Proper Care and Maintenance of Friendship (9781609417291)

  LISA VERGE HIGGINS

  NEW YORK BOSTON

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  Table of Contents

  Reading Group Guide

  Copyright Page

  FOR THE SUNDAY NIGHT LADIES:

  Nancy, Judy, and Cathy.

  Amazing writers, wonderful friends.

  chapter one

  When the rumbling Cessna heaved into the sky, Kate Jansen completely lost her nerve.

  She seized the strap of her seat belt as the whole plane shuddered. Through the dirty window she glimpsed Jo and Sarah—her two best friends in the world—standing on the tarmac and shrinking swiftly into the distance.

  “Now don’t you mind all the rattling, Miz Jansen,” Bubba shouted, patting the metal sides of the plane. “This old girl has brought me safely up and down again a hundred times or more.”

  Kate glared at her skydiving instructor. He sat facing her, dressed in his black-and-blue jumpsuit, looking like a giant mutant housefly. He’d just spent two hours shoving her off ever-higher platforms onto thick mats, to teach her the proper falling techniques in the airport’s single hangar. He’d promised her that the jump would conquer her fear of heights, her fear of flying, her fear of everything. He promised her that the experience would completely change her life.

  What the hell am I doing?

  Breathe. Breathe. It had to be all right. Her friend Rachel Braun had done this a thousand and thirty-six times. Solo. But Kate would be diving with Bubba strapped to her back, hooked to him at six points. Each hook could carry two hundred pounds, he’d told her, and so if four of them snapped off while they were tumbling toward earth, well, a little thing like her shouldn’t worry.

  The plane banked. Kate let go of the chokehold she had on her seat belt. She seized the ragged edge of the plywood she sat upon. A thousand little splinters pierced her palms.

  She was going to kill Rachel Braun for this. And she would—if Rachel wasn’t dead already.

  The plane jerked in sudden ascent, and she cast about wildly, seeking escape—an exit, an out that didn’t involve tumbling through the sky. Her gaze fixed upon a silver cross dangling from the rosary beads clutched in the other skydiver’s hands. His name was Frank, Bubba had told her, a Franciscan monk who jumped a few times a year.

  She wondered, in a panic, if a monk could take confession.

  But what did she have to confess? She loved her life. She was a thirty-nine-year-old mother of three who had a comfortable home with a cranky heater and flaking plaster walls. Her life overflowed with PTA meetings and Christmas-craft fund-raisers. She baked bread on Sundays, slapping the dough with floured hands. Every other year or so, she’d do a twenty-mile walk for one of Sarah’s charities.

  She loved, most of all, her kids, whose faces she could summon up like spirits. Tess, trying to be cool while sucking on a hank of hair, her cropped hoodie clinging to her rib cage; Michael, moody and dark and brooding like Heathcliff; and Anna, little Anna, who gave small wet kisses like sparks.

  Only a few hours ago, she’d signed fifteen pages of a contract that absolved the entire universe of any responsibility for loss of property, loss of limb, loss of life. It prevented anyone from even asking about her death—the death that would affect her three little beneficiaries, and her husband, too—who didn’t know that she was currently approaching a cumulus cloud hovering a mile above the earth.

  Suddenly the photographer stood up. He grasped the handle of the door just opposite the pilot’s seat and yanked it open to a blast of sunlight and freezing air.

  Ohmygod. Ohmygodohmygodohmygod—

  “Don’t go cold on me now, Miz Jansen,” Bubba yelled over the roar. “Let’s go over procedures one more time.”

  I can’t do this.

  “Remember, breathe through your nose.”

  I’ve got three kids to pick up from school this afternoon.

  “We’ll hook up, walk to the ledge, and somersault out.” Bubba leaned in closer, so she could better hear the bellow of his voice. “Then get into the arch position right away.”

  The Franciscan stood up, palming the sides of the open door. He yelled something over his shoulder, and then made the sign of the cross. Papers on the pilot’s clipboard rattled—two tore off and reeled into the wind.

  Frank was gone.

  Holy shit.

  “C’mon, Miz Jansen.” Bubba grinned as he reached over and unbuckled her seat belt. “Let’s do this.”

  “No…” The wind sucked the word from her mouth. “No…”

  But Bubba didn’t hear her. He hauled her up with those ham-sized fists and then twisted her around like he was going to take her by the backside. She struggled to speak as she stood there with her knees buckling, bracing herself against the back of the plane, while he pressed his long, hard body against her and hooked her up to him—six little hooks.

  She forced air past her throat. “I’ve changed… my mind.”

  “Ten minutes.” He moved against her. “Ten minutes, and we’ll be on the ground.”

  Kate’s foot slipped off the plywood into a gully where the seats should have been. Something imploded inside her, shooting sparks to her extremities, making her cramp into a curled ball of terror, held up by six little hooks. She seized a beam of molded metal above a window, shouting, “You said… I could change my mind.”

  “You’re not going to chicken out on me, are you, Miz Jansen?”

  “I’m just… a housewife!”

  “Right now you’re a sassy thirty-nine-year-old woman,” he bellowed, “with a big country boy strapped to your back.”

  “I’ve got three kids—”

  “Congratulations. You must be a heck of an athlete, keeping those abs of yours.”

  “—I’ve got responsibilities.” She couldn’t breathe, and all the yelling hurt her throat. “I’ve got obligations. But Rachel died—she’s dead.”

  Rachel, Rachel, why did you ask me to do this?

  “Hey,” the pilot barked. “We’re over the drop zone! Get out!”

  “Miz Jansen, you’ve got to make a decision now.”

  “Rachel… Rachel died,” Kate stuttered, her whole body shaking. “That letter should have had instructions for her funeral. Dirty songs to sing over her grave. Not… not this.”

  Bubba yelled, “You opting out?”

  “Yes!”

  “You sure?”

  “Yes!!”

  Bubba sighed. She rose and fell upon the weight of it.

  “Okay,” he said. “We’re done.”

  Kate stilled. She kept her grip on the molding, slippery now with sweat. She heard her breathing, felt the slight banking of the plane. “Really?”

  “Oh, yeah. Really.” Bubba worked the hooks. He spoke close to her ear so he could make himself heard without yelling. “You think you’re the first to give up, honey? Hell, no. Happens all the time.” He slipped the first hook free. “ ’Specially with women like you. The ones staring down the barrel at their fortieth birthdays. Think they’re going to hurl themselves out of airplanes to resurrect their wild youth. Never happens.”

  “I’ve got… three kids.”

  “So you said. It’s too bad you didn’t go. They’d never look at you in quite the same way.”

  “Better that I’m around to see them,” she retorted. She straightened up, away from the cutting rumble of his voice. “Better I’m alive on the ground—”

  “Oh, sure,” he said. “Then you can go back to your soccer carpool. Flip out your foldable chair. Over a fancy coffee, tell those other moms all about how you almost jumped out of an airplane.” />
  Hell, yes.

  “And when you’re done, you can go home and dust the moldings, maybe scrub a toilet. Figure out how you’re going to cook chicken for dinner. Schedule a tune-up for your second car. Maybe slip in a load of laundry before bedtime. After all, you have to get that stain out of Junior’s soccer pants. I hear Tide with bleach is the thing.”

  Stop.

  She didn’t need to hear it. She saw it, as clearly as she saw long wisps of clouds through the window. Oh, yes, the unfurling of the long years, marked by yet another beach-house vacation and another project involving toothpicks and toilet-paper rolls, another concert with the grammar-school band screeching “Hot Cross Buns.” Smiling all through it. Yes, this was fun; yes, this is the life; yes, we’re a hundred thousand times blessed. Year upon year passes in clockwork predictability, and the only things that change are the height of her kids, the baldness of her husband, and the width of her ass.

  “Listen, asshole,” she yelled over her shoulder, “stop the reverse-psych crap. Sure, I’m a housewife, but it’s a hell of a better way to spend my time than chilling in a morgue.”

  “Like Rachel?”

  Bubba yanked another hook free. He might as well have jerked it from her flesh. It left her speechless. Aghast. Grasping for words.

  Failing to find them.

  Then he pushed against her, sensing her vulnerability. He pressed his stubbled cheek against her hair. “What do you think your friend would give, Kate, for a chance to be up here again?”

  Kate knew the answer. Rachel had lived for moments like this, made huge sacrifices for the adrenaline rush. Sacrifices Kate hadn’t always agreed with.

  But all that was over. All possibilities, for better or worse, were gone forever.

  The pilot yelled, “Last chance, Bubba.”

  Last chance.

  The plane dipped. The wind battered the jumpsuit against her legs. Kate Jansen glared out at those blue skies, at the ground so very far below. She glared up at the heavens. Didn’t know whether to curse Bubba or Rachel or her wretched self for the foolishness she was about to attempt.

  Bubba spoke, one last time.

  “What’ll it be… wifey?”

  chapter two

  “Sweet Jesus, she’s done it.”

  Bobbie Jo Marcum stood on the tarmac, leaning against a rental car, watching one of her best friends float out of the October sky. Even from a distance, Jo could see the grin splitting Kate’s face, as the man strapped to her back manipulated the ropes in order to glide them both to the painted yellow target. They descended frighteningly fast, and hit the ground at a trot. Behind them, the parachute deflated in graceful red folds.

  Jo gave Sarah a bump of her shoulder. “Kate Jansen, mother extraordinaire, has just jumped out of an airplane. What d’you think that means for us, sugar?”

  “Never mind what it means for us,” Sarah said, as she shaded her eyes against the sun. “Think of what it means for Paul.”

  “And those poor kids of theirs.”

  “She’s overdue.” Sarah ran her fingers through a kinky mane of hair that hadn’t seen a stylist’s scissors in ten years. “I don’t think Kate has had a proper steam-blower since before Tess was born.”

  “Building up like a damn volcano.”

  “Last one I remember was years ago, that climb we all took in the Shawangunks, a few months before she got pregnant. Three bottles of red wine and a lot of yodeling.”

  “Yeah, and a striptease in the Hudson Valley sunrise.” Jo grinned, remembering the frigid shower they’d all taken later, in a small mountain cataract. “Gawd, I love that girl when she’s crazy.”

  “So did Rachel.” Sarah’s voice went soft, and she turned her clear gray gaze to Jo. “Guess there’s no getting out of it now.”

  “I hear you, sugar. I surely do.”

  Jo let her gaze skid away. Go-for-it-all Kate had just thrown down the gauntlet by being the first to do what Rachel had asked her to do. If the stay-at-home martyr could jump out of an airplane, well, then, Jo had better do what Rachel had ordered in the ratty white envelope now folded in Jo’s pocket.

  It wasn’t supposed to be like this.

  Only a few days ago, she’d gone to Rachel’s house. Rachel’s family had been sitting shiva. Jo and Kate and Sarah had taken off their shoes and paid their respects, then wandered through a house with black-draped mirrors, tables full of hard-boiled eggs, and a swelling crowd of friends and relatives they didn’t recognize. Jo kept expecting Rachel to jump out from behind a door.

  Gotcha.

  Once, a long time ago, Jo bet twenty bucks that snowboarding would be the sport that would kill Rachel—especially after the skiing accident in Colorado that left her in a body cast for two months. Kate put her money on skydiving—which would explain why Rachel had ordered Kate up eight thousand feet. Sarah, long dubbed their moral and social conscience, was bewildered by the betting until Kate explained that it was good juju to bet against survival. Sarah was most concerned about BASE jumping. She, the international public-health nurse, knew better than all of them the paucity of good health care in the countries that turned a blind eye to a sport that involved leaping off skyscrapers or very high bridges. So, for the nearly twenty years since they’d graduated from college, she and Kate and Sarah had held their breath on a death watch. But you can only teeter on the edge of worry for so long. After a while, it became a running joke, yelled over crackling satellite connections.

  “Hey, Rachel, you still alive?”

  Of course, Rachel hadn’t died in any of those expected ways. Rachel’s last terrible battle was the one adventure she’d kept secret, until the very end. Maybe that’s why her death didn’t seem real. Any more real than seeing Kate Jansen skid into the drop zone, buckled to a strapping hunk of man.

  Sarah, breathless, skittered across the field to meet her. Her hand-dyed brown skirt flapped around her legs. Jo reached into the car’s open window to push aside her cell phone, convulsing to the tinny chorus of “It’s Raining Men,” and hauled out a bottle of peppermint schnapps. Cracking it open, she savored a swig, then winced at the sweetness. It reminded her of ice-skating rinks and junior high and the boy who gave her her first kiss, Lonnie Clyde Barkley.

  If only Rachel’s instructions had been “Get laid.” That would have been easy. Jo could have found someone in her BlackBerry, and if her contacts didn’t pan out, there was always that hot divorcé in Accounting who’d been giving her the burning eye. He had a crest of silky dark hair and a butt that could crack walnuts. She’d been debating whether a fling with him was worth the inevitable complications. Unfortunately, Rachel hadn’t let her off the hook that easily. Her instructions to Jo were simply… unbelievable.

  Jo followed Sarah across the field, swinging the schnapps. Kate unbuckled herself from a rugged bull of a man, and Sarah flung her arms around her. Kate looked like someone had pulled her from the edge of the world. Flushed and wild-eyed and completely incoherent.

  “I can’t believe… Ohmygod… I just… I can’t believe…”

  When it was Jo’s turn to hug, she felt the slamming of Kate’s heart. Jo offered her the schnapps. Kate grabbed it and took the biggest swig Jo had ever seen her take. Except for one memorable evening in the spring of their senior year, when, stressed after finals, Kate had gotten so looped she’d worn her own bra on her head and sung “The Hills Are Alive” from the roof of their dorm.

  Kate shook herself like a wet dog and thrust the bottle back at Jo. Then she let out a Kenilworth State University Rock Climber’s Yodel that could probably be heard in Manhattan. The square-jawed rogue in the jumpsuit was grinning like he’d just given Kate a double orgasm.

  Sarah swayed around, dancing, trying to get Kate to describe it.

  “It was like… being suspended.” Schnapps ran down Kate’s chin; she didn’t wipe. “The wind pushed me up.”

  “Come on.” The hunk took Kate by the elbow and directed her toward the hangar. “Let’s get you
undressed.”

  “Oh, honey,” Jo murmured, as she and Sarah followed, “don’t talk like that. Kate’s a married woman.”

  But I’m not.

  He looked at Jo. The twinkle brightened in his eye. Jo savored the familiar tremor that shook her whenever she approached a man high on testosterone. It might be worth jumping out of a plane, she thought, to be pushed up against that.

  “It was… Time stopped.” Kate stumbled along. “It stretched. Nothing but air and noise. Ohmygod—”

  “Looks like the schnapps is kicking in.”

  “Oh, no,” the hunk said. “That’s pure adrenaline. The best drug in the world.”

  “I JUST JUMPED OUT OF A PLANE!” Kate pulled away and twirled across the tarmac. “I JUST FREAKIN’ JUMPED OUT OF A PLANE!”

  “You know, you might want to think about taking our Accelerated Free-Fall course,” the hunk began. “Then you can do it without me strapped onto you—”

  “Now, darling,” Jo interrupted, “what’s the fun in that?”

  “By myself?” Kate was hopping around like a kangaroo. “Really? How long does it take?”

  “It’s more extensive training, but if you’re serious, we can talk about setting you up….”

  Jo narrowed her eyes as the hunk launched into his sales pitch. She skewered Kate with a good long look. No doubt it would put a damper on the moment to tell Kate that they didn’t need another adrenaline junkie like their dead friend Rachel, or to suggest it might be a good idea for Kate to let her own husband know what she was doing while the kids were at school. But seeing Kate half crazed like this, totally cut loose, was becoming too rare a thing, like seeing the Tomato Queen catch the mud-slick sow at the pig scramble. It only happened on the blue of a moon if it fell on a Saturday. It reminded Jo of the good ol’ Kate, the pre-wedding Kate, the pre-children Kate, the old friend whose vibrant personality was fading into legend.

  “CAN YOU BELIEVE IT?! I JUST JUMPED OUT OF AN AIRPLANE!”

  That airplane was landing now, roaring down the runway toward the same hangar they were heading toward. Kate danced ahead, and Sarah, laughing, danced with her, and every once in a while Kate would scream some variation of “I just jumped out of an airplane!”