Read Online Prosperous Friends by Christine Schutt - Free Book Online

black—black beaded; she sat uncertainly holding a flute of something pingy. At his father’s memorial service, his mother had told Clive not to expect such a turnout for her—and there wasn’t.
    In a companionable moment, he put his arm around the soft shape of his daughter. The bowed softness of his daughter, the cushioned arms, not his mother’s arms or his, but hers, Sally’s. Children are always entirely themselves—so Dinah said. Dinah, his second, sturdy wife, he missed her.
    As if his daughter knew his thoughts, she asked after Dinah.
    “Dinah is fine,” he said, with some relief to be walking in the sun, walking north, northeast from Bethesda Terrace to the Conservatory Garden, some considerable distance, though he was fit, Clive; he still ran. He was ready for spring. Dinah was crazed for it but otherwise fine.
    “There’s already spring interest here. Look at that!” he said.
    The early dogwood’s yellow had arrived, no more than dots on twigs, yet they brightened the bark-chip mulch and blackened leaves that had toughed out winter. He liked the yellows better than the pinks to come or the Conservatory Garden’s rigid plantings of tulips, now just spikes, but the penitent Lenten rose was up in borders, and he liked that perennial very much.
    “Look inside,” he said, and Sally bent down next to Clive and looked inside the surprise of the muted hellebore.
    They had seen more spring than he had expected. “That was pleasant,” he said and meant it, glad not to have talked about money or that woman Sally lived with—anything to do with Sally’s messy grown-up life.
    “I thought we could pick up Wisia at school together” was Sally’s hopeful invitation at the gates to the Conservatory Garden.
    But no, he couldn’t come to school. A friend had called, not someone she knew.
    “Man or woman?”
    “What business is it of yours?”
    “Why won’t you see Mom?”
    The answer he had was too harsh, and he didn’t know why he went ahead and said, “For the same reason I don’t see you that often. You both make me sad.”
    “If you think we’re disappointing, Dad. Really, to be stingy at your age.”
    He made as if to take off her head and didn’t stop short but hit her in the neck with his hand. He hit her but not that hard.
    “That hurt.”
    “Wasn’t very hard.”
    “Says who?” Sally backed into the street and waved down a cab, all the while holding a hand against her neck. “Enjoy the rest of your visit,” Sally said, before she shut the door.
    He would. Goddamn her. He had perversely persevered, had lunched, dined, breakfasted with Sally, walked with Sally, listened to her litany of insufficiencies—starting with funds! He could have been seeing Isabel Bourne. His surprise was considerable then when Sally appeared the next day at Torvold’s gallery. She startled them both, Clive and the convincing young adult (spotty beard but deep voice) there to interview Clive. “This is a surprise.” Clive stood up. “My daughter,” Clive said, by way of introduction to the young man named . . . he’d already forgotten.
    “I’m sorry,” she said to the young man and then again to both of them. “Really, I am.” Sally looked closely at her watch, pressed her ear to the face of it. “Go ahead,” she said, then, “Oh, no, is that recording?”
    “No,” the young man said. “No, I turned it off.”
    “Lucky,” she said although it seemed to Clive she was the unluckiest person. She was too timorous to make a wider way through the world, yet it gladdened him to know he was predominant still and could shut her up with just a look. Clive sternly watched her walk to the other end of the gallery with its glassy island of a table and low seating that conformed to it. Onto this shoreline Sally dropped as if she had been pushed.
    “I’ll just wait,” she said, and she took off her watch and peered closely at it, longer than was necessary, and she did not look back at Clive; rather, she