Free Good Faith by Jane Smiley Page A

out of her face. I yawned, but I wasn’t tired, only relaxed. She said, “I’m going to meet that woman for a drink today.”
    “What woman?”
    “Linda Burns.”
    “Who’s that?” It had been several weeks by that time since I had looked over Marcus Burns’s tax returns.
    “The wife of Bobby’s friend Marcus. They went out with us—Thursday night, I guess it was. We went to Mercados.”
    Mercados was one of Gordon’s favorite restaurants, truly out of another era. They served large plates of pretty good old-fashioned Sicilian food, but the menus had no prices. If they knew you, they gave you one price; if they didn’t, they gave you another price, much higher. Strangers were not encouraged to return, but friends ate practically for free. I yawned again. I was still a little disoriented from the direction my afternoon’s activities had taken. The Sloans and the ranch-style three-bedroom with three-car garage on a corner lot that we were seeing seemed very very far away. I realized Felicity was still talking about the Burns woman. I said, “Do you have your own friends, Felicity?”
    “Of course I do. I have lots of girlfriends.”
    “What do you do together? I mean, Sherry didn’t have many girlfriends. She thought women were irritating.”
    “She thought everyone was irritating, honey. She was so jealous, I didn’t know how you could stand it. She was always herding you and guarding you and telling you what to do.”
    “Maybe she was.”
    “Daddy always used to say after you left, ‘Isn’t that one a full agenda?’ and Betty would say, ‘He would have been perfect for Sally.’ And then everyone would sigh.” She looked at me mischievously. “I would say to myself, ‘More perfect for me.’ Wasn’t that utterly wicked?”
    “Have you been planning this for a long time, Felicity?”
    “Well, not planning. Just being open to opportunity.”
    I gazed at her. She looked friendly and receptive.
    She went on. “You know, a couple of years ago, I was going in the door of my house with a bag of groceries, and I just happened to look down at the basket we keep by the door for shoes and sneakers. We started doing that when the boys were little, so I wouldn’t have to be looking for their shoes all over the house whenever we had to go somewhere. Anyway, this time I looked down, and all their shoes were so big! Then, a couple of days later, I had this vase Mom gave me, and I’d put some star lilies in it that I had bought. So I set it on the mantel and stepped back, and I was looking at it, thinking how pretty it was, and a football came over my shoulder and smashed right into it and all the pieces and the flowers fell to the floor.”
    I said, “Oh, Felicity!”
    She said, “Oh, it wasn’t a tragedy or anything. I was shocked in that moment, but then it was a revelation! I thought,
I live in a frat house and it’s okay with me.
My boys are very independent, and so is Hank, and I thought,
What am I doing, holding some kind of candle up here for traditional family life when my family doesn’t even see it?
So I started living like they do—getting up every morning and saying to myself, What would be fun today? and then going out and doing it. I’m telling you, the house doesn’t look great, but everyone is a lot happier. I don’t think any of them even realized the degree to which I was nudging them to conform to an ideal I didn’t even know I had. So that’s what I mean by being open to opportunity. Many desires have gone through my mind over the years about lots of things. I’m almost thirty-nine. And while I haven’t
planned
to pursue any of those desires, I remember them perfectly well when the opportunity presents itself.” She looked at me for a moment. “So there you are.”
    “And here you are.”
    “Not for long, I suppose, if you have to go show a house. Linda Burns loves that place. When are they moving in?”
    “Closing is in a couple of weeks, I think. I’m hoping Bobby is