By Patricia Volk
(Reviewed by Nancy Jelinek)

Alice Vogel was certainly Roberta’s oldest friend. Their mothers had been friends and godmothers to each other’s daughters. She and Roberta ran together nearly every morning and loved the theater. Nanny Wunderlich and Bobbie had been friends since grad school, had both been therapists, and had been pregnant at the same time. Nanny and Bobbie enjoyed seeing movies in the afternoon.

While Alice and Nanny each consider themselves Roberta Bloom’s best friend, they are known to each other only through conversations with their friend. “Roberta didn’t care to mix people,” and mixing Alice and Nanny is like mixing oil and water. Now, after Roberta’s death to cancer, they are both wearing bracelets of Roberta’s, inscribed “ALLERGIC TO FISH WEARING CONTACT LENSES,” and surprised to find themselves in her attorney’s office at the same time. Sometime in the past, they’d been asked to sign a bank-vault card. The attorney turns over their friend’s vault-box key, and their unlikely adventure together begins.

The vault box contains a letter to their friend. As Roberta was notorious for not keeping secrets, both are surprised that neither of them knew anything about this correspondence. Nor are they sure just what to do with it. Alice is for burning it; Bobbie feels pulled to find out who the author is and make contact. Perhaps Roberta wanted the sender to have the letter back without her husband or daughter knowing about it. Maybe the sender would like the letter back. In between Alice’s schedule of running her “pre-owned boutique,” Luba and Nanny’s occupation as a sharp New York City realtor, they meet for lunch numerous times and rather disjointedly seek a path to the truth about their friend, themselves, and each other.

Patricia Volk is author of the novel White Light and two collections of short stories. Her writings have appeared in numerous publications, and she was a weekly columnist for Newsday.

Vintage Books (a division of Random House, Inc.)
ISBN 978-0-307-27574-5