates those.” Even in the throes of infatuation with Charles Street, I was still first in Quinn’s lineup.
My mom had been right about everything when it came to Quinn, and at every opportunity, she gave herself full credit for setting me up for success at Princeton. Quinn Tahiri was the daughter of a half-Irish, half-Japanese mother who was the “it” soprano at the Metropolitan Opera. Her father was tangentially related to the Moroccan royal family and founder of one of the largest rug import companies in the United States. Quinn’s beauty was an undefinable mash-up of teardrop-shaped eyes and flawless, year-round tanned freckled skin, immune to the weather-worn results of winter or academic stress. With wavy black hair brushed over her shoulders, she walked with the surety of someone who belonged wherever she was headed.
On Princeton move-in day, after setting up my part of the dorm room, careful not to touch anything on Quinn’s side, I sat on my bed rereading my beloved, tattered copy of Jane Austen’sPersuasion. I nervously awaited meeting the girl who, from her framed pictures, looked like she had already lived quite a life. In comparison, mine had existed mostly in the comfort of books, as editor-in-chief of my high school newspaper, teaching ESL classes to children in a Washington Heights after-school program, and helping set up author events at the Corner Bookstore for visiting radical writers eager to shake up the entrenched beliefs of the citizens on New York’s Upper East Side.
Quinn had blown into our room around 10:00 p.m. with a luck-struck Charles in tow, taken in a long look at me curled up on the bed on my side of the room, introduced Charles, then proclaimed, “The three of us are going to be best friends!” She threw her arms around me before I could even put my book down. Looking over her shoulder at this Charles person, I could see one thing for certain in his moony eyes: He was a goner.
Though I may have been intimidated by Quinn’s effervescence at the start of freshman year, Charles Street was not. Valedictorian of New York’s Dalton School, son of a real estate magnate, and a three-sport athlete, Charles rotated in a similar orbit as Quinn. With all there was to take in and do and experience the first semester of freshman year,Quinn soon dropped Charles into the friend zone and kept him there as she amassed several admirers from the tennis team and her art classes. I respected the way Charles kept his cool and treated Quinn with affection when they were together. I also noted he would strategically disappear for days on end, allowing Quinn time to miss him. For a nineteen-year-old guy riding the freshman football team bench, he had remarkable game, on and off the field.
At our first homecoming football weekend, Quinn and I tailgated with my dad and his buddies behind the Tiger Inn eating club since they had the better beer and grilled bratwursts. At halftime, we headed into the stadium to meet up with other girls from our floor who were slowly becoming part of our larger friend group. We screamed for Charles at the top of our lungs.
After the 30–14 win, Quinn and I stormed the field with a handful of other students. Among the fans, we found Charles flanked by his parents with his arm slung around a beautiful redhead. With the gentlemanly manners he possessed, Charles introduced us to Rebecca from Malibu, California, and claimed he’d catch us later, before walking off the field with his parents and this unfamiliar girl under his arm. Up until that moment, I had only seen Quinn’s mouth turned up, but now it was in a frown. From that night forward, at a post-game dance party, Charles Street’s status in Quinn Tahiri’s world evolved from friend to first and forever love.
There is nothing like the sight of competition on the arm of a back-burnered boy to encourage a girl to make up her mind. Quinn and Charles meshed seamlessly into one of those relationships that felt like it had always existed. His presence did not interrupt my friendship with Quinn; Charles simply became an adjunct to our lives we could hardly live without. And the fact that his friendship created an easy entrée into the jock world I hadn’t before been privy to turned out to be a bonus of well-muscled men whose company I didn’t mind.
Chapter Six
Present
Quinn and I try our best to schedule our mammograms, colonoscopies, Pap smears, and any other invasive procedures on the same day every July so that we can hold each other accountable from either coast. Last year, however, I lied to Quinn about receiving a clean bill of health, when in truth, I didn’t show up for my annual exam. My beloved OB-GYN, Dr. Newman, had abandoned me for a retired life of lower taxes in Wyoming. When my exam month rolled around and I wasn’t able to schedule an appointment to wax and trim down there in time to introduce it to Dr. Newman’s replacement, I declared myself healthy enough and didn’t reschedule.
“Callie, it’s nice to finally meet you. I’m Dr. Kwan.” Dr. Kwan puts out her slender hand and shakes mine with surprising vigor. Before coming here, I was pumping gas at a Chevron station, so I sure hope she is going to wash her hands before touching any of my other body parts. “I’m happy to see you have decided to stay with the practice after Dr. Newman’s retirement.” I didn’t so much decide to stay as I was forced to agree to an appointment by Mary Jane, the bully receptionist Dr. Kwan inherited from Dr. Newman. She called me every day for a week straight until I finally picked up to end the phone badgering.
“I know I have dense breasts, and sometimes that can raise a red flag,” I disclose as a precursive pledge that there is nothing further to dig up about my current state.
Dr. Kwan stares at me intently but says nothing.
