I was about to drive away, but she came over to the car and leaned in the window. “I just passed my ex-husband’s pregnant wife on her way into the store,” she said. Claire’s such a private person, and we’re not close. I’ve rarely seen her, except from a distance, since that night a couple of years ago, when all we suddenly single women had dinner at Isabel’s. It was a measure of Claire’s distress that she said anything to me. She started to say something else, but dropped her head down onto her arm, which was resting in the window. Her shoulders were moving up and down, and I assumed she’d started crying. It must have been a full minute before I realized she was vomiting all down the side of the car. What a strange experience, lifted out of the ordinariness of a day like that. I felt disoriented. In retrospect, my reaction struck me as strange, too, mechanical, almost as if I were not in the picture, but watching it. I got out of the car and went around to help, but I watched myself performing these motions—getting her a paper towel from Corelli’s, wiping her face, noting, by the car door, that she seemed to have eaten a soft pretzel recently, all that—with total detachment.
