With Friends Like These... by Gillian Roberts

anymore.”
    “Canceled,” Sybil said in a hard whisper.
    The elegant man behind me yawned loudly. He obviously wasn’t concerned with Lyle’s ratings. “If they would only have told me I was going to spend some of the night vomiting,” he said, “I would have dressed for the occasion.”
    “Don’t even say that word,” his skinny seatmate begged.
    A police officer who had already written down about half of our names and addresses methodically continued his rounds. He didn’t look any happier than the rest of us, although he, at least, wasn’t overdressed.
    “Don’t you want some kind of statement or something?” I recognized the voice as Janine’s. I hadn’t realized she was on my bus.
    “Can’t take them when you’re all together like this,” the policeman said. “Later.”
    We were the HUP delegation, being trucked to the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania. Other segments of the possibly afflicted had been taken to Hahnemann, Jefferson, Pennsylvania Hospital, and Temple. It was lucky that Philadelphia was so liberally blessed with medical facilities. Or was it suspicious?
    My mother sat next to me, in the window seat, her hands folded on her lap and her bottom lip gripped by her upper teeth, the sure sign that Bea was brooding. As children, Beth and I used to scurry for cover as soon as we saw the old lip-in-the-teeth, although luckily, Bea could only brood for brief periods of time. I checked my watch. Six minutes since we had boarded. Not many more to go.
    Then I looked at my watch again and did a mild double take. Only seventy-five minutes—one and one-quarter hour—had passed since we entered the dining room for Lyle Zacharias’s gala birthday dinner. It felt more like epochs, great historical subdivisions, but it was not yet nine-thirty.
    With nothing to do but sit and ride, the emotional overload of the evening finally had a chance at me, and I felt overwhelmed with exhaustion and sorrow.
    “Good thing Lyle was watching his weight,” my mother murmured, breaking her brood.
    Nothing like your mother saying something completely insane to snap a mood around. I swiveled and stared at her to see if she was serious. She was. “Call me crazy,” I said, “but in all honesty, the last thing I’d want to do right before my death is diet.”
    “No, I mean if he hadn’t been, I’d be worried that one of my tarts did him in. Given that they weren’t refrigerated.”
    “Trust me. It wouldn’t have done him in, even then.” A love affair can become toxic that fast, but not tart topping.
    “Except…” my mother said.
    I waited.
    “When I excused myself to go to the powder room—remember?”
    I half nodded because I only half remembered.
    “I checked them again. Because it was hot in that kitchen and—”
    “Yes, Mother, I know. But they were fine, and anyway, nobody ate them, so forget about it.”
    “I would. Except for the two I took out of the tin. Only half of one was on the plate,” she said. “So somebody…you don’t think the heat in the kitchen could have—”
    “Of course not!” All the same, I was glad she’d been whispering, and I lowered my voice, too. “Mom, whipped cream—as spoiled as it can possibly get—can make somebody sick, but not the way Lyle was.”
    She blinked, fighting back tears. “Are you positive?”
    I nodded.
    “Did you see, Reed?” Sybil said from across the aisle. I tensed, afraid she was talking about my mother and me. “Did you catch her impersonation of grief? She never could act. Little starlet tramp. And Shepard as the good old family friend. Now there’s a good actor, given how he felt about Lyle, and Tiffany—I’d expect him to be dancing with joy!”
    “Mom, please. You’re practically shouting,” Reed said with the classic agony of a teenager. “Why do you always say things like that, anyway?”
    I was on his side. His mother was loud and drunk and extremely indiscreet.
    “I’m whispering, Reed. You’re so