Free Best of Friends by Cathy Kelly

seen it.
    She never told anyone what Joe had said to her. From then on, she was stoic about the break-up.
    “People change and move on,” she said when anyone commiserated with her.
    “Myles and I had our good times but you know we married too young and for all the wrong reasons,” she told her sister, Gwen. “What did we know of love at our age? There should be a law against people getting married before they’re thirty!”
    “We should have split up years ago,” she said to Dr. Morgan. She hid her misery and bewilderment from everybody.
    Myles made it easier by moving out of Dunmore into the city and by virtue of the fact that there wasn’t anybody else in his life—though, at first, nobody quite believed that.
    “There must be another woman,” they said suspiciously, and all the single women in the squash club got fed up with being asked about Myles Shanahan.
    “He wasn’t the chatting-up sort of man,” they insisted time and time again. “He was sweet and sort of lonely.”
    But as time passed, and it became clear that he was genuinely happy but single, the chattering in Dunmore ceased.
    Myles and Lizzie became the watchword for the modern world: they’d made brave choices and lived with them. They’d had the courage to swap two sets of slippers in front of the fire for the single life.
    Myles had taken up sailing and, during a month’s leave, had be-come one of a crew taking part in a big yachting race. Who’d have thought it? Quiet Myles braving the Atlantic and coming home full of energy, with a windburned face and his middle-age spread gone, looking ten years younger.
    There was no problem talking about this to Lizzie either. She knew all about it. She, Myles and the kids still had their Christmas dinner together in Dunmore. They went to the hotel in the square for it and, the first year, people had stared at the family smiling over the turkey and wearing paper hats as if nothing had happened. Civilised was the word for it, and while everybody in Dunmore ad-mired them, nobody had a clue how they’d managed it.
     
    The house was silent as the grave as she opened the door. Look on the positive side, Lizzie told herself firmly. A quiet house meant she hadn’t disturbed a gang of drugged-up-to-the-eyeballs burglars ran-sacking the place in vain for money.
    The answering machine light was winking merrily and Lizzie felt her heart lift. Maybe it was Debra. She hadn’t phoned for a couple of days but she never left it longer than a week before getting in touch.
    Without taking off her coat, Lizzie hit the button and smiled as her daughter’s light voice filled the hall.
    “Hi, Mum. Oh God, you won’t believe it, you just won’t. Barry’s sister is being impossible. She doesn’t like the pattern I’ve chosen for the bridesmaid’s dress. A-line suits everyone—I don’t know what the problem is. She’s just being difficult. She says she’ll buy her own dress but we can’t have that. It won’t be what I want. I think I’m going to hit her. Can I come over and talk to you?”
    Dear Debra.
    It was wildly ironic that Debra, who wasn’t pregnant and was of the generation who could have happily had a fleet of children with-out ever marrying the father or even introducing him to the rest of the family, was set on marrying her childhood sweetheart. The very words “childhood sweetheart” made Lizzie shudder.
    Both she and Myles had, separately, gently advised Debra that perhaps she should live with Barry for a couple of years first. Just because they’d been together since school and gone on holidays together for five years didn’t mean that they were going to make it as a couple.
    But Debra wouldn’t hear of it. “Marriage is fashionable now,” she told her mother, as if she was speaking to someone very elderly and very stupid. “Commitment is important. I don’t think older people understand that. What with terrorism and stuff in the world today, it’s younger people who know what