A Farewell to Yarns

friend anymore.“
    “If you’re not my friend, I won’t drive you to the airport to pick up this long lost pal of yours and you’ll never finish that afghan—which might be my ultimate contribution to the longterm benefit of mankind. Now, tell me about this friend of yours.”
     

Two
     
    “Phyllis Wagner was from somewhere back East and had come to Chicago to live with an aunt when she was a teenager. When we were both newlyweds, we were neighbors,“ Jane said, hanging onto the afghan and trying to work without consciously thinking about it. Surely it was possible. Surely a grown woman who could manage the rococo complexities of carpooling three kids could crochet without talking to herself.
    “We lived in a ratty apartment building in the city. Mostly elderly people and students. You know the kind of place. Steve was still in school then, and I was working at one of his family’s pharmacies.“
    “Was Phyllis a student, too?“
    “No, Phyllis wasn’t the student type. And she didn’t work either. Back in those days, if you recall, women weren’t expected to, unless it was absolutely necessary. As far as I could tell, she spent her days visiting with other people in the building. She brightened a lot of lives. In the evenings she visited me or we went to movies or something. Steve was studying all the time and hardly noticed that I was gone.“
    “And Phyllis’s husband?“
    “She’d only married Chet Wagner a few months before they moved into the apartment building. He was much older. Phyllis was only nineteen or so, and Chet must have been in his mid-thirties. That seemed downright ancient to me then. Chet was never home either. As I recall, he’d lost everything, including his sons and his business, in a divorce and was starting over. That’s why they were slumming it with us. He was involved in starting a company that had something to do with computers.“
    “Not a bad time to start in computers.“
    “I’ll say. He made an absolute fortune in no time. We all lived there for six months or so, then Steve graduated, and I discovered I was pregnant with Mike, and we started building the house. About the same time we moved out here, Phyllis and Chet moved into a little house in Evanston. The next thing I knew, she’d moved into a bigger house. I was there for lunch one day, and it was a gorgeous place. Phyllis and I kept in touch, but sort of loosely. She didn’t have any children, except Chet’s boys on vacations, and I think that was sort of difficult. I had Mike just after we moved here, and then Katie came along, and I was knee-deep in babies and diapers and sterilizers. I couldn’t fit into my pre-pregnancy clothes and couldn’t afford nice new ones to fit into her lifestyle. And you remember what it was like, being so absorbed in your babies that you lost touch with the rest of the world.”
    Shelley bullied her way skillfully through a knot of cars and said, “Boy, do I remember those days. It always took three people to cram me into the outfit I took to the hospital to wear home.“
    “Actually, it wasn’t that Phyllis would have cared if I’d turned up in baggy jeans and a sweatshirt. I’ll say that for her. No matter how much money Chet made, she stayed Phyllis. Fortunately—or unfortunately. She always seemed to think the money was sort of nice but didn’t quite know why they needed so much of it. Frankly, it made me jealous sometimes. There we were, struggling for nickels, and Phyllis sort of shed cash like water off a duck. It wasn’t her fault, and I didn’t blame her, but it did create a barrier between us.
    “Anyway, we saw less and less of each other and then talked on the phone less often, and finally, when Katie was a baby, Phyllis had some sort of breakdown. I never knew quite why—we weren’t ever really close enough to talk about gut-level stuff. I never thought Phyllis had a gut level, to be honest. She was such a simple, straightforward person. Chet took her on some sort of cruise to recover, and the next time I heard from her, it was in a letter telling me they’d stayed on a little island in the Caribbean that they loved so much that Chet bought it.“
    “Bought the whole island?“
    “Well, most of it, I think. There was a resort hotel and a little village where the hotel workers lived, but they owned the rest, as I understand. I got the impression from her later letters that they eventually bought the hotel as well and put up a few houses for