Between Friends by Kristy Kiernan

starting your dialysis here. We have a center across the street that I’m affiliated with and it’s a superb facility, but I’d rather see you at home, with your support system already in place.”
    Home. I didn’t know what that was. Where was home? I was all right without defining home, but apparently nobody else was.
    Was it where my daughter was? The daughter I had no claim on. She was always an abstract as mine . Yes, there was genetic material there, but she was certainly not mine. She was theirs, Ali and Benny’s.
    I’d never understood Ali’s attraction, beyond the physical, to Benny. He was so . . . solid. He was so solid as to seem immobile. And immobile was barely breathing, wasn’t it? I wanted movement for Ali. I wanted her to dance on currents, trembling leaves and undulating rivers and swirling waters.
    But she had been so firmly hooked by the whole thing. Marriage, babies. The cruel betrayal of her reproductive organs was devastating. She had been ready, truly ready, at twenty. Who’s ready for a baby at twenty? But Ali really was.
    The rest of us had wanted to wait until we’d graduated college, until we’d had careers firmly established, until we were ready , as if some inner switch would flip and we’d just wake up and know one day. Her struggle had been frightening for everyone. If Ali could be infertile—and at such a young age—then what might we eventually be facing?
    We got degrees, we had careers, those who wanted to married, and then as our friends from high school got pregnant, they slowly dropped away. I imagined they’d say they were dropped, that Ali had become too jealous and heartbroken to maintain the friendship, but I knew better.
    The fact was, Ali’s beautiful, naked longing was too much for them to witness. She cradled their infants, cuddled their babies, played with their toddlers in a loving way they seemed unable to sustain. They dealt with the dirty diapers, the teething, the tantrums, the loss of time, of romance, of sleep.
    I think they couldn’t stand to watch her delighted around their children in a way they couldn’t muster anymore. I think she made them feel inadequate, as though they didn’t appreciate what they had. Perhaps I was wrong; perhaps I was uncharitable. But as far as I was concerned, the only one I needed to be charitable toward was Ali.
    When I visited, while Barbara was still alive, Ali would come to our house and stay the night the way she had when we were girls. Only this time we were allowed to stay out on the beach for as late into the night as we wanted.
    We’d duck through the sea grape hedge, finding our old paths, bursting through to the wide white sand. We’d walk for hours, the moon a ghost high in the sky, the sun throwing its last desperate rose-gold fingers over the horizon, as reluctant to surrender the beach as we were.
    And she would tell me about how all she’d ever wanted was for someone to call her Mommy . How she needed to hear that word from the mouth of a child, how it thrummed in the core of her body. And how she was certain that she had heard it called to her, across the house, from the nursery she’d optimistically painted yellow and green, in the hazy moments before sleep took her.
    The idea of someone calling me Mommy filled me with dread. It didn’t just feel wrong in my head, it felt wrong in my heart, and it made me shudder at the comedic horror show I was certain I would create if I tried to raise a child. We were close enough that I confided this to her, and if anyone ever wanted to know why I loved her so much it was this: She laughed.
    She did not recoil in horror, look at me in pity, question my womanhood, or grow hurt that I didn’t want, or understand, something that she so desperately did. She simply stared at me for a moment and then burst into laughter. She accepted my truth in as open a way as she ever had. The same way she had when we’d first met on that beach, when I told her that I might be