Proper Care and Maintenance of Friendship (9781609417291) Read online

  “Aunt, don’t you remember? We talked about this in the car—I suggested we wait another week.”

  “Why another week? A week is forever in a kid’s life. Gracie should be back with her family.”

  Jo closed her eyes. And saw, in her mind, the montage of foster homes, one trundle bed after another, one weary, well-intentioned foster mother after another, one school after another. Jo always felt like the mutt in the dog pound, shuttled from one shelter to another because no one really wants someone else’s old dog.

  “I agree,” Jo said suddenly, surprising herself. “Grace should be with family.” She twisted to look at the two women. Mrs. Braun squeezed out her tea bag against the spoon and placed it on the saucer. Jessie looked pale and tense. “I agree,” Jo repeated, “that, in a perfect world, that’s the best possible thing.”

  “I always knew you were a sensible girl, Jo,” Mrs. Braun said, clattering her spoon on the table. “I’m glad it’s settled.”

  “But you have to be strong and healthy enough to take care of her. I mean really take care of her. Drive her back and forth to softball games. Bring her to the county fair. Help her with homework. Go clothes-shopping.”

  “Jessie’s good at shopping,” Mrs. Braun said, over the edge of her teacup. “She’s always trying to get her into dresses, don’t know how you did that, Jo—”

  “And I don’t mean just for a few weeks or a few months,” Jo continued, pressing against the island counter. “I mean for years and years to come. It’s not fair to Grace to take her home, only to have to send her away again.”

  “We’ll manage.” Mrs. Braun waved her wrist, waving away the trouble. “We’ve always managed, haven’t we, Jessie?”

  Jo caught Jessie’s gaze before Jessie could drop her lids over her eyes, hiding her thoughts. Clearly, Mrs. Braun did not realize the extent of the burden she was putting upon the frail shoulders of a twenty-two-year-old girl. Mrs. Braun, like Gracie, had not yet truly absorbed the extent of the changes in her life since Rachel’s death.

  That’s what was going to make this so hard, Jo realized. It was inevitable when a mother—or a daughter—dies. Denial was a powerful tool to stave off the grief, to stave off the difficult process of accepting change.

  Sometimes it takes a whole lifetime to come to grips with the loss.

  “It’s the changes that got me in a knot, Leah,” Jo said, carefully, swirling her cup. “I know what it’s like, being shuttled around from one home to another.” Never knowing, when the social workers show up, if they’re just checking up on you, or if you’re going to be sent away because you spit out your peas at the dinner table. She swallowed a dry, growing lump in her throat. “It’s a hell of a way to grow up.”

  A memory struck her like a bolt of lightning.

  Rachel, lying on the couch with her legs hiked in the air after coming back from her first bout at the fertility clinic, grinning as she enjoyed a final beer, while Jo sucked on a Marlboro, shaking her head.

  Rachel, I still don’t understand you. You’re going to be hugely pregnant—you can’t skydive anymore; you can’t hike over the tree line, and that’s your last beer. Why are you doing this?

  Baby fever. I caught it from Kate.

  Well, sugar, that’s one fever I’ll never catch.

  Oh, Jo, don’t rule it out so quickly. I think you should adopt.

  What, a puppy?

  A child, Jo. A child. Who’d know better than Bobbie Jo Marcum how to take care of an orphaned little girl?

  With trembling hands, Jo sipped her tea. It scalded her tongue. She sipped it anyway, to hide her face and the tumbling realizations. She had convinced herself that Rachel had chosen her because—more than any of Rachel’s other friends—Jo could afford to raise a child. Now Jo realized that money had nothing to do with it.

  Rachel knew that this situation was going to happen. Rachel knew how much her mother loved Gracie, how insistent her mother would be about being the sole guardian. Rachel knew how soft a touch Jessie was, how devoted to family, how easily she subsumed her own desires. Rachel, losing weight in her bed, had had plenty of time to think about what to do for little Grace—sweet Grace, forgotten Grace in the whirl of doctors’ visits and home health aides and prescription changes and mountains of laundry. Rachel knew her death would bring a whole new set of problems she couldn’t even imagine.

  But Jo could imagine them. Jo knew what happened to orphaned little girls. Who better to take care of an orphaned little girl than a woman who’d once been an orphaned little girl herself?

  She looked over the rim of her teacup at the two women sitting in front of her. Her heart moved. Both loved Grace, that was clear. They wanted her to be back in their home, back in their family—even to the point of consulting a lawyer. Two openhearted, well-meaning women sat before her, but they did not completely understand the effect of their own actions on Grace’s well-being—and couldn’t, not in the way Jo did.

  “I’ll tell you one thing, ladies.” Jo slid the cup back on the counter. “Grace is a lucky girl to have so many people who love her.”

  In the silence, they heard Sarah’s quiet footfall through the living room.

  Jessie glanced up at the bathroom door. “Grace isn’t crying anymore. Is she coming down, Sarah?”

  “Not right now.” Sarah’s face looked strangely bright. “She needs a few minutes.”

  “Why was she crying?” Mrs. Braun asked. “What was all the fuss about?”

  “She kept saying something about ‘lots of tots.’ ” Sarah crouched to pick up the blanket she’d left on the floor and then swept it around her shoulders. “She kept saying she didn’t want to go back to ‘lots of tots.’ ”

  Jessie exchanged a guilty look with Mrs. Braun and muttered, “Did we use them too much?”

  “No, no.” Mrs. Braun shook her head. “She needed to be with other kids. That’s why we sent her there.”

  “All those doctors’ appointments.” Jessie sank against the back of the barstool. “And the physical therapists.”

  “No, no, Jessie, don’t think that way,” Mrs. Braun insisted. “It wasn’t good for Grace to be alone all the time.”

  “I was late once—”

  “She liked the place, she did.” Mrs. Braun’s voice caught. “She told me she liked it. She told me she liked the computers.”

  Mrs. Braun’s chin started to tremble.

  “Listen,” Jo said, taking a deep breath, summoning her inner executive warrior. “We don’t need a lawyer to work this out. We’ll decide, together, what is best for Gracie. But not today, not right now. Okay? Today is a visit, just as Grace expected. Can we agree on that much?”

  A wave of relief passed across Jessie’s face. She leaned in to her aunt, put her hand on her shoulder. “Auntie… I think Jo’s right.”

  “But she belongs home.” Mrs. Braun pulled a tissue out of her sleeve and pressed it against her cheek. “She belongs with her family.”

  Sarah spoke up, suddenly. “Grace told me one more thing, Mrs. Braun. Something she was very sure about.”

  Jo heard the creak of hinges. She glanced up to see, through the balusters, the door of the bathroom widen just a crack. Wide enough for a little girl’s face to peep through, wide enough to show one pleading, tear-filled eye—blinking and fixed on Jo.

  “For now,” Sarah said, “Grace would like to stay with Aunt Jo.”

  chapter seventeen

  On a road ten miles northwest of Gatumba, Sarah hauled herself out the window of a moving car and planted her butt on the rim of a door that had lost its window decades ago. Opening a bottle, she leaned across the windshield and sprayed the driver’s side with water, so the driver could clear the glass with her one working wiper.

  “Better? Mieux?” Sarah asked, dipping her head to speak to Ninette, an acquaintance from UNHCR who happened to be at the airport in Bujumbura yesterday to pick up supplies. “I have a little more water—”

  “Oui, ça va, that’s fine.” Nin
ette took one hand off the wheel long enough to adjust the knot of her orange-and-green head-scarf, which had gone askew when the car lurched into an enormous mud hole, coating the whole front end with a third layer of muck. “I will have to go more slowly,” she said. “One more hit and—pftt!—no more suspension.”

  “The camp is just around the bend.”

  Though every bounce jarred her bottom, Sarah lingered on the edge of the door. She’d left Boston two days ago in a snowstorm, after spending Christmas and most of January with her family in Vermont. Now she breathed deep of the humid air, sharp with the scent of ozone and rich with the smell of earthy decay.

  As they passed the last hillock, the refugee camp loomed into view. It sprawled up the gentle slope of a denuded hillside in all its strange beauty. At the sight of it, she dug her fingers into the metal rim of the car’s roof. Years ago, this camp had been a tent-strewn temporary way-station for refugees from the wars in Congo and Rwanda—an oasis in crisis, to be abandoned as soon as everyone had been repatriated. Now, as she gazed upon the exuberant patchwork of makeshift houses created from bent saplings, thatched hay, and tarps, she realized how fully it had become a village, complete with—she counted the roofs—a dispensary, a clinic, a maternity unit, and three schools.

  The ragged ribbon of her heart clenched. After all the weeks in New York, helping Jo settle the situation with Gracie, and then, after staying in her family’s rambling farmhouse, Sarah had toyed with the idea of leaving Doctors Without Borders for good. Strangely, it had nothing to do with Colin. She’d shut the door on him in L.A. Her weariness and uncertainty ran deeper than that; and it had been growing long before she received Rachel’s letter. She’d collected too many terrible memories. She’d finally filled herself up to overflowing.

  She’d come a whisker away from quitting the business forever. Until she heard the news that Sam had returned to Burundi.

  At the sound of shouts, Sarah saw a crowd of children racing toward the car—a gaggle of excited boys. Sarah recognized the biggest, Misage, who’d grown at least a head taller in the months she’d been gone. Niboyu, Misage’s younger brother, tottered barefoot, trying to keep up, sporting his big brother’s muddy Red Sox baseball cap. The kids spread out across the road like stampeding antelope, shouting her name.

  “Mwaramutse.” Sarah greeted the boys in Kirundi, reaching into her woven bag for the hard candy she’d brought as gifts. When they got close enough, she tossed the first amber candy to Misage. “Eh, Misage, bite?”

  “Hello, Miss Sarah,” he replied, in English, as he deftly caught the candy. “Welcome back to Burundi how are you today I am fine thank you.”

  Show-off. Clearly, he’d been made leader of the crowd, though she knew he was barely twelve and had a weakness of heart due to a bout of scarlet fever when he was a toddler.

  “You’ve been studying hard,” she said, as the kids swarmed around her side of the slow-moving car, reaching eagerly for the candy she doled out as fairly as possible. “Where are you all going today?”

  “We go to market.”

  “Ah.” The market was four miles away, and not much more than a crossroads to Bujumbura, the capital. “Did you find anything good on the heap?”

  He shrugged, indicating the sack against his back. “Kool-Aid very sweet. Pretty shoes. Very high.” He struggled as he searched for words for the things he had scavenged from the refugee garbage, and then he sank his free hand into the pocket of his shorts and pulled out three small tubes. “This, too.”

  Sarah stared at the tubes and frowned as she tried to remember the words for “lip balm” in Kirundi. Doubted the language had such words. In this humid, muddy climate, there was very little need for lip balm or stiletto heels, or for many of the odd donations that occasionally made their way to the refugee camp. Yet these little entrepreneurs could earn some coin hustling such flotsam in the marketplace—usually to prostitutes. Their efforts kept whole families afloat.

  “Pour les lèvres,” she explained in French, the lingua franca of the camp, as she rubbed her mouth in imitation. “Pour les jolies filles.”

  For the pretty girls.

  A couple of the boys hooted. Misage quickly shoved the lip balm back into his pocket. Tugging on the fraying sleeve of Niboyu’s oversized sweatshirt, he barked orders to the rest of the boys, who made motions of not paying attention even as they headed back down the road, waving, vigorously sucking the butterscotch candy.

  “Nzoz’ejo, Miss Sarah,” Misage shouted over his shoulder. “I will come tomorrow.”

  To the clinic. To learn more English from her, as he surreptitiously watched Dr. Mwami pierce a boil or stitch up a swipe of a machete. As if Sarah had been away for a few days, not four months.

  Time passes very differently in Burundi.

  The small group proved to be only a fraction of the welcoming committee. As they approached the steep road that led to the camp’s main building, a flood of children poured around them, splattering mud with every excited step. Despite leaning on the horn and shouting at the kids, with her head outside the window, Ninette was forced to bring the car to a complete stop at the base of the hill.

  “Ça va,” Sarah said, sliding inside the car to gather her bags. “No one ever makes it up the hill. You don’t want to attempt that slope anyway,” she said, gesturing to the steep, muddy incline. “It won’t be solid until the rainy season ends.”

  “You trust this swarm with the boxes?”

  Sarah eyed the crowd. “Some.”

  “Bon.”

  Ninette shoved the car into park, kicked the door open, and waded through the throng of kids toward the trunk. With a jerk, she lifted the dented hood and handed Sarah’s duffel bag, following Sarah’s direction, to a tall Tutsi girl with a regal bearing.

  “À ma chambre, Aline,” Sarah said, “if I still have that room by the dispensary. Then come to me after—for a gift.”

  Sarah had made sure to stock up on gifts. Her duffel bag bulged with beads to braid into cornrows, flip-flops decorated with colored glass, Bic pens, and cigarettes made of real American tobacco.

  Ninette handed box after box into the arms of the chosen, barking at them in fluent Kirundi to take the boxes directly to the doctor. “Tell Dr. Mwami,” Ninette said to Sarah, piling a second, smaller box into a young girl’s arms, “that these are all the salt tablets we can spare for now but there’s another shipment coming in soon.”

  “I have a few boxes arriving by plane also.” Before leaving the States, Sarah had stocked up on alcohol prep wipes, bandages, IV tubing, and other simple necessities. “Maybe I can send Sam…” She choked on the name. It fell off her lips without thought, and then caught as the sound reached her ears. “… or someone from the camp,” she added, recovering, “to pick everything up at once.”

  “D’accord.”

  Ninette embraced her, kissed her on both cheeks, and then shooed the children away from the Peugeot as she slipped back in. Sarah plunged her hand into her bag and lured the swarm away from the old car with the sound of crackling wrappers. They rushed her so fast that she nearly fell.

  Sarah found her footing and headed up the incline while the children yanked on her skirt, patted her arms, ululated, and cried out in that high pitch only young children can reach. Miss Sarah Miss Sarah Miss Sarah Miss Sarah, they cried, hands raised, as she tucked a single candy into each palm, the number of palms never slacking, the number of faces never easing, and she recognized most of them: tall, slim Tutsi girls, the wide cheekbones of a child of the Twa tribe—Have you finally lost those front teeth, Shabani? Is that you, Nadège, with all that hair? Egide, have you had your measles shot yet? The mud sucked at her sandals with every step, threatening to steal them from her feet.

  Then, drawn by the noise, the women emerged, ducking beneath the doorjambs to straighten like long streaks of color against the stick-and-mud construction of their refugee homes, or rising from their cooking pots, smoking over wood fires between buildings.
r />   Sarah waved at Solange, noting the swell of her belly. Sarah called a greeting to Raissa, surreptitiously counting her toddlers, and wondered about the littlest one—the one who’d been sick with measles when Sarah left—the one she did not see.

  She wondered, too, about the young girl she didn’t see, the one with two crooked braids standing up on either side of her head, tipped with wooden beads. She’d been sent away, no doubt. To a place with no bad memories.

  “Miss Sarah, you are back!”

  Sarah glanced over her shoulder to a woman trudging up the hill, balancing a heaping thatch of firewood on top of her head.

  “Bonjour, Safi,” Sarah said. “How are your children?”

  “Yvan has a sore, and Mamy drank bad water, but the others fare well. Did your travels pass well?”

  “Thank you, yes.”

  “And your mother and father, are they in beautiful health?”

  “Yes, Safi, thanks for asking. How are your lovely mother and respected father?”

  Sarah continued to hand out pieces of hard candy as she and Safi traded the expected morning salutations. Finally, after she’d asked about Safi’s parents and children and aunts and goats, Safi said, flatly, “Bon,” and got to the true business of her blessings.

  “Now that you are here,” Safi said, flashing a sly grin, “are you hiding an American husband among those children?”

  Sarah reached deep in her bag, scraping the bottom for the last few candies, letting her hair screen her face. No doubt Dr. Mwami had explained her sudden absence in a way the Banyamulenge women would understand—that Sarah had gone home to see her family, a family that would undoubtedly marry her off before she became too old, because she was already, in Tutsi terms, the oddest of creatures: a woman without a husband, away from home.

  “What need do I have for a husband,” Sarah said, “when I already have so many children?”

  “How can that be, you come back alone?” Safi paused, to hitch the weight of sticks on her head. “The men in your tribe—they must be…” She made a motion with her hand, indicating her low opinion.