Free The Easy Way Out by Stephen McCauley

curb, and hit a tree. It wasn’t as spectacular an accident as it sounds—it was a small tree—but it did attract a crowd. Sharon rushed from her car with a lit cigarette in her hand. Once she’d established that I was unharmed, she began telling me how I could collect from my insurance company, Chevrolet, and the city of Cambridge—and then sell the wreck to a junkyard. I was still strapped into my seat, slightly dazed. I remember looking out the window through the falling snow at Sharon, dressed in sandals and bell-bottoms that were too short, rummaging in her bag for her business card. “Boy,” she said sincerely, “you’re lucky I’m the one who hit you instead of some jerk.”
    I didn’t think to question the logic of her comment until much later, and by that time we were good friends. I was living on the top floor of her house when I met Arthur. She was indirectly responsible for our meeting, a fact for which she’s never entirely forgiven herself.
    As we made our way through the lunchtime crowd in Harvard Square, I told Sharon I needed her advice. When it came to relationships or life management, Sharon was one of the most perceptive people I knew—mostly, I suspect, because she was rarely in a relationship herself and paid no attention at all to managing her own life.
    â€œYou know my advice,” she said. “Leave him and take the rug in the living room.”
    â€œIt’s not about Arthur.” Unlike most of my friends, Sharon did not feel that I was lucky to have reliable Arthur as my lover. “It’s a family crisis.”
    â€œOh, good. Did Ryan shoot them both or just your father?”
    â€œIt’s about the other one.”
    I insisted we walk out of Harvard Square to a greasy pizza and submarine sandwich shop on Broadway, across from the public library. It was pointless to try and talk to Sharon in a restaurant in the Square itself; she was always running into clients who’d demand advice on their travel plans, or friends, like me, who had some personal problem they wanted to discuss with her. We cut through Harvard Yard, past all the depressing libraries of Sharon’s alma mater.
    Like both my parents and neither of my brothers, I often give the false impression of being emaciated. (For years I was buoyed up by a one-night stand’s comment that I looked better out of clothes than in. Later, I realized it was intended as an insult to my wardrobe, nota compliment to my body.) Side by side, Sharon and I exaggerated each other’s physical extremes. We once went on a travel agent’s junket to Brazil and shared a room. Everyone else on the trip thought we were lovers. We took great pleasure in sitting around the hotel pool in our respective bikinis, keeping our companions horrified.
    As we slowly traversed the paths through the campus, I told Sharon about my phone conversation with Tony. She’d met my younger brother once, at a dinner she and I gave when we were roommates. Upon hearing that Tony was planning to attend a business school, she went into a vituperative rant against MBAs and then suggested to him that if he wanted to really make money he should move to northern California and grow marijuana. Every few hundred yards, Sharon would stop, lean against my shoulder, and adjust the straps on her sandals.
    â€œI have to take these in to be repaired,” she’d say. “Go ahead with your story; I’m listening.”
    Sharon was the one person I knew who could carry around extra weight as if it were a luxurious fur coat she had draped over her shoulders. She was probably more than ten pounds outside the “ideal” range on even the most generous weight-to-height charts, but it was all smoothly and evenly distributed and perfectly proportioned. She never made any excuses for her size and often took delight in flaunting it by wearing tight-fitting slacks or skimpy sundresses with pinched