Free One Good Friend Deserves Another by Lisa Verge Higgins Page A

the tiny table, and Dhara came up behind it, looking disheveled and heavy-eyed. “Please solemnly swear that this is not some lame ploy to get me to another intervention.”
    “ Chica, I honestly wish it were.”
    Dhara visibly deflated. She sank into her chair, covering her cheeks with both hands. She stared at Marta with widening eyes.
    Marta swept her fresh Cosmo off the tray as the waitress approached. “You’d best get the doctor here a ginger ale,” Marta said to the waitress. “For her, that’s the hard stuff.”
    “I’m going to need something stronger.”
    “Whoa, we’re cutting loose. Make it an ice tea,” Marta corrected. “But not the Long Island type.”
    “Yes, yes. Sweetened. With a lemon.” Dhara ran her hands down her face and then let them drop onto the table. “I’m an ass. I should have known you wouldn’t joke about this. How long?”
    “I kicked him out the night of your engagement party. I haven’t seen him since.” She tightened her grip around the stem of her glass, remembering how she’d tossed the pictures of his children at him, ashamed at the tears on her face. “So, which one of you won the pool?”
    Kelly’s brow furrowed. “What pool?”
    “The betting pool.” Marta tried that casual shrug again. “Over how long this thing with Carlos would last.”
    “Oh, Marta, you must really be hurting to suggest something like that.” Dhara shook her head. “You know that all of us were hoping that Carlos was the one.”
    Marta’s throat constricted even more. She’d thought Carlos was the one too. She’d even brought him home to her family last January for El Dia de Reyes,the feast of the three kings. Must have been fifty people in her mother’s cape house, twenty-one of them children. He’d played dominos with her father. He’d dissected every dish, asking her mother how she made the meat and plantain pasteles, sniffing the sofrito that flavored the rice dish her aunt made with pigeon peas. He’d even chased around her three bratty nephews, the ones Marta referred to as Pedro Stop, Sanchez Put-That-Down, and Alejandro Don’t-Hit-Your-Brother.
    It was the only time, she now realized, that he’d ever met her family.
    “Tell me he’s out of the apartment.” Dhara dragged her purse off the table, dropping it with a clank to the floor by her feet. “Tell me you launched all his stuff out the fifth-floor window.”
    Marta thought of the echoing spaces she’d confronted when she’d come home from work last night—the stretch of her closet, the two gaping drawers, and the pot-rack devoid of copper-bottomed saucepans. It had been days since she’d thrown him out, but she couldn’t seem to get the smell of his aftershave out of her towels. “His dry cleaning showed up on my door this morning. But from what I hear,” she said wryly, “the Salvation Army is always in need of Egyptian cotton shirts.”
    “Sure you don’t want to take a scalpel to them? I have a supply.”
    “Tempting.”
    “And if you see him again, I could teach you how to make two small incisions on either side of his scrotum—”
    “If I ever got that close, it wouldn’t be the scrotum I’d cut.”
    “How could he keep a secret like that for so very long?” Kelly said, looking genuinely uncomfortable. “I mean, eventually, isn’t it going to come out anyway?”
    “Kelly, here’s something I have to face.” Marta searched for courage in the rosy depths of her drink. “I’m no better than those well-meaning women who marry door-to-door salesmen only to discover—to their surprise—that those long trips the guy makes? Well, they are to one of his other four wives.”
    Dhara made a muffled noise. “Marta, don’t do this to yourself.”
    “Think about it. If I hadn’t made Carlos sign those loan papers, I’d be like some Florida granny who’d had her fortune siphoned off in marshland real-estate scams.”
    “No,” Dhara insisted. “No.”
    “Did you know that there’s a