Friendship Makes the Heart Grow Fonder (9781455517763) Read online

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  To Tom…for showing

  me the world.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Four years, two weeks, and three days. To Monique, grief was still a familiar guest, arriving without warning.

  She sat on the edge of her bed. She knew she shouldn’t be here, alone in her house, engulfed by shadows. She should be outside enjoying the waning light of the evening with Judy and Becky and the whole neighborhood. Through the screen window, she smelled the mesquite-smoke scent of barbecue. She heard the rippling of her friends’ laughter as they gathered on the deck next door. It was the last Sunday of the summer. Everyone was home from the beach, the lake, and the mountains. Swarms of kids squealed as they jumped on the trampoline. In the driveway, an empty garbage can rumbled to the ground as if someone had stumbled against it.

  Earlier Monique had made an appearance at the gathering, like she always did. She’d brought over a nice batch of doubles, her grandmother’s Caribbean-island version of spicy hummus sandwiches. It was a crowd favorite. She’d shown up because Lenny would have wanted her to. Lenny had always loved these casual get-togethers, sitting back with a beer and laughing with Judy’s husband, Bob, over some golf game. He’d tease Becky’s husband, Marco, for doting so much on his own young kids, even as Lenny leaned forward to allow those same giggling children to peel open the winged seeds of maple trees and stick them on his nose.

  Four years, two weeks, and three days. Everyone expected her to move on, whatever the hell that meant. Yet here she was, sitting in the gloom with Lenny’s bucket list on her lap. Fingering the crackling edges of the paper in the hope that, if she stared long and hard enough at it, then Lenny would come.

  He did not disappoint.

  She drew in a long, deep breath, smelling the faintest whiff of Brut. She let her eyes flutter closed. She detected a rustle in the room, like the sound of curtains blown by a breeze. She imagined she felt a pool of warmth, just behind and to the right of her, where the mattress canted a bit, sagging under an unseen weight. She heard Lenny’s rumbling baritone in her mind.

  Taking that thing out again, huh? Second time this week.

  She made a stuttering sound like a half laugh. Her heart began doing that strange pitter-patter thing, the one that reminded her of the swift skitter of a premature baby’s heart, the fierceness of it in the preemies she worked with in the neonatal intensive care unit. Her doctor had told her that palpitations sometimes happen when a woman approaches menopause. But she didn’t think it had anything to do with menopause. She was only forty-six years old, and everything else was working right on schedule. But she’d been feeling this sensation on and off since the day Lenny died.

  I left you money to do that list years ago, Monie.

  She smiled into the darkness. This list lived in the drawer of her bedside table, along with Lenny’s Mass card, his watch, and the case with the diaphragm she hadn’t touched since. “You left me with a thirteen-year-old daughter too, remember?”

  Oh I remember she’s a handful.

  “It just didn’t seem the right time, to flit off to Europe, me, a widowed working mom.”

  Monie, when did you ever “flit”?

  “Is it wrong to want to spend as much time with Kiera as I can? In less than a year, she’s leaving for college.”

  Kiera will be all right. She’s like you, Monie. She’s strong in the middle.

  A prickling started at the back of her eyes. The paper rattled in her hands. She didn’t feel strong, sitting here in the dark with her heart romping in her chest. She couldn’t help thinking about a biology lab she’d done while she was studying to become a nurse. She and her lab partner had put dissected heart cells into a petri dish and fed them an electric current to set them beating in dissonant rhythms. Within only moments, the cells began to adjust their throbbing to sync with the ones closest.

  The heart closest to hers was dead.

  She battled the urge to turn around and burrow into his burliness, to smell the scent of cut grass on his flannel. She’d succumbed to that urge once—the very first time she’d sat in this empty room, bent over, crying out for him. She’d sensed him then. She’d jerked up at the sensation. In her elation, she’d whirled around and found, instead of the man she’d buried, nothing but cold and silence and an empty bed. So she’d learned to hold her breath when she felt him, lest she scare away the ghost of his memory.

  Her Trinidadian grandmother would have called him a jumbie—a lost spirit—and in her island patois she would have urged Monique to go to an Obeah woman to collect the herbs and the talismans needed to send the spirit of Lenny away.

  She didn’t want Lenny to go away.

  You should do the whole list, Monie. All of it, just like we talked about.

  Monique read the odd things they’d written. Slogging through the catacombs of Paris. Rappelling down an alpine ledge. Hitting 100 mph on a German autobahn. She could barely remember what they were thinking when they dreamed up this list. The project had just been something to do to pass the time between chemo sessions or while the doctors were waiting for test results before they prescribed more pills. These trips were something to busy their minds with, something to joke about, so that Lenny wouldn’t completely lose hope, even while his burly body melted away in the hospice.

  Lenny never lost his sense of humor, not even in the end.

  She ran her fingers across his spidery scrawl, noticed how shaky his handwriting became at the bottom of the list. “This was just a lark, Lenny. You don’t even like motorcycles.”

  Maybe I just wanted to see you wearing leather.

  She choked down a laugh. Her chest squeezed, muscling out all the oxygen. The truth was that the things on this list bore no resemblance to any part of the wonderful life she’d led with her husband. Their life was here, in their center-hall colonial on a street swarming with children. What vacations they’d taken had been modest—cabin-camping in western New Jersey, a week in a beach house in Wildwood, one splurge to Disney World—always tempered by the need to pay the mortgage and his medical school loans, and fatten up Kiera’s college fund.

  She’d give up a thousand trips to Paris to have Lenny back, laughing as he hiked Kiera on his shoulders so their daughter could reach the red apples on high.

  “I can’t do this, Lenny.”

  She clumsily folded the paper, running her fingers along the weakened seam. His disappointment was a chill as his presence faded from the room.

  “I just can’t do this without you.”

  *

  Judy poked her head in through the open front door and called Monique’s name into the darkness. Monique’s muffled response rippled down from second floor gloom. Judy gripped the banister and headed up the stairs, noticing, as she reached the landing, that a light suddenly went on in the master suite. She rounded the bedroom door just in time to catch Monique slipping something into the drawer of her bedside table.

  Monique shot off the bed and started pulling clothes out of the laundry basket, folding them with brisk efficiency. “Hunting me down already, J
udy?”

  Judy noticed three things at once: Monique wasn’t meeting her eye, her friend’s graceful neck was tight and corded, and the photo of Lenny on her side table was angled perfectly for bedside viewing.

  “Well, Monie, you did pull your vanishing act again.”

  “You usually let me get away with it.”

  “Yeah, but this time you left me sitting next to Maggie talking about her most recent skin melanoma.”

  Monique flashed her hazel eyes, begging her not to probe. Judy considered. She never should have let Monique drink that second glass of wine tonight. The neighborhood gatherings often set the widow off. Four years was too long to be grieving this strongly, but then again, Judy missed Lenny too. Bob missed Lenny. Everyone in the whole darned neighborhood missed Lenny.

  Judy gestured to the basket of clean laundry. “I suppose you’re determined to finish that?”

  “It’s not going to fold itself.”

  Judy wandered to the bed to pull a pair of pajama bottoms out of the basket. “You know, you’re not the only Franke-Reed who was noticed missing in action tonight. Becky’s kids were asking for your daughter.”

  “Kiera’s still in the city, working with that filmmaker. She’s going to stick with that internship until the director kicks her off the set.”

  “Ah, yes. Unpaid internships: The twenty-first-century way to work around child labor laws. At least it’ll look great on her college applications.”

  Judy glanced over her shoulder to where the door to Kiera’s room yawned open across the hall. Kiera’s computer monitor was on, the screen-saver a kaleidoscope of warping neon cubes. A pile of textbooks teetered on the desk. A blow dryer lay on the top of the bureau amid a cascade of cosmetics. A hoodie was tossed carelessly across the unmade bed.

  Proof of occupation.

  Judy’s ribs tensed. She remembered what it was like to have a teenager at home. She remembered what it was like to have five kids at home, to have an oversized calendar on the kitchen wall aflame with ink—blue, green, yellow, red, purple, orange, brown—one color for each body in the house. She’d been the captain of the Good Ship Merrill, full of purpose, blissfully ignorant that her entire adult life was sailing by in a blur of parent-teacher conferences and Tater Tot casseroles and crew-team meets.

  Now her empty calendar, a ghost in the kitchen. Audrey’s empty bedroom, like a sucking black hole. Judy’s sense of purpose a wisp she kept searching for, while whisking the dust bunnies from under unused beds.

  Judy forced her gaze away from Kiera’s room. Laying the folded pajamas down, she reached for a pair of jeans and shook them with excess vigor. “So,” Judy said, “has Kiera whittled down her list of schools?”

  “She’s working on the NYU application already.”

  “Clearly I’m going to be useless to both of you. Kiera has already started early, which is the first piece of advice that I would have given you.”

  “You can still help. She’s stuck on a list of odd questions. You know, ‘what’s your favorite word?’ And ‘describe your most life-altering experience.’”

  “Oh, yeah. Audrey and I spent a whole afternoon vying to come up with the most outrageous opening lines for that one.”

  Monique winced. “Please tell me Audrey didn’t use the story of her teammates trying to sneak a bottle of cheap vodka into the crew-team hotel suite.”

  “No, no, we made everything up.” Judy fixed her attention on smoothing the seams of the jeans, to hide a pang of remembrance. “I think Audrey won with ‘It took me awhile to convince the natives to make me their god.’”

  Monique’s smile was subdued, but at least it nearly met her eyes. Post-Lenny Monique was a hard nut to crack.

  “Monie, don’t worry. Kiera’s a super candidate. She’ll fly right through this, just like she does with everything.”

  “I hope so. Because, I tell you, it’s really not fun.”

  Judy felt her smile tighten. It hadn’t seemed fun at the time, she remembered. It had been stressful and difficult. She probably complained about it at every opportunity. Amid the raucous chaos of her home life, she had taken for granted the affectionate intimacy, the warm, busy togetherness that had been jettisoned abruptly three weeks ago when Audrey walked to the gate of the plane that would take her to California and tossed her mother a casual, breezy wave.

  Bob kept telling her she should be grateful for the new freedom. Bob kept saying she was acting like a bird who didn’t yet realize that the cage door was yawning wide open. Well, she remembered that they’d owned a parakeet once. Her older daughter Maddy, appalled at its incarceration, had flung open its cage door.

  The bird flew out…and then flew right back in again.

  “You all right, Judy?”

  Judy snapped her attention to her friend and found herself in the crosshairs of Monique’s hazel gaze. She dropped her attention back to the yoga pants she was folding. Oh, yeah, she would love to talk to Monique about this—if the idea didn’t fill her with shame. Monique worked as a nurse in a NICU. She cradled premature babies fighting for life every day. After Kiera left home, Monique would have a meaningful vocation to return to, not just a house that felt so hollow and quiet that Judy felt compelled to vacuum obsessively just to fill the place with noise. Monique wouldn’t have to fight a constant, low-grade pall by starting an attic-cleanout project, or replastering the battered, crayon-streaked walls of the hallway, or planting perennials on the edges of the lawn. “Damn hot flashes,” Judy muttered, picking up the pile of Monique’s active wear so she could turn away from those all-seeing eyes. “I swear, if you could plug me in, I could light up half the neighborhood.”

  “You’re not looking pink to me.”

  “It’s just starting.”

  “Um-huh.”

  Monique’s mutter was low and drawn-out and supremely doubtful.

  “You just wait.” Judy crouched to pull the lower drawer of the black lacquered chest-on-chest to slip the yoga pants and workout shirts into their proper place. “In five minutes, I’ll have mottled cheeks and beads of perspiration on my upper lip, and I’ll be generating enough heat to put steam on these windows.”

  Monique gave her a narrow-eyed look. “Did you leave the barbecue because you didn’t feel like listening to Joe Davis’s latest fishing story?”

  “You mean the one about the two-hundred-pound marlin?”

  “It was one-eighty when he boasted to me.” Monique rounded the bed to carry Kiera’s things across the hall. “The point is, you clearly used me as an excuse to slip away.”

  “Your powers of observation are extraordinary, Sherlock.”

  “It comes with the nurses’ training.”

  Judy paused outside Kiera’s room, assaulted by the scent of nail polish and coconut shampoo, of dirty socks and ink. “Actually,” she said, “I wanted to talk to you about Becky. She came by tonight.”

  “Yeah, I heard the tumbling of the garbage can that heralded her arrival.”

  “Actually, that was Brian’s Big Wheel, which she knocked into the garbage can. The thing is, Becky came by, but then left right away.”

  “Did she forget to bring that red velvet cake? If she brought that cake, I’ll reconsider my antisocial tendencies and put up with Joe’s fish tales.”

  “She didn’t bring the cake.” Judy frowned, concern filling her anew, the concern that had urged her to seek out Monique in the first place. “Something’s up with her.”

  Monique wandered toward the doorway and tilted her head in unease, her fall of tight braids brushing against her throat. “It’s Marco, isn’t it?”

  “That’s where I’d put my money.”

  Marco, Becky’s husband, had been put on unpaid furlough three weeks ago as a cost-cutting measure imposed by the architectural firm he worked for. The company was struggling to hold on to its talent through a grim economic time, but couldn’t afford to keep everyone on full payroll. Marco was one of the architects with the least seniority, one of the late
r hires. Gina, his eighteen-year-old daughter from a previous marriage, was now in college, while Becky stayed home raising the younger kids.

  “The timing is right,” Judy said, “for the financial strain to show.”

  “It can’t help that Becky dented the car again.”

  “Body work is expensive.”

  “It couldn’t have happened at a worse time.”

  “Yes, and Marco’s not home tonight. He took the train to his brother’s house in Hicksville so he could borrow their second car while theirs is in the shop.”

  Monique paused. “So she’s alone.”

  “Yup.”

  “And her kids are next door, having fun on the trampoline.”

  “Monie, I saw her through the window tonight. She’s sitting at her kitchen table with her head in her hands.”

  *

  She could do this.

  Becky pushed herself up from the kitchen table and slipped into the den, rounding the couch to confront the usual scattering of toys. She picked up the Matchbox fire truck and little yellow car, and then she scooped up the Spiderman and Green Goblin action figures and tossed them unerringly into the big wicker bin in the corner. She gathered the fashion dolls. She squinted at the rug, searching for the little shoes, belts, and sparkling fabric purses. She lifted pillows off the carpet and tossed them on the L-shaped couch, pausing to fold the throw blankets and tuck them in the lower shelf of the coffee table.

  See? She was perfectly fine. She could take care of her house. There was nothing wrong with her at all. She’d finish cleaning out this den and then she’d move back to the kitchen and make sure the last of the flour had been scrubbed from the counter. She would hand-dry the bowls she’d used to make the cake. By then the pans should be well-soaked enough that she wouldn’t have to scrub to loosen the baked-on crumbs.

  After that, it’d be time to call Brianna and Brian home from the trampoline. On summer nights, they always tumbled in streaked with grass stains, sticky with mosquito repellent, and sweaty around the hairline. She’d have to bathe them tonight because early tomorrow morning they were going to her motherin-law’s house for the annual Labor Day weekend cookout. She should probably start packing snacks for the car.