Her words, not mine. Mom’s intimate group of girlfriends, “The Awesome Eight,” had been decimated to “The Fabulous Four,” much like the demise of the Big Eight accounting firms. Mom’s friends used to run in a pack. They were as close as sardines. There was hardly room to maneuver between them. And I was a part of that. I thought my mother’s friends would always be there, for her and for me. But sometimes, as Donny liked to say, life throws you a curve ball. One of the last friends to go had been Maxine. We called Maxine the Black Widow because she’d already outlived two husbands and was afraid of marrying a third time. She’d been going with Harry, her significant other, for fifteen years. The way Maxine figured, she was keeping Harry alive by not marrying him. I was sure Maxine, who had been in the synagogue choir with my mother, was now in heaven singing soprano with the angels. “I wish I could have told her to give my love to your father,” my mother had said last week, after we’d had a good cry over the phone when we learned about Maxine’s death.
