Free After I'm Gone by Laura Lippman Page A

would be twenty-nine when her youngest child was born, which meant she would be forty-seven when that child headed off to college. Forty-seven. It sounded so old. Bambi was going to be thirty in the coming year, Felix would be thirty-six, closer to forty than thirty, and Bert was twenty-eight. Lorraine liked being the baby of the group even if they did gang up and tease her sometimes, act as if she didn’t know anything about the world before she was born. She had skipped a grade in elementary school. It felt natural to be the youngest in a group.
    The band began playing one of Lorraine’s favorite songs. “Our song,” Felix said with a significant look at Bambi.
    “How can that be?” Lorraine asked.
    “I slipped the band a twenty.”
    “No, I mean—this song was on the radio just a few years ago, when Bert and I were living in the apartment near Mount Washington. You were old married folks by then.”
    “That was the remake. The original was 1952, but it was also recorded by Connie Francis in 1959 and the Orioles had a hit with it as well. It was playing the night Bambi and I met. Remember, Bert?”
    “What I remember is that I was left alone with Tubby and a bunch of fraternity punks who wanted to beat us up, so it doesn’t have the same romantic associations for me.”
    But Bert held out his hand and led Lorraine to the dance floor. He was a very good dancer—better than Felix, who was a little hoppy for Lorraine’s taste—but she couldn’t help being aware that Bert’s eyes were everywhere, surveying the room over her shoulder, keen to know who was here, who they were with. If Bert were a woman, he would be considered a gossip. Meanwhile, Felix held Bambi as if she were the only woman in the world. Yet Felix was the one who cheated and Bert was the trustworthy one. It was confusing. Lorraine wanted the kind of attention that Felix lavished on Bambi, but she could never work out if such intense devotion was the by-product of cheating, in which case wasn’t it better not to have the attention?
    The music shifted to something a little fast, so Bert and Felix were out. Lorraine sometimes tried the new dances, home alone, watching Kirby Scott. She thought of it as exercise. But the clothes—the truly mod clothes—did not suit her, thin as she was. They made her look old, mutton trying to pass as lamb. The same with the short haircut she had tried with the two side curls, coaxed out at night and held down with Scotch tape. What are those, payos? Felix had teased her. Yet Bambi, so much older, looked divine in her Pucci shift tonight.
    She and Bambi went to the powder room together, checked their hair and lipstick, taking their time in front of the mirrors. It was a little hard, being side by side in a mirror with Bambi, but Bambi smiled encouragingly at Lorraine as if she understood, as if even she found her beauty burdensome. It was going to be hard for her daughters. Linda and Rachel. Lorraine could imagine boys falling in love with Bambi when the girls began to date. Lord, it was hard enough to be her friend, to notice how men noticed her. Bert, out of courtliness, always insisted Lorraine was prettier.
    “It’s exciting,” she said, “being at the start of a new decade. The last time that happened, I was fourteen years old. I couldn’t have begun to imagine where I’d be tonight—married to someone like Bert, getting ready to start a family.”
    “Ten years ago tonight, I couldn’t really imagine my life, either,” Bambi said, taking out a cigarette and lighting it. Lorraine looked at it longingly—so much easier to stay thin while smoking—but she had quit the moment the surgeon general’s report came out. “I thought I could, but I didn’t have a clue.”
    “Where did you go for your honeymoon?”
    “We spent the night at the Emerson Hotel, before going to Bermuda the next day.” She exhaled. “The Emerson Hotel was sold at auction this year.”
    “We got married at the Lord