DMCs: A Hard Friendship

S ome friendships are smooth and easy and others are hard work for any number of reasons. This story is about one of those hard friendships.

I have a very close friend a friendship that goes back as far as the year we were born. We were neighbors you see and our mothers were good friends so by default when Reva and I were born three months apart we were instant friends too. We even have a few baby pictures together which are always fun to look at.

The funny thing is that I sometimes thought that if not for circumstance we wouldn’t necessarily have been good friends; we didn’t have so much in common. I’m quieter and she’s quick-witted loud and a little sarcastic. But we still managed to be close though we ran in different circles at school.

It’s hard to pinpoint exactly when things started changing. I suppose it was when her father picked up and left one day when we were 11. Reva was shattered though she tried hard not to show it. Her mother was working two back-to-back jobs and was always exhausted. Whenever I went over I could hear Reva’s mother yelling and I just knew that the yelling was even worse when I wasn’t around. You know how it is everyone is on their best behavior around guests even familiar ones so if that’s how she was treating Reva and her brother Yitzy when I was visiting I could only imagine what was happening when nobody else was around.