door. She eyed a glass shelf housing an impressive collection of tiny antique perfume bottles. Really? she thought. Where do people get the time? (And then: Who am I kidding? I have the time.) Someone rapped gently on the door.
“Hold on,” she said. She squared her shoulders, happy that she’d worn her favorite zebra-print wrap dress from her favorite secondhand clothing store. She took a deep breath and opened the door. Maybe Lena wouldn’t even recognize her, she thought, as she walked into the front hall. But the moment she emerged from the tiny powder room, Lena pounced, squealing and pulling Bea into an alarmingly fierce hug. “I heard you were here, but I didn’t believe it!” she said, rocking Bea a little as if they’d just been reunited after a lengthy, involuntary separation.
The Glitterary Girls were just an invention of some journalist for an urban magazine. Bea had been horrified when the article came out, which made them sound like silly socialites. (“Perched on a Soho rooftop on a languid summer night, the most buzzed about writers in Manhattan glitter like beads on a particularly smart necklace.”) The breathless writing was awful, the designation didn’t even make sense, a meaningless phrase assigned to a group of female writers who happened to live in New York City at the same time, happened to be around the same age, and, for the most part, disliked one another. At best, they were grudging acquaintances bound by a name they all wished they could shake—except for Lena, who had adored the catchphrase and taken it literally. (Gliterally, Bea had joked to the one woman in the group she actually liked, a poet from Hoboken who had also seemed to drop off the face of the earth in the ensuing years.) Back then, Lena was always trying to gather “the girls,” for drinks or dinners or suggesting they go to events together, as if they were a lounge act in Vegas.
“You look exactly the same!” Lena held Bea at arm’s length and gushed. “Come sit and talk to me.” She clapped her hands, and her bared cleavage bounced a little. Had she bought herself new breasts, too? Bea didn’t remember Lena ever being voluptuous. They sat in a quiet corner of the dining room next to an enormous table covered with trays of meticulously made canapés. Bea positioned herself with her back to the room and steeled herself for Lena’s interrogation only to realize, within minutes, that of course Lena wanted to talk about Lena.
“Here she is,” she said, handing Bea her phone and swiping through what seemed like hundreds and hundreds of photos of her daughter. “She’s three. I finished the edits on my last book on a Wednesday morning, e-mailed the pages to my editor, stood up from my desk, and my water broke.”
“You were always really efficient,” Bea said.
“I know!”
“What’s her name?” Bea asked, looking at the photo of a little girl with a party hat sitting in front of a birthday cupcake.
“Mary Patience.”
“Patience?” Bea wasn’t sure she’d heard properly.
“Oh, you know,” Lena said, as if it were obvious, “one of those old family Mayflower names.”
“Have you been adopted by a new family?” Bea knew Lena had grown up in a trailer park somewhere in central Ohio with a single mother who managed to raise four kids working a variety of minimum-wage jobs. You had to listen closely these days to hear any echo of the broad and nasal midwestern vowels in Lena’s speech, and her unruly black hair had been straightened, and somewhere along the line Nowaski had become Novak—and there were those new impressive breasts—but there was no way Lena’s round and freckled face with the slightly bulbous nose that looked like it had been raised on kielbasa had anything to do with the Mayflower.
“My ridiculous husband,” Lena said, her voice full of admiration. “He’s in the blue book.”
Bea looked down at the picture of Lena’s daughter again and was secretly pleased to see that the girl’s nose had been inherited from the kielbasa not the Mayflower side of the family. She looked kind of sweet.
“So tell me about her?” Bea said, sending a fat one across the plate to Lena. “Tell me everything about being a mom.”
Forty-five minutes later, she’d neatly extracted herself from the predictably dull conversation. (“They say being a mother is the hardest job in the world and it’s true,” Lena had said, solemnly, “many, many times harder than writing an international bestseller, harder than