Free The Red Book by Deborah Copaken Kogan Page A

roommates in a single word. “Suburbanites?” Addison had answered, adding a delayed, “But really fun and nice!” too late to matter. And that was the end of that.
    “You know,” Clover now says to Bucky, after settling down in a booth at the burger joint, “people work through the kind of stuff you and Arabella are dealing with all the time. Take my parents. They spent years sleeping around with other partners—with permission, but still—and now the two of them are off living by themselves up in the woods of Oregon, totally at peace and seemingly happy together in their little self-sustaining yurt.”
    “Oh my God, a yurt?” says Bucky. “I always loved all those crazy stories about your family.”
    “Yeah, well . . .” she says, thinking: You had your chance, and you blew it. And by the way, I hated most of the stories about your family—“they’re definitely colorful.” She states this without the shame or disdain she once felt for her parents; if anything, the older she gets, the more she’s grown to appreciate their adherence to a particular set of guiding principles, as far as they might be from her own.
    “I remember the one about your mother getting arrested for, what was it again?”
    “Defacing government property.” Lena had taken an anthology of poetry out of the Novato Public Library, the kind where all the poems are written by white men, and scribbled her own poems in the margins.
    “That’s right! I remember now! That was such a badass story . . .”
    Clover’s BlackBerry buzzes for a third time, from the same 617 number. “Sorry, Bucky, I have no idea who this is, but whoever it is keeps calling me. Let me just get rid of it . . .” She holds the phone up to her ear. “Hello?”
    The voice on the other end is crying, gasping for air. “Clover? Is that you?”
    “Yes,” she says. “Who’s this?”
    The woman sounds so distraught, she’s barely able to speak. “It’s Addison.”
    “Addison, baby. What’s wrong?”
    At the sound of Addison’s name, Bucky’s ears perk up, like a dog’s.
    “I’m . . . I’m in jail!” she says.
    “ Jail? What the fuck . . . for what?”
    Bucky grabs the phone from her unceremoniously. “Ad, it’s Bucky. Where are you?”
    Okay, Clover thinks, so the two were friends since preschool. So they went on mind-expanding binges in the Ramble in Central Park during school breaks when they were teenagers, and they took formal dance lessons together when they were twelve. Does that give him greater claim to her cell phone or to a friendship she’s now stoked and nurtured for twenty years? Where was Bucky when Addison was recovering from her appendectomy; when each of her children was born; when her postpartum depression after the second was so intense she was threatening to kill herself ? Where was he when Addison’s daughter Trilby fell off the monkey bars and broke her leg, and someone had to pick up Houghton and Thatcher at preschool and bring them to the lobby at Mount Sinai? Where was he when—
    “Which police station?” says Bucky. “I’m sorry, where? Sixth Street? Near Kendall Square? Yes, okay, don’t worry. We’re on our way.” He throws three crumpled twenties on the table, despite his earlier deal with Clover, and grabs his ex-lover’s hand, as if it were once again November of 1985, and they were rushing off to the Fly Club to rescue Addison, who this time had eaten so many mushrooms before a game of strip poker that she was standing on the roof of the club wearing only her panties (this last part much to the delight of the Fly’s members, many of whom had dreamt about seeing Addison Hunt’s breasts thus unleashed), flapping her arms like a bird and squealing to the young buck trying to coax her back inside, “It says the Fly Club, silly! I’m just following the rules!”

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