Friendship Makes the Heart Grow Fonder (9781455517763) Read online

  A knock on the back door startled her. Shadows shifted through the window, and then someone turned the door handle and stepped right in.

  “Hey, Becky.”

  She recognized Monique’s voice before her friend stepped into the light of the kitchen. Monique wore a tank top that showed off her arms, honed by kickboxing. Judy, a shorter, sturdier shape, followed behind.

  “I told you she was an alien.” Judy hiked her fists onto her hips as she scanned the room. “Mothers of three children aren’t supposed to have clean houses.”

  “It’s only two of the monsters now. I can’t blame Gina for this.” Becky pulled open the lower cabinet to toss a paper towel into the garbage. “I haven’t seen hide nor hair of Gina since she left for Rutgers. But I’m not complaining.”

  Becky smiled tightly. No use bringing up that other concern about Gina—that, if Marco’s unpaid furlough stretched much longer, the college girl might actually have to move out of the dorm at Rutgers and back into this house. She and her stepdaughter didn’t have the best of relationships. If Gina came home again, the girl would take inordinate pleasure in flaunting the tongue-stud she had done on her eighteenth birthday.

  But Becky had bigger things to worry about now. She let Gina slip away, like water through her fingers.

  Monique pulled up a chair. “We missed you at the barbecue, Beck.”

  “That’s quite a trick,” Becky said, “since you weren’t there either, Monique.”

  “I bailed when I thought your red velvet cake wasn’t coming.”

  Becky turned toward the sink to avoid those clear, all-knowing eyes. “I think you bailed when Mrs. Davis started talking about her colonoscopy. I hear the Miralax powder is thorough.”

  Judy asked, “Marco not home yet?”

  “The charmer won’t be back until ten or eleven.”

  Monique said, “You want to talk about it?”

  Becky concentrated on pulling one of the cake pans out of the sink and attacking it with the scrubbing side of a blue sponge. No, she really didn’t want to talk about it. She hadn’t even told Marco what was bothering her. For so long she and Marco had been living in strained little silences. The act of keeping explosive information from him had been easier than she’d expected. The financial squeeze they were feeling was only the latest hit in a long string of odd distrusts and not-so-subtle misunderstandings. And he’d been so angry lately, for the fact that his salary had been cut to nothing, for the bills piling up, for the car accident. It didn’t help that she’d just found out from the dentist that Brianna was going to need braces. She hadn’t yet dared to mention that, if Brian was going to play hockey this season, he would need all new equipment because he’d grown so much. And no matter how many elaborate fantasy-castle cakes she made for friends and their referrals, she couldn’t bake and sell them fast enough to fill the gap between what Marco had been paid and what the mortgage demanded. It was a long list of worries.

  They all seemed so silly now.

  “Hey, Becky,” Judy said, peering at the calendar hanging over the desk in the corner of the kitchen. “Don’t you have a birthday coming up?”

  “Yeah. In April.” Becky held the pan up while water dripped into the sink. “I didn’t think you’d so quickly forget the margaritas at Tito’s last spring.”

  “April, September, whatever. It’s close enough for a celebration.” Judy wandered over to the table and ran her hand over the back of a chair. “Don’t you agree, Monique?”

  “I think I could talk Kiera into donating a little community service time toward watching your two little monsters.”

  Judy added, “I hear that new tapas place on Main Street is great.”

  Monique murmured, “A little Spanish guitar…”

  “A little Spanish wine…” Judy nodded in decision. “I think you and Marco could use a fun night out.”

  A night out. Becky shifted her gaze to the window over the sink, to the smudgy, shadowed reflection of her own face.

  Nights were the worst.

  She gave the dripping pan one last shake and then slipped it onto the drainer. At least she tried to slip it onto the drainer. Somehow instead, she cracked the corner of it against a glass mixing bowl so precariously piled that the force made the bowl tumble over the edge and knock a whisk and two wooden spoons out of the utensils bin. While the bowl clattered on the wet counter, one wooden spoon flipped into the air and then rattled onto the tile floor.

  In the uncomfortable silence that followed, Becky felt a hot prickle of embarrassment. Clumsy Becky, again. Always tripping on uneven sidewalk pavements, stumbling over garbage cans, knocking over wineglasses, and dropping whole trays of cupcakes off the edge of tables.

  So adorable.

  “Hey, nice flip.” Judy turned the bowl upright and pushed it deeper onto the counter. “Did you see the spin on that thing?”

  Monique retrieved the spoon and handed it to her. Becky took it and saw the flicker of a look that passed between her friends. It was a subtle thing, a quiet zipping of information. The kind of nonverbal communication that would, soon enough, pass right by her, unnoticed.

  Monique flicked a drop of water on her arm, to get her attention. “Are you going to tell us what’s wrong, girl, or do we have to do this kabuki dance until we tease it out of you?”

  Becky picked the other cake pan out of the water, setting the sponge upon it with new ferocity. She wished they would just go away. They knew her too well. Just like Becky could tell by the strain in Monique’s voice that something was bothering her, or by the way Judy acted crazy when she was upset, Becky knew they saw the signs in her, too. When you form an alliance to mutually raise a passel of curious, risk-taking, hormone-crazy teenagers, you become comrades in a very narrow foxhole. She, Monique, and Judy had survived raising-a-teenage-daughter boot camp. They were bonded for life.

  But Becky wasn’t in the mood to share. She hadn’t yet wrapped her own mind around the news. Every time she looked at Brianna and Brian, her throat closed up. She found herself cataloging the tangle of their lashes, the way Brian’s nose tilted up at the tip, Brianna’s shoulders dusted with freckles.

  If she spoke the words out loud, then it would be real.

  “Marco didn’t believe me,” she said, casting about for any reasonable excuse for her behavior. “About the accident.”

  Judy wandered to the far cabinet where, by stretching her solid frame up on her toes, she could just reach the bottle of whiskey on the third shelf. “Beck,” she said, “you aren’t the best of drivers.”

  “So I’m repeatedly told.”

  “I mean,” Judy continued, “it’s not like this was your first fender bender.”

  “It was a deer.” At least, she thought it was a deer. It might have been a big beige dog. Or an odd-colored garbage can. It had all just happened so fast, and the sun was right in her eyes. “I clipped it on that road just by the nature preserve.” Twenty-five-mile-an-hour speed limit and she was riding just under it. “The place is lousy with deer.”

  Monique shifted her stance, a line appearing between her eyes. “How bad is the damage?”

  The damage to the car, at least, was repairable. She shrugged. “It’s more than we can afford right now. Marco is understandably angry.”

  Judy nudged her and held out a whiskey on ice. “Listen, when Bob had his so-called retirement and was home for four months, he took every frustration out on me. Thank God he was hired by this start-up online news corporation or we’d have killed each other by now.” Shrugging, she pushed a lock of brown hair behind her ear. “Marco is tense, Becky. He’s feeling like he can’t provide.”

  Becky let the pan drop right back into the water as she took the drink. “Marco made me go to the eye doctor to get my vision checked.”

  “That’s like when I sent Jake to get his hearing checked.” Judy rolled her whiskey glass in little circles on the kitchen table. “Perfect hearing, the doctor told me. Apparently my kid just doesn’t listen to me
.”

  “Becky, you’re coming up on forty, yes?” Monique said. “Well, it’s a sad, dreary little fact that you’ll be wearing rhinestone-studded reading glasses before long.”

  Judy took a sip of her whiskey. “Hey, it’ll raise the chance that one of us will remember our glasses when we go out to eat. We’ll be like those three witches in that Disney movie, sharing one eye.”

  Becky clattered her glass onto the table. Her hand was shaking, and she’d already spilled some of the liquid onto her fingers. She tried to rub it off, but only succeeded in spreading it over her other hand. Maybe Monique would understand all this, she thought, digging her nails into her palms. At the very least Monique could explain it to her in a way she might be able to comprehend.

  Becky strode to the small desk in the corner of the kitchen and riffled through the permission slips and flyers she’d pulled from her kids’ backpacks until she found the information sheet she couldn’t bring herself to read. She glanced at it briefly and then, closing her eyes, thrust it behind her, toward Judy, who was closest.

  Judy took it and held it at arm’s length. “Wouldn’t you know I didn’t bring my reading glasses?” She squinted as she moved her head back a little. “And it’s in Latin, no less.”

  Monique started. She came around the table to peer over Judy’s shoulder. Becky watched Monique’s face as she swiftly read the text, her eyes moving back and forth. As Becky watched Monique read to the bottom, she noticed that her friend’s lips went tight, revealing a pale line around the edges.

  “I don’t get it,” Judy murmured, squinting ferociously. “All I can see is the title. What the hell is retinitis pigmentosa?”

  “It’s a disease.” Monique lifted her troubled gaze to Becky’s. “A degenerative one.”

  Becky saw the shock in Monique’s eyes and the dawning dismay in Judy’s. Then she spoke before her throat closed up.

  “Apparently, ladies…I’m going blind.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  Monique pushed the curried chicken around the iron skillet. The scent of onions, garlic, diced tomatoes, and green seasoning rose up with the steam. Through the kitchen window, she glimpsed Becky’s kids playing in her backyard on the old wooden swing set, the one she couldn’t bring herself to take down though Kiera hadn’t gone near it in years. At least Becky’s kids were enjoying it, their laughter bright and sharp.

  Monique stopped stirring, her fingers tightening on the wooden spoon. She knew that Becky still hadn’t told the kids. Kids that age would struggle to grasp the meaning of such bad news. They wouldn’t really understand the incremental progression of the disease, or what it all meant to them on a day-to-day basis. With the diagnosis so fresh, Monique suspected that even Becky and Marco hadn’t fully absorbed the consequences—certainly not enough to explain to Brianna and Brian in plain terms the grim, long-term repercussions.

  Dread shifted within her, a solid weight that pressed against her spine. Earlier in the week at the hospital, she’d spent a coffee break with a specialist in degenerative eye diseases, pumping him for information. Monique knew the prognosis. She knew how it would play out. She knew more than she wanted to know—enough to break her heart three times over.

  “Hey, Mom.”

  Kiera busted through the back door. With a solid thunk, she dropped her backpack onto the floor of the mudroom. She sailed into the kitchen and gave Monique a quick peck on the cheek.

  “Hey, baby girl,” Monique said. “How did the physics test go?”

  Kiera rolled her eyes. She scooted to the sink, rolling up the sleeves of her hoodie. “Let’s just say I wouldn’t mind pushing Mr. Orso off a cliff to calculate how long it would take for him to reach terminal velocity.”

  Monique suppressed a smile, momentarily grateful for the spoon in one hand and the oven mitt in the other, because they prevented her from running her palm over Kiera’s hair to smooth down the short pieces that stuck up from around the braided headband. Such fierce, affectionate motherly urges were usually repaid with affront. “I’ll make sure not to mention that at the next back-to-school night. You hungry?”

  “Starved. That smells awesome.” Kiera peered into the skillet as she ran her hands under the open faucet. “Curry chicken?”

  “And callaloo.” She lifted the top off another pot to show the greens simmering in coconut milk. “Swiss chard and spinach, though. Don’t go expecting dasheen leaves like Grand-mère would have made you, hunting them down in some side-alley Caribbean grocer.”

  “So what’s the occasion?”

  The kid had a sixth sense. “Since when do I have to have an occasion to whip up some comfort food for my hard-working high school senior?”

  “You’re still in scrubs.”

  Monique shrugged as she glanced down at the duck appliqués on her blue scrubs. She’d had one of her colleagues cover for the last hour of her shift because she was no fool. She hoped Kiera would adore what she was going to ask her, but since it involved her father, there was no way to tell. “Takes a long time to chop all these vegetables, you know that. Didn’t have time to change.”

  Kiera narrowed her dark-chocolate eyes as she shut the faucet off, grasped a dishtowel, and worked her hands dry. She made a little mumbling sound, the kind of sound Lenny might have made if he had an opinion and was tamping it down for the time being.

  The similarity was like a needle in her heart.

  “I know what this is about.” Kiera tugged the dishtowel through a cabinet handle below the sink. “You shouldn’t poke around my room, you know.”

  Monique gave her daughter a raised brow. Kiera was a good student, a strong-minded individual who rarely got in trouble. Her daughter’s room was an oasis of privacy Monique had allowed her, one that Monique had never felt compelled to invade.

  Course, that didn’t mean she wouldn’t let her daughter think she would invade it—if she had due cause. “Is there something in there that your mother shouldn’t see?”

  Kiera flung herself in a kitchen chair. “I was going to tell you. I was just waiting for the right time.”

  A cold tingle washed up her spine. She ran through the usual dangerous possibilities—body piercings, tattoos, sexting with strangers, drug paraphernalia. She pulled the oven mitt off her hand and turned toward the cabinet, more to hide her expression than to pull down plates.

  “And just for the record,” Kiera said, “it’s not going to work.”

  “What?”

  “The great meal, the whole nice attitude, your aura of unshakable calm. I’ve made up my mind.”

  “Kiera,” she said, placing the first plate on the counter, “when have I ever tried to talk you out of anything?”

  “Well, I know you’re going to try to talk me out of UCLA.”

  Monique fumbled the second plate. It slipped out of her grasp and onto the counter. She pressed it to stop it from clattering.

  Los Angeles. Three thousand five hundred miles away.

  Monique feigned calm as she dished a chicken thigh on each plate, smothering them in the onion, garlic, and diced tomato sauce. This wasn’t what she’d planned to talk about tonight. But she’d been a mother of a teenage daughter long enough to understand the importance of seizing the moment.

  “I’m glad you’re telling me now, Kiera.” She added a healthy helping of the dark green callaloo. “You have to admit your mother deserves to have a voice in this discussion, since I’ll be writing the checks.”

  “It’s trust money, Mom. Daddy put it aside for me.”

  Her throat tightened at the sound of the word daddy. “Yes, it is. And we’re both lucky that your father had prepared so well to take care of us, long after he couldn’t physically do it anymore. But you know he’d want to discuss this with you, too, if he were still here.”

  “Low blow, Mom. Guilt is not a fair weapon.”

  “But it’s ageless and ruthlessly effective.”

  Turning around, Monique gave Kiera a little smile as she slipped both dishes on
the table in the breakfast nook—where they took all their meals now that there were only two of them at home, and the dining room table had morphed into a staging surface for the college search. Kiera chose that moment to drop her gaze and fuss with her napkin.

  Monique settled down across from her, watching her daughter with the word “Los Angeles” echoing in her head. She looked lovingly at Kiera’s hair, shining with raven-blue highlights. On weekends, Kiera took great care to fluff and condition it into a flattering cascade of relaxed curls, but during the active sports season, she just pulled it back flat. Monique liked it better this way. With the stub of a ponytail, the open plaid shirt, the tank top and ripped-knee jeans, Kiera retained some remnant of the active little girl who once tore swaths through the backyard, catching ladybugs and sorting them by spots.

  Sometimes she missed that little girl, hidden within the perceptive, years-ahead-of-herself teenager that Kiera had become.

  Monique waited for Kiera to say something. Kiera straightened in the chair and switched her knife and fork from one hand to another, before idly digging into the chicken thigh. Her daughter was a deep, deep well. Monique knew this. Monique loved this.

  Finally Kiera glanced up through sullen lashes. “You know it’s the best film school in the country, right?”

  Monique didn’t argue the point. UCLA had always come up on their early searches for the best film schools, and it was just as quickly waved off as geographically undesirable. She also knew that two of the other best film schools in the country were in California, a fact she would pointedly not mention. “A month ago you were saying the same thing about New York University.”

  “NYU has one of the top film departments too,” Kiera admitted, “but I’m applying from New Jersey.”

  “Yeah?”

  “It’s a disadvantage. Lots of people from New Jersey will be applying to NYU—I mean, it’s right there. We can commute.” She chewed another bite of chicken. “But there won’t be nearly as many people from New Jersey applying to UCLA, so I’ll have the advantage of geographical diversity.”