The Little Clan

by Iris Martin Cohen

  The microwave whirred interminably, and Ava turned another page. She had been regularly reading the gossip columns as they gleefully reported each descending step in the Lazarus Club’s upheaval. They had received a surprising amount of bad press for kicking Ava and Stephanie out. “The Lazarus Club Eats Its Young” was Ava’s favorite headline, and their departure started a trail of dominoes falling as years of malfeasance came to light, most of which was tangled up with Aloysius. The board tried to kick him out, a bunch of lawsuits followed, accusations of hoarding and misuse of funds, some scandal involving a bunch of dead finches. Eventually they all settled out of court, and Aloysius was outed from his apartments and temporarily banished from the establishment. Following all this had become one of Ava’s few indulgences. She chuckled in anticipation and turned to Page Six.

  She almost dropped the paper. There, immediately recognizable, even with her head slightly turned from the camera, was a picture of Stephanie getting out of a car, maybe a limousine, Ava couldn’t tell. A male hand was extended toward her, and from the angle of the shot, it almost looked as if she were crouching away from it, although maybe she was just hiding from the blast of flashbulbs. Her short skirt had ridden up even higher, and a small strip of bare thigh was visible. The caption only listed her name and whatever party she was going to. Ava held the paper closer, trying to coax from the blurry newsprint any further information, some small clue as to what her friend was doing now, whom she spent her time with, whether she was happy, but closer inspection only revealed the thick pixels of the photograph, a refusal to betray deeper secrets. With a slight ache, Ava recognized the specific strap of her bra.

  She had tried calling once. In her new happiness, the expansive air of possibility in which she now lived, Ava found she was becoming nostalgic. Stephanie couldn’t help who she was. And Ava had noticed a funny thing: as she wrote her book, she found she was giving Irene Adler more and more of Stephanie’s characteristics, and as she crafted this portrait of her friend on the page, the sting of betrayal had started to fade a little and she was left with a complicated admiration for her friend’s strange, dynamic personality. She missed her. Stephanie had answered in what sounded like a crowded restaurant. “Who?” she asked, though she had clearly heard the name. “Oh, sorry, Ava, I can’t talk now, I’m very busy.” Ava managed to give her phone number and address just in case. Then a few days later she had received five pages of hand-scrawled vitriol, hysterical self-defense and character assassination, which Ava folded and put away in a drawer. She decided to give up on getting back in touch with Stephanie for a while.

  Ava walked back to her room, slurping noodles, still intent on the picture when she almost bumped into her neighbor, a tall brunette she often exchanged shy smiles with while they fumbled with their respective keys.

  “Oh, don’t eat that stuff,” said the neighbor with a laugh. “I do it all the time too, but it’s too depressing. Instant ramen is, like, the taste of sadness. I have a toaster. I could make you a slice of toast.” She paused and blushed, looking at her sneakers. “If you wanted.”

  Her faded blue T-shirt had the name of a band Ava had never heard of and freckles burst across her nose when she smiled and Ava tried to bite free from the noodles dangling from her chin. “I love toast,” she said and then thought it sounded silly.

  “Okay, I’ll come over in a little while. Do you like lemon curd?”

  Ava could only nod.

  The neighbor smiled and disappeared back into her room.

  * * *

  Safely behind her own door, Ava set aside her noodles and paced, trying hard not to listen for sounds from the next room, because it seemed too eager and a little creepy. From the mailboxes she knew her neighbor’s name was Kate, and this sounded like such a wonderfully prim name. After a while, she sat down at her typewriter, hoping that a distraction might make the time pass; it felt like the last five minutes had taken forever. At one point she even got up to check, but when she picked it up, her old alarm clock ticked quietly, humming against her ear, and Ava sat back down, scrolled in a blank page, and started a new chapter.

  * * * * *

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Thanks to my brilliant agent, Dana Murphy, and my incredible editor, Liz Stein, for making this happen and especially for all your help and support in that final stretch of unexpected difficulties. I’m so grateful to have such a pair of amazing women on my team. My thanks also to everyone at Park Row Books who worked on this for me.

  Thanks to my writing group, teachers, and early readers: Madeline Stevens, Karen Havelin, Joe Ponce, Yardenne Greenspan, Emily Barton, Rebecca Godfrey, Heather Aimee O’ Neil, Zachariah Pickard, and especially Lauren Leblanc for all the advice, support and encouragement. I could have never done this without all of you.

  Thanks to André Aciman for twenty years of unwarranted faith in me. It’s a debt I may never repay, but I’m working on it.

  Thanks to my mom and dad and the circle of friends to whom I owe my education, Jon Newlin, Henri Schindler, Ersy Schwartz.

  Thanks to David Brooks for sharing your name and your inspiration with me.

  Thanks to my friends, my support: Kris Alexanderson, Alison Fensterstock, Robert Starnes, Janet Peters, Callie Field.

  Thank you to Brooke Geahan, a friend, a genius, a force of nature, one of a kind.

  A very special thanks to David Shamoon and Ian Davey Volner, as well as old friends and new friends who helped make something magical.

  And finally thanks to my husband, Matt, for making me a better person, a better writer, for offering your calm waters up in service to my hurricane, and for tolerating all the nonsense it took to get here.

  And to Oliver and Violet, my loves, thank you for sharing your gestation and infancies with this book.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Iris Martin Cohen grew up in the French Quarter of New Orleans. She holds an MFA from Columbia University and studied Creative Nonfiction at the Graduate Center, CUNY. She currently lives in Brooklyn. The Little Clan is her first novel.

  ISBN-13: 9781488080470

  The Little Clan

  Copyright © 2018 by Iris Martin Cohen

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  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental. This edition published by arrangement with Harlequin Books S.A.

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