Excerpt from All You Have to Do Is Call by Kerri Maher, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

1
Patty

"This looks delicious!" Patty exclaimed as she took the fragrant Bundt cake from Veronica, who was wearing one of her hippie skirts, which swayed in time with her cascade of honey-hued hair and the musical stack of bangles on her arm. For years, her dearest, oldest friend had smelled like lavender and sounded like a wind chime, while Patty herself favored tailored yet flippy and flirty skirts and dresses, outfits she admired from the windows of Marshall Field's or the pages of Cosmopolitan, a magazine she tried to hide from her nine-going-
on-thirteen-year-old daughter, Karen.

"It felt like a gingerbread kind of day," said Veronica, and her friend's familiar smile was such a relief after the day she'd had.

It had started well enough. The morning had been cold and blue-sky crisp, and she and the kids had sung along to "I'll Be There" when it played on the radio as they drove to St. Thomas the Apostle. Then the four of them-Patty, Karen, Junie, and Tad-had crunched over the last of the fallen leaves from the car into the cathedral for Sunday mass. Matt had skipped today. He was doing that more and more recently, always using work as an excuse not to go to church, or the PTA cocktail party, or Karen's ballet mini-recitals. Patty was getting worried; he'd never checked out like this before, and she was constantly stopping herself from wondering, as she had during mass, what might be keeping him.

Once church was over, the many hours of the day had been a forced march of chores. It was impossible to overstate the relief Patty felt on welcoming Vee and Doug and Kate into her home; tears of relief needled her eyes. It had been so long since she'd seen Vee. Too long. More than a month, which was unusual for them.

Thankfully, Matt was also happy to see them, and the kids were always glad to add Kate to the mix. As the little ones ran off, Matt said to Doug, "Beer?"

"I need one after that game this afternoon," said Doug.

The Bears to the rescue. Patty was glad Matt could relax into some guy time, but ... she missed him. There were no two ways about it.

Alone in the kitchen, Veronica said to Patty, "Are you okay?"

"Is it that obvious?" Only to such an old friend, I hope.

Patty didn't think they'd be friends now if she and Vee hadn't forged such a strong bond in that anemic seventh grade production of Macbeth, where the two of them had stolen the show from Rachel Livingston and Ben Milliken, cackling over their lobster pot of dry ice and scaring the bejeezus out of everybody when they chanted "Double, double, toil and trouble / fire burn and caldron bubble." Eighteen years later, Veronica and Doug lived in the rapidly changing neighborhood of Hyde Park, and Patty and Matt in the more traditional enclave of Kenwood-geographic choices that said nearly everything about them. If she and Vee had simply met at a mixer for Lab School parents, where Kate and Junie had been nursery school classmates, they would have eyed each other with suspicion. Too patchouli, Patty would have thought. Too uptight, Veronica no doubt would have thought. But there was something fierce in the friendship they had grown as young women dabbling in the small freedoms and transgressions to be shared at soda fountains and football games in what they both perceived to be the suspicious sameness of the then-shiny-and-new suburb of Park Forest, where their fathers had swept their wives and children into the postwar dream of peace and prosperity.

Patty had almost lost Vee once in the very early sixties, when her friend's increasingly radical views-she'd tried to become a Freedom Rider, for Pete's sake!-made it hard to find anything to talk about at dinner parties. But then Vee got pregnant with Kate at the same time Patty found herself pregnant with Junie, her second, and Vee had needed help: the advice, comfort, and solidarity only one young mother can give another, which reminded them both of what they'd shared as teenagers. Patty would always think of their serendipitously timed two girls as rescuing her friendship with Vee. Dear, dear Junie and Kate.

Excerpted from All You Have to Do Is Call by Kerri Maher. Copyright © 2023 by Kerri Maher. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.