Between Friends Read online

  “Okay,” I assured her, taking over, doing for her what she’d done for me countless times. “Go on and get out of here. Go home, put that wine in the fridge, and relax on the couch. I’m going to close up now, run home and grab some things, pick up some takeout, and I’ll be at your place in less than an hour.” I brushed her too-long bangs out of her eyes and made her look at me. “Hey, it’s okay. You’re home. We’ll have a sleepover and by tomorrow you’ll feel so much better. All right?”

  She sniffed, but her smile was steadier now. “All right. You sure?”

  “Sure about what?” I asked.

  “You don’t have plans or anything?”

  “Plans? You kidding? Have you seen my life lately? Besides, if the queen were coming to dinner I’d cancel. Now go on, let me get closed up.”

  She hugged me again, tightly, then took the wine and left, hitting the horn on the little Toyota she’d had since we were in high school, and I watched her drive away, completely mystified. At least my concerns about her being mad at me were gone. I had no idea what was going on, but I was going to find out.

  I rushed through my closing routine and got home before Benny. I gathered everything I thought I’d need, and plenty I probably didn’t, like magazines and books and deep conditioner and facial masks. I was almost excited that she was in such a state. Cora had always held me up, always had the solutions, been the one I turned to.

  I’d been the one looking like hell, trying to not cry—and most often failing—more times than she had. Now I could be strong for her. As I packed a duffel bag I went over all the things that could have gone wrong. Maybe she’d been fired.

  Maybe she and Drew had broken up. Again. They’d been in and out of it for years, but she’d never been so upset that she’d come back home.

  I didn’t think anyone could have died. She had no idea who her father was, her mother had been killed when Cora was just eight, and Barbara had died almost ten years ago. Technically, Cora didn’t have any family left at all.

  I settled on Drew. That had to be it.

  Benny came home while I was tossing my bags in the car, and I followed him back into the house.

  “Leaving me?” he asked lightly as he began putting his work away, teasing, his way of easing back into our relationship after an argument.

  “Only for a night,” I said, playing along, but on guard.

  Benny and Cora might not have been crazy about each other, but he was grateful to her for our daughter, grateful to her for being the shock absorber of my crazier emotions, my darker moods during those years.

  There had been times throughout my relationship with Benny—started and ended frivolously at fifteen, begun again in all seriousness at seventeen—when I thought the combination of Benny and Cora would make the world’s perfect husband.

  And when she came back into town, no matter how long it had been, how long Benny had had me to himself, there was still a bit of resentment at my being a ghost of a presence in the house while she was here. It wasn’t that he minded my being gone, it was Cora; specifically, her free spirit, her adamant personality.

  I imagined it had started as adolescent jealousy over my time, but neither of them had fully grown out of it. He didn’t trust her independence, and she didn’t trust his conformity. I needed both, and I usually had the best of both worlds. I swung between them like a hammock, gently at times, tangled at others.

  But right then, when it came right down to it, I thought my absence was likely a welcome break. When he teased me about leaving him rather than falling silent, I could tell he was looking forward to an evening at home alone, hanging out with the birds and a beer. I decided to tread lightly, making conversation before dashing off.

  “So how was it?”

  “How was what?” he responded, slipping his shoes off.

  “Your day, Benny, how was your day? Do you like being back out there? Anything happen? Catch any bad guys?”

  He smiled at that, but he looked tired. I’d grown used to his face aging above a button-down and tie. Seeing it above a uniform again was a little startling, and for the first time I stopped thinking about the fact that he hadn’t consulted me about the job change and wondered if he wasn’t taking on more than he could handle at this point in our lives.

  “No bad guys today,” he said. “Lots of speeders, red-light runners, the usual. I caught a couple of kids trespassing at the Jasper place. It’s still a mess there. Talked to them for a while. Good kids, just curious.”

  “Okay, good. You happy you’re doing this?”

  “Ali,” he said, “stop worrying. I’ll get back into the swing of things. Give me some time, okay?”

  “Okay,” I agreed.

  “Going to hang with Cora, I take it?”

  “That all right with you?”

  He shrugged. “Would it matter if it wasn’t?”

  I closed my eyes briefly. “Of course it would. Do you need me here?”

  He didn’t answer that. “How long did you manage to hold off before calling her?”

  “I didn’t, actually. She showed up at the store. But you were right, she does look awful. I think she and her boyfriend must have broken up.”

  “That’s too bad,” he said, but he wasn’t really listening. He pulled on his after-work clothes, ready to get out to the yard. “Anything in the fridge for dinner?”

  “Not really, unless you want a sandwich. I left a couple of delivery menus on the counter for you.”

  He nodded. “Letty check in yet?”

  “No, but she’s over at Emily’s tonight, remember? Your night stretches out before you, totally unencumbered by women, my dear.”

  He reached his arms above his head, grasping the door trim, and stretched his back with a happy groan. “Sounds lovely,” he admitted. I playfully punched him in his exposed stomach, and he dropped his arms around me and kissed the top of my head. “Have a good time,” he said, giving in. “Call if you need me.”

  “Love you,” I called to him as I left, unable to keep from smiling at the echo of his “You too” just before the sliding glass door closed.

  CORA

  I rested my head against the steering wheel when I got back in the car, exhausted by my unexpected breakdown. I’d done my bird-against-the-window routine for her before with great success, and I’d just wanted to see Ali with all that laughter and joy on her face.

  But the second her arms were around me, all I wanted to do was break down and sob.

  I’d occasionally wondered over the years if there had been anything wrong, ethically, with what we’d done. But then I would see Ali with Letty, or be the recipient of Ali’s mothering instincts myself, as I was today, and I wrestled no more. Of course I had done the right thing. Ali was supposed to be a mother, there was no question.

  But now I wrestled with something that was not so abstract. What, exactly, had I given her? A loving gesture from a best friend, or heartbreak? And feeling her arms around me made me wonder if I had fooled about with something that I shouldn’t have. Perhaps the reason I’d never felt any maternal itch was because I wasn’t supposed to have children. Perhaps my flawed genes were being flushed out of the great Darwinian pool.

  I wanted to go back to when those thoughts were abstract. Once I started getting specific, other specifics began creeping in. How did Letty feel about me? How did I feel about her? How would she feel if I died? How would she feel if she had the same gene? It wasn’t a given. She had a fifty-fifty chance.

  I did have the option of simply saying nothing, going back to Seattle, getting the hemodialysis, hoping for a kidney, and if things didn’t pan out, or the dialysis didn’t work well for me, well, then eventually I’d die and wouldn’t have to worry about it any longer anyway.

  I never said it was a good option.

  I did some deep-breathing exercises on the drive home, determined to hold myself together and have a good night with Ali. I panicked slightly when I saw the state of the house. I hadn’t had the energy
—or the time, thanks to Dr. Cho’s zippy referral—to open the storm shutters, and I certainly hadn’t bothered to neatly remove my clothes from my bags. Things were strewn about, and I was ashamed of myself, ashamed to imagine what Barbara would think of how I was treating the home she’d so generously provided for me.

  I hurried around gathering my clothes together and shoving them in my dresser drawers, drawers I hadn’t looked in for years. I continued to stay in my old room, not out of some misguided respect for Barbara’s room—she’d have expected me to move into it—but because I liked my old room in the back corner of the house, its French doors leading out to the patio and pool, doors I used to sneak out of in high school to meet Ali and our friends down at the beach.

  When she rang the bell, the interior was as good as it was going to get, though it was still dark without the shutters open. I forced a smile on my face, and when I opened the door, it softened into something more natural. Ali had arrived laden down with enough stuff to stay a week.

  “What all did you bring?” I asked, throwing bags onto the sofa while she went back out to her car for more. I laughed when she brought in a stack of DVDs and books. I nearly expected her to whip a puppy out of her pocket.

  We both fell back onto the couch and just looked at each other for a moment.

  “It’s good to see you,” Ali said.

  “Oh, honey, you too, you have no idea.”

  “How long are you staying?”

  I surveyed the array of supplies she’d brought spread before us. “Apparently not as long as you are.”

  “Well, I wanted to plan for every contingency,” she said. “I’ve got heartache movies, funny movies, funny heartache movies, books on changing careers, books on midlife crises, books on cultivating coleus . . .”

  “Cultivating coleus?”

  “I don’t know. It looked pretty,” she said, holding up a book with photos of brightly colored plants with white veins running through them. “I had no idea what sort of mood you might be in, so I just grabbed everything within reach,” she said with her old Ali grin.

  I shook my head and took the book from her. “You’re a nut,” I said, “but I do love you.”

  “Okay,” she said briskly, standing and surveying the living room. “Let’s get the shutters up.”

  I collapsed back against the couch. “Really? Isn’t it nice and soothing in here?”

  “Yes, it’s quite soothing. For mental patients. And if I can help it, you’re not going to become one just yet. On your feet, lady.”

  I stood with a groan. “All right, but if I collapse, I’m holding you personally responsible.”

  “The fresh air will do you good,” she said. And, as usual, she was right. It took well over an hour, and by the time we’d worked our way around the house cranking the rolling shutters up into their cases, I’d worked up a fine sheen of sweat. It exhausted me, but it felt good, too.

  Granted, Ali was doing most of the work, physically and emotionally. She’d kept up a constant stream of chatter, and I hung on every word. She told me about Letty, how she was getting used to high school, how her grades had slipped a little, but that was to be expected with the tougher classes.

  Letty was going to be fifteen in a couple of weeks. My God. Fifteen.

  “She says she doesn’t want a party, can you believe that? She says she’s too old for a party. The girl who had to have pony rides at seven, a bounce house at eight, all those ridiculous theme parties we threw every year with all those screaming girls?”

  I did remember. I’d been there for a few of them and had always thought they were the most absurd waste of money. I thought they were spoiling her, but I kept my opinion to myself, of course. They kept her limbs intact and air pumping through her lungs, and what more could you ask, really?

  “So, will you be here for her birthday?” Ali asked, and if I wasn’t mistaken, there was a slight edge to her voice that I couldn’t readily explain.

  “I might,” I said. “What’s the plan if there’s no party?”

  “Well, dinner out, I guess, and we’ll go ahead and start looking for a car—”

  “What? I thought she was fifteen?”

  “She is,” she said, sounding surprised. “But we thought it would be good to have her learn to drive on the car she’d actually be driving. Besides, we’re just starting to look; it’s not like it’s going to be sitting in the driveway with a big red bow on it. We’ll get it during the year and make it low-key; you know, we don’t want it to look like we’re spoiling her.”

  I gaped at her.

  “What?” she demanded, hands on her hips. “That’s not that unusual, you know. You don’t have kids; you don’t know how it is now.”

  “Oh, come on,” I protested. “You and I both had to work for our cars. What’s Letty doing?”

  “Letty is being a kid—”

  “Kids don’t have cars,” I pointed out. “Young adults have cars, and young adults work, and pay for their insurance and their gas—”

  “Cora!” Ali interrupted me. “Look, yes, we did all that, but things are different now. You have no idea how much work these kids do at school, how crazy and busy their lives are. And I don’t want Letty to have to work yet. We can afford to get her a car, a good, safe car so we don’t have to worry about her breaking down on the side of the road.”

  I started laughing. “Remember when your Fiat lost half its gears and we had to drive home from the beach in first gear the whole way?”

  I thought she’d laugh over the shared memory, but she frowned.

  “That’s exactly what I’m talking about,” she said. “Do you know how dangerous that was? What were we even doing out that late at night? Anything could have happened, and we’d have been able to go all of twelve miles an hour to get to safety. I don’t want Letty in any situation like that.”

  “Well, we managed to live through it,” I said, turning back to the shutter on the front window, the final one. Ali was still standing in the driveway looking at me with her arms crossed over her chest. “And I don’t think we turned out too badly. Do you?”

  I didn’t know why I was pushing this. I didn’t want to fight with Ali.

  “It was a different time,” she said, narrowing her eyes at me. “And I have no idea what my parents were thinking, letting me stay out so late, letting us do some of the stuff we did.”

  “Wow, I think that’s pretty harsh.”

  I was truly surprised. Ali’s parents had been great, ideal parents as far as I had been concerned, and after my mother, foster homes, and then Barbara, I had certainly considered myself something of an expert on what constituted a good family.

  “They let you do things because you’d proven yourself reliable and responsible,” I said. “You worked at the store from the time you were ten; you saved your money; you made good grades; you made good choices, I’d like to think, in friends.”

  She snorted at that. “Well, I guess I did at that. Sorry. Benny’s been a bear lately, and I’m feeling a little frazzled this week.”

  “Me too,” I said, trying to give her an understanding smile, but puzzled by the pained look on her face.

  “What’s going on?” I asked, and she laughed and shook her head.

  “I’m supposed to be asking you that,” she said, then gave the house an appraising look. “Come on, let’s get cleaned up and start downing some wine. I’m feeling like we’ve done enough work, how about you?”

  “I thought you’d never ask.”

  I got in the shower, and Ali passed various potions and unctions in to me, directing me as to what part of my body they were to be used on. At one point I smelled like a pine-infused mango with lemon zest, but still, it was lovely to feel taken care of.

  “Here,” she said, talking over the patter of the shower and handing in a white device. When I took it from her, I realized it was vibrating and nearly dropped it in surprise. There was cream on one end.

  “What the hell am I supposed to do with
this?” I called from behind the curtain.

  Ali pulled a bit of the shower curtain back and looked at me disapprovingly, but she was unable to keep from laughing, too.

  “It’s for your face, Cora. My God, where have you been for the past five years? It’s microdermabrasion. Just rub it around on your face.”

  She let the shower curtain drop, and I applied it to my face, still giggling.

  “And try to not get any in your eyes or your mouth,” she called to me, making us both laugh again.

  When I finally got out of the shower, microdermabraded, deeply conditioned, and loofahed until I tingled, I had to laugh at Ali’s disheartened face.

  “What? You thought I’d look better, didn’t you?” I asked with a grin.

  “You look great,” she said, but I’d seen her face. I believe dismay was the predominant emotion, though it was lightly tinged with concern.

  “We should get massages this week,” she said brightly, and I could see her mentally cataloging the procedures I’d need to have done in order to look myself again. She was probably thinking about lymph node-draining rubdowns, toxin-releasing wraps, and all manner of luxuries that weren’t going to do a thing.

  I wanted to reassure her that it was merely an incurable disease I had, just to make her feel better about her ministrations’ lack of power to transform me.

  “You want to go up with me tomorrow?” I asked, surprising myself.

  Her eyes widened. “I have to open the store,” she hedged.

  This was an old tug-of-war between us. “You know, people actually ask me to take them flying. I’m trusted, sought out, beloved for my safety record.”

  “How ’bout I belove you for staying on the ground?”

  I turned my head upside down and rubbed my hair dry, and Ali pointed to the low stool we used to sit on to apply makeup. I sat and rubbed lotion on my arms—the one beauty regimen I’d embraced in recent years, trying to combat my dry, itchy PKD skin—while Ali started running a comb through my hair.