Read Everything Changes for Free Online Page B

I should call Hope. That’s what you do in these situations, right?
    But when I finally make a call, it’s Tamara’s number that my fingers dial.
    “Hey, it’s me.”
    “Zack! What’s up, babe?”
    “You feel like a visit?”
    “Sure. You coming for dinner?”
    “I thought I’d blow off work and come now. Take Sophie to the park, hang out a little.”
    “You’re going to blow off work?” she asks skeptically.
    “I do it all the time,” I say.
    “Fine,” Tamara says. “Except, no you don’t. Not ever. So what’s going on?”
    “I’m just in a foul mood.”
    “So you figured you’d bring your coal to Newcastle.”
    “Misery loves company,” I say.
    “That it does,” she says. “Come on over. I’ll do my best to make your problems pale by comparison.”
    “I’m counting on it.”
    Tamara laughs. “What a team we make. You want me to pick you up from the train?”
    “No. I’ll take Jed’s car. I’ll see you in about an hour.”
    “Good. I’ll wake the little monster up from her nap.”

    Jed keeps his car, a Lexus SC 430 convertible, in a garage around the corner from our apartment. The attendants know me by now, since, with both Tamara and my mother living in Riverdale, I tend to use the car a lot more than Jed, who never seems to go anywhere anymore. I often wonder why he bothers keeping the car at all, and paying the exorbitant monthly garage fees, but I suppose when money’s no object, you’re willing to pay just to have the option available to you, yet another case of his conspicuous consumption benefiting my freeloading ass. Before I go to get the car, though, I take a shower and touch up my shave. Tamara will kiss my cheek and give me a hug, and I want to smell good when she gets that close.

    When Rael and Tamara got married, the plan had been to stay in Manhattan, but when Sophie was born, their studio apartment became too cramped, and they bought a small split-level in Riverdale, less than a mile away from where Rael and I grew up. Although he didn’t like to admit it, Rael was thrilled to be back in Riverdale, saw symmetry in raising his daughter in his own hometown. But then he died, leaving Tamara a stranger in a strange town, with a daughter and a mortgage and no idea of where to go and what to do with herself.
    Tamara’s house. She’s sitting cross-legged on the round kitchen table in shorts and a tank top, sipping at a Diet Coke, her long dark hair partially concealing her face as she intently reads a
People
magazine. She has no interest in celebrity divorces and red-carpet fashion faux pas. Without having to look, I know she’s reading one of those tearjerkers about a child, the little girl who suffered burns on ninety percent of her body when her mother’s car was struck by a drunk driver and exploded, the young boy being treated for an exotic form of leukemia, whose classmates all shaved their heads in solidarity, the teenager from Cambodia who received a kidney from a retired postal worker in Scranton, Pennsylvania. Since Rael’s death, Tamara has cultivated an obsession with sick and dying children. She’s all Sophie has now, and she’s terrified that she’s not up to the task.
    Faster than a heartbeat, I take in Tamara’s legs, which are pale and not particularly shapely, but always appear as if they would be satiny soft to the touch, the soft curves where her triceps meet her broad, athletic shoulders, and the buoyant presence of her breasts, somewhat obscured, but no less formidable under the tank top. With all beautiful women, there’s always one feature that puts them over the top, and on Tamara it’s her lips, which are full, and a deep crimson that no lipstick could ever hope to achieve. They seem to have been extruded like putty out of her face, pulling her porcelain skin taut into a robust, sensuous, and wholly unintentional pout. Sure, her emerald eyes, each set under a thick dark brow, would be captivating all on their own, but those lips are the