With Friends Like These: A Novel by Sally Koslow

buns and starched white collars. These ladies had been dead a hundred years, yet I could feel their narrowed eyes judge me as I walked toward a young redheaded man seated at the corridor’s end. “Here for the open house?” he asked.
    “Chloe Keaton. Please tell me it hasn’t already started?”
    He checked off my name on a list. “We’re still waiting for all the parents,” he said, and gestured. “Right this way.”
    I entered a room with a wide view of the Brooklyn Bridge, which stood like heavy black lace against the sky. As many as forty other parents—mommies and daddies, daddies and daddies, mommies and mommies—filled rows of straight-backed chairs. Xander had five minutes in which to arrive. While I looked for a seat toward the back, I heard a familiar voice stage-whisper from several rows in front of me.
    “Chloe!” Talia was waving her hand like a traffic cop, forming the words “sit here” and leaning over Tom to tap an empty chair.
    What was Talia doing here? She was supposed to be at our office today. I walked over to see my friends and showed them a smile as big as a poodle.
    “Sit down,” Talia said after the three of us kissed hello.
    “I’m waiting for Xander,” I said, seeing only one empty chair next to them. “I’ll look for you during the tour.” I couldn’t bring myself to ask Talia why she hadn’t mentioned that she’d be here. Preschool was a subject we’d been discussing since our breast-feeding days, but our conversations politely sashayed around specifics. I hadn’t planned to admit—ever—that I’d hired a professional to guide me through the school application process. That was like confessing I needed to pay a personal shopper—Jules, for instance—to pick out my clothes. But there was more. I’d gotten the impression that Talia and Tom wanted to wait another year before enrolling Henry anywhere. “Does a four-year-old really need school?” had been her exact words just last week, which had shut me up fast. What surprised me more was, why Jackson Collegiate? Hadn’t Tom and Talia made a commitment to public school, on account of Tom working, as he likes to say, “in the public sector”?
    I didn’t have to speak. Talia read my mind. “Tom’s adviser at Columbia is married to the head of the lower school,” she offered. “Her name’s—”
    “Betsy O’Neal,” Tom said. “Her husband’s my thesis adviser.”
    I kept my smile going while a thought snuck up like a burp. Was that the thesis Tom Wells had never finished, the one Talia complained about with regularity?
    “Betsy nagged us to check out the school …,” Talia said, and lifted her eyebrows ever so slightly to telegraph to me that she was a skeptic.
    “Jackson’s got a great reputation,” I said. It was the most sought-after private school in Brooklyn, I’d learned from Hannah McCoy, and enrolled students from as far away as Gramercy Park and Chelsea.
    “We’ll be the judge of that.” Talia laughed. “Let’s see how they deliver the goods.”
    I wasn’t used to feeling flummoxed around my best friend. Fortunately,I spotted Xander walking through the door. “Do you want to have coffee later?” I asked Talia.
    “I have to get back to the office,” she said. “There’s a limit to how long a faked eye doctor appointment lasts.”
    “Then let’s talk tonight,” I said, and walked to the back of the room, where Xander had carefully folded his black overcoat over his arm as he found two chairs.
    “What kept you?” I whispered when we were seated.
    “I’m lucky I got here.” He was slightly out of breath. “I have to leave in exactly an hour.”
    That hour fled. Dr. O’Neal introduced department heads and specialists—every witty one of them had spent summers running programs for children in third-world countries. Following the faculty rundown, we were treated to an a cappella choir singing Native American folk songs, a Dixieland band, and an abbreviated performance