Read With Friends Like These: A Novel for Free Online Page A

Chloe’s cell phone had rung twice when an evil voice in my head began to speak. I call her Mean Maxine.
    Why should Chloe get all the breaks? Maybe June Rittenhouse is cold-calling and simply works in alphabetical order. You, Talia Fisher-Wells, are equally talented—maybe more talented—and need a better job ten times as much as Chloe does. Or the headhunter might be mining candidates for a position neither Chloe nor you would ever want, in a suburb of, say, Bismarck
.
    Mean Maxine snarked away until, unconvinced and disgusted, I shut her down and got on with my work, even taking several calls from Chloe. She asked for her messages. I gave them to her, all but one.
    On the ride home, from within my bag the green stickie continued to shriek,
I belong to Chloe
. Mean Maxine hooted back,
No way. Talia, don’t be a fool
. The debate segued into one of my least favorite quotidian themes, life’s mysterious, unjust collision between money and luck. By the time I walked into our apartment in Park Slope, I’d worked myself into a lather. This never bodes well for Tom. I sat at our kitchen table and opened mail, which today contained not only bills but an article featuring restaurants in Rome.
Think about it, my lovelies
, Jules had scrawled on the top in her back-slanted handwriting.
Diet
domani. Jules, Chloe, Quincy, and I wereplanning to get together to hash out plans for our annual trip, and as if it were a presidential primary, Jules had been campaigning. She is nothing if not strategic.
    I kvetched aloud. “Why am I the only person who ever has to think about money?”
    Tom groaned, folding his arms over his broad chest. “Is this a question I’m expected to answer?” He hates when I bitch, as much as I resent the lectures he can’t resist giving about how I notice only the world’s haves. On this subject, we hit an impasse fast, because I like to point out that if he applied for membership to the have-not club, they’d reject him based on genealogy. What’s more, innuendoes suggesting that my value system is out of whack strike me as cheap shots because I think Tom and I agree that I, Talia Fisher-Wells, qualify as one of the good guys. I keep my carbon footprint dainty, and I’d compost if our backyard were bigger. Each month, I find four hours to donate to a food co-op in exchange for a deep discount on rutabagas and twenty kinds of beans. On a scale of 1 to 10, my materialism barely scratches 5. If I belonged to their tribe, the Catholics might canonize me.
    “Forget I broached the subject,” I said. “In fact, why don’t you go for a bike ride?” With that, Tom did, but I continued to ruminate,
farklempt
, even after I parked Henry at the kitchen table and watched him scribble with his fat crayons. Shouldn’t Tom be able to comprehend how frustrating it is that my three friends on speed dial happen to be preeminent haves? These perfectly agreeable people never blink before buying another pair of shoes they want, a verb they confuse with
need
. When their roots grow in, they make an appointment, not a purchase from the drug aisle. They use their airline miles to upgrade, since they don’t have to hoard them for a ticket, which in my case is for my twice-yearly visit to my parents in Santa Monica.
    Am I envious? Yes. And I think of this defect as more pathetic than my inability to calculate a percentage. I recognize that I lead a blessed life, and I am not a woman who flings around that adjective casually. I am healthy, with a husband, and not just any husband, but Tom Wells, a lovingmensch, smart and funny. I have Henry, our delicious little boy. I have a job that engages my brain and student loans that are 75 percent paid off. Yet despite how often I remind myself of my considerable privileges, Mean Maxine points out the economic chasm between my life and my friends’ lives, which every year yawns more profoundly. Next to any one of them, I, Talia Fisher-Wells, am a third-world country. What I