Friendship Makes the Heart Grow Fonder (9781455517763) Page 3

  “You should be choosing a school because it’s where you want to go, Kiera.”

  “Duh.”

  Monique absorbed the hit. Her ego wasn’t so large it couldn’t survive a few bruises. “You’ve never even visited it.”

  “Audrey’s there. She loves it.”

  “That doesn’t mean you will. And you shouldn’t be choosing a place just because you think you’ll have better odds of getting in.”

  Kiera started to roll her eyes and then, abruptly, stopped herself. “I have to work the odds, Mom. It’s hard to get into any film school. ” She stabbed a piece of meat. “And it’s going to help that daddy is an alum.”

  “He went to the University of California in San Diego, not UCLA—”

  “—doesn’t matter. I checked.”

  “Did you check the cost? It’s more expensive for out-of-state students. Just as you said, for NYU, you could commute.”

  “Not sure I want to commute.”

  Monique stilled a little, soaking in that revelation, staring at the sliver of onion stuck in the tines of her fork.

  “I mean,” Kiera added quickly, “Daddy left us enough money, right? You always told me that college was one thing I’d never have to worry about.”

  “I did say that.” Damn fool.

  “If it hadn’t been that way, I’d just be making you fill out financial aid forms. We’d have found a way to work it out. You always told me that.”

  The girl was warming up to the debate. Monique could tell by the swirls Kiera was drawing in the air with the tip of her knife.

  “And living away from home the first year is sort of part of the whole college experience. You know, dorm life, learning to get along with different kinds of people from all over the world and all that.”

  Monique raised a forkful of callaloo. “At UCLA it’s not like you’ll be able to pop home for some curried chicken.”

  “Yeah, but when I do, it’ll be all the more special.”

  Kiera leaned over the plate, her smile slowly stretching wide. Monique gazed at the full round cheeks that her daughter had inherited from Lenny, at the steady intelligent eyes pleading for understanding. And it came to her that her daughter was behaving more and more like Monique’s own father, who’d worked thirty-two crazy years as a district attorney in Newark. Dad had claimed his ability to argue his way around the cleverest of defense lawyers was a product of hard work, plenty of preparation, and good old German-American logical thinking.

  Monique suddenly realized she shouldn’t have started this conversation. She was utterly unprepared. And outmatched.

  “Let me think about this for a while,” she said, completely changing tactics. “There was actually something else I wanted to discuss with you tonight.”

  “Oh?”

  That was a lighthearted, hopeful, high-pitched kind of “oh?” followed by a little wiggle in the chair and a fresh attack on her dinner, and Monique sensed that Kiera believed she’d just won the argument.

  Monique didn’t want to think about that right now. “Remember the other night,” she said, “when I told you about Mrs. Lorenzini’s diagnosis?”

  “Yeah. Major bummer. Gina texted me after her dad gave her the news. She was all freaked out about it.”

  Monique checked her surprise. She couldn’t imagine that Becky had asked Marco to give Gina the news. Gina was Marco’s daughter from a relationship he’d had when he was just out of high school. The relationship quickly went bad, and after twelve years of drama, Gina had finally ended up in Marco’s custody. Gina had been, hands down, the most difficult of the three neighborhood teenage girls to handle, and it had been years before she began behaving in a way that wouldn’t give Saint Theresa gray hair.

  “I mean,” Kiera added, grimacing, “Gina used to say some really nasty things about Mrs. Lorenzini. She used to go on about how stupid she was, how clumsy, how blind.”

  “Maybe this will make her reassess her relationship with the stepmother who welcomed her in her home and raised her.”

  Kiera gave her a look that said otherwise.

  “In any case I’ve been thinking about doing something for Becky. Something special.”

  “Oh, Mom, I can’t do a fund-raiser.” Kiera shook her head. “If it were any other time, I totally would. I love Mrs. Lorenzini. But you know how important these first-quarter grades are, and now that I’m coaching freshman crew—”

  “I’m not asking you to hawk brownies at the next PTA meeting.”

  “No?”

  “It’s not like someone is actually sick.” Although Becky was behaving like a mad housewife, endlessly picking up toys and cleaning floors. “There’s no use in rallying the casserole brigade. Becky’s just fine making dinner.” For now. “And with Marco home on work furlough, she has all the driving help she needs. No, what I’m thinking, well…frankly, it’s a little crazy.”

  “Crazy? Like, what, buying her a seeing-eye dog?”

  “The bucket list.”

  There. She’d spoken it aloud. Just the act of speaking the words to another human being caused her pulse to race and her breath to hitch in the back of her throat and the curried chicken in her stomach to roll. She’d spent every spare minute of the last two days searching airline fares and calculating approximate hotel costs and mapping possible routes and then checking exactly how many vacation days she had and whether she could take the time off without causing chaos on the neonatal floor.

  Kiera looked at her with a face that had gone utterly blank.

  “You remember,” Monique prodded, “that list your father and I made, in those last weeks?”

  Kiera dropped her gaze to her plate. “Oh. That.”

  “Your father put some money aside so I could do all those things—”

  “I know.”

  “So,” Monique continued, “I started to think about Becky. About all those cakes Becky bakes to earn a little money on the side. She models them on castles from all over the world. You remember on your sixteenth birthday she—”

  “—made me a cake like Cinderella’s castle in Disney World.” Kiera tapped her knife against the edge of the plate.

  “Right. But Becky has never actually seen any of these castles. Not a single one. And I thought, wouldn’t it be a wonderful thing to bring Becky to Europe? Show her the Tower of London or Chambord or Neuschwanstein?”

  Monique left out the obvious addendum: before Becky goes completely blind.

  Kiera hunkered a fraction farther over the table. “So is this it? You want to take Mrs. Lorenzini to Europe?”

  “I want to take her,” Monique said, as she stretched her hand across the table, “and I want to take you.”

  Kiera stilled. Her hand curled up underneath Monique’s palm. Monique tried to read the shifting currents of Kiera’s expression, sensing storm clouds of danger ahead but not quite sure of their source.

  Kiera slipped her hand out from hers. “Mom, it’s my senior year.”

  “I know it won’t be easy to schedule.”

  “I’ve got applications due at the end of November, and more in January, and semester grades are going out to those schools.“

  “I’ve already looked at our calendar. We can arrange it over the Jewish holidays, the parent/teacher conferences, and stretch it into Columbus Day. You’d miss a total of six full days and one half-day—”

  “To go tripping across Europe with you and Mrs. Lorenzini, fulfilling your and Dad’s silly bucket list?” Kiera pushed away from the table so hard the chair screeched against the floor. “Wow, Mom, what a teenage dream.”

  Monique narrowed her eyes. Her senses were tingling. “It’s Europe, Kiera. This is a wonderful opportunity. You might find another idea for a college essay.”

  “My college essay already rocks. And I told you, I’m coaching the freshman crew team. We’re just starting the season.”

  “Then let’s just work it out for when the timing is better.” Monique suppressed a spurt of worry. Becky’s diseas
e was degenerative, and there was no knowing the rate at which her tunnel of vision might tighten. “Maybe during the April vacation—”

  “My college acceptances will just be in. I’ll have to visit schools to make a final decision.”

  Monique squashed the urge to ask about next summer. Next summer Kiera would be working in the city again, interning with the producer she’d met through one of the neighborhood block parties. Monique mused that there once was a time when she and Kiera planned everything together, a time just after Lenny died when they spent a whole month in Trinidad, seeking solace in the sun and the easy living, braiding each other’s hair.

  Now her daughter had plans of her own, appointments and schedules.

  “Let’s do it right after you graduate then,” Monique conceded. “Before that producer sucks up your summer.”

  “Mom, you just don’t get it. I’m not going.” Kiera pushed up from the chair. She seized her plate and strode to the counter, where she pulled open the cabinet for the garbage and started violently scraping the remains. “Why do you always have to finish things, Mom? Why can’t you just leave something undone?”

  Monique went very still. The question made no sense. She and Kiera were most alike in this particular way: Neither one of them ever left anything undone.

  “This has nothing to do with Mrs. Lorenzini going blind.” Kiera tossed the plate on the counter next to the sink. “That’s an excuse. You just want to do that bucket list.”

  Her daughter’s feelings billowed over her, and Monique struggled to parse them out—anger and frustration and, most upsetting, a deep sense of confusion and hurt. None of this made sense. She and Kiera had discussed Lenny’s list no more than two or three times since his death, and then only in passing. Monique thought she’d been clear: she’d always intended to do the list, someday. It was Becky’s diagnosis that drew her, for the third time in one week, to seriously consider the idea. Becky deserved to go away.

  So she looked at her tight-jawed daughter and answered the only way she could. “Kiera, you know I promised your father I would do it someday.”

  Kiera’s eyes narrowed with incredulity. “And what’s going to happen when you’re all done with that list? Are you going to set up an account on Match.com? Start bar-hopping with that crazy divorced nurse in your ward? Bring home skeevy younger men to meet your grown daughter?”

  Monique blinked. She didn’t just hear those words come out of her daughter’s mouth. It was…absurd. She would laugh at the idea of dating, if she could muster air into her lungs. The sad, sorry truth was that no matter how many people told Monique she should move on, get herself out there, start dating again—Monique knew she could never, ever bring any other man into this home.

  “Kiera.” Monique took a deep breath, striving for equilibrium. “Clearly, you’re upset—”

  “Yeah, I’m upset.” Kiera pushed away from the counter. “It must be nice, Mom. I mean, it really must be nice. You know, to just check things off a list, and then completely forget about Daddy.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  “So Kiera threw that comment like a punch and then—like a true diva—made a dramatic, sweeping exit.”

  Judy shook her head in sympathy as Monique finished relating what had happened last night. Judy’s two oversized and hyper-energized dogs propelled her along the park path, past women jogging with strollers, kids biking with their backpacks lurching, and seniors perched comfortably on benches. “Boy,” she said, “that daughter of yours sure chose her career well.”

  “She wouldn’t talk to me all night.” Monique kept pace along the path, swinging two-pound weights in her hands. “She wouldn’t even open her bedroom door. She just stayed inside, blasting her emo rock.”

  Judy fixed her gaze on the dappled path. In her experience, teenagers during this difficult year before college shifted their behavior like quicksilver, from cruel mockery to icy distance. It was an evolutionary impulse—at least that’s what she’d told herself while she’d been suffering through the same fluxing emotional banishment, five times over. It was the only way teenagers could handle the fact that they’d soon be leaving home.

  But Judy sensed Monique was too distressed to absorb the truth. “C’mon, Monie, you must have figured that your proposal was going to take her by surprise.”

  “I thought she’d be thrilled. It’s a trip to Europe, not a root canal.”

  “It has something to do with her father, which means it’s a minefield.”

  “And it blew up in my face. Can you believe what she said to me?” Monique’s ferocious striding threatened to outpace Judy’s chocolate lab and her lunging golden retriever. “Kiera really seems to think once I’m done with Lenny’s list, I’ll be dressed in leopard skin leggings and strutting on the singles circuit.”

  “You do own a pair of leopard skin leggings.”

  “Halloween costume.” Monique shook her head in dismay. “You have a memory like an elephant.”

  “You and Lenny sporting the Tarzan-Jane thing seven years ago at the neighborhood Halloween party? I’ll be taking that image to my grave.”

  “I haven’t even looked sideways at a guy since Lenny died. Honestly, if I weren’t still having my period, I’d wonder if I had any hormones at all. As far as I’m concerned Lenny’s still here.”

  Monique tapped her chest with the ball end of one of her weights. Judy imagined she could hear a hollow, unhealthy thump.

  “Maybe Kiera will come around.” And maybe Kiera would, Judy told herself, when Monique finally came around. “Maybe she just needs a little time to think about it.”

  “Time.” Monique let out a frustrated sigh. “The one thing Becky doesn’t have. She’ll be losing more of her vision every year.”

  Judy’s insides did a sliding drop like they did whenever she imagined Becky rendered, by slow and unpredictable degrees, into utter darkness. The dogs, sensing weakness, plunged onto the grass in pursuit of a squirrel. She put the whole force of her shoulders into restraining them, and the whole force of her mind not to think how this villain of a disease would steal from Becky the sight of her own children’s faces.

  She’d Googled the disease after Becky’s bad news, but her mind just couldn’t grasp the kind of scientific and medical jargon that, in her early academic life, sent her fleeing to the humanities. So she’d focused most of her Internet searches on what she really wanted to know: the possibility of a cure. The only one she could find lay in retinal implants, a speculative and untested therapy that might not be viable for decades.

  Judy often found herself these past weeks trembling in the living room in front of the bookshelf, staring at the photographic history of her own scattered brood.

  “Here’s the kicker, Judy.” Monique’s feet scuffed across a patch of gravely path. “I was getting a little excited about it, you know? Before I spoke to Kiera I’d been mapping out a couple of possible routes, thinking about the castles Becky might want to see. Trying to squeeze in all those things on Lenny’s list.” Monique tipped her head back, closing her eyes for a moment under the light of the sun. “And I’d so really, really wanted to do this for Becky.”

  Judy understood. The whole neighborhood was trying to find a way to help the Lorenzinis. Everyone was offering rides to drive Brianna and Brian to their various activities, now that Becky had determined that it was better that she just didn’t drive at all. She herself had been making some preliminary phone calls to determine how much it would cost to buy Becky a seeing-eye dog when the time came.

  But Judy knew from personal experience that there probably wasn’t a more powerful or effective or immediate treatment for an emotionally traumatized Becky than a glorious two-week trip to Europe.

  “In fact,” Monique added, “I was going to ask Becky today. This very morning.” She swiped her sweat-beaded forehead with the back of her sleeve. “But after that spat with Kiera, I guess that’s done. I may as well just shove the whole idea of doing that bucket list out of my mind.�
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  Judy shook her head sharply. “Bad idea.”

  “Yeah, maybe it was a bad idea. Maybe Kiera was right to refuse. It’s a difficult year, with the applications and essays—”

  “No, I mean it’s a bad idea to axe the trip.” Judy pivoted on one foot as they rounded the playground end of the park, the dogs leaping and straining at the sight of the kids climbing the jungle gym. “Next year, Monie, there’ll just be another excuse.”

  Monique’s pace slacked. “Excuse me?”

  Judy surrendered to the tug of the dogs, wishing they’d drag her so quickly away that she’d save herself from her own foolishness. She eyed the canopy of leaves that turned the path into an emerald green tunnel and told herself she should keep her mouth shut. But the words were expanding against her sternum, an unrelenting pressure. Over the past few months, it was becoming more and more difficult for her to resist the urge to just say exactly what was on her mind.

  Like when people came up to her and asked how she was enjoying her “new freedom,” now that her last child had flown the nest. Or opined on how they couldn’t wait until their teenage son took his smelly socks and his growling, wolfman attitude off somewhere far, far away. Or worse, gazed deeply into her eyes and asked her how she was holding up.

  Well, she wasn’t holding up. She was in swirling little pieces. She wasn’t talking about her wonky knee just starting to twinge, or the excess of gray that was threading through her hair, or the fact that she’d missed another period. She was falling to pieces inside. And one of the pieces that was falling away right now was the pleasant social nicety that insisted she hold her tongue.

  “The bucket list, Monie.” The words tumbled out of her. “You’re scared to death of it.”

  Monie’s protest was a stutter of unformed syllables.

  “The summer after Lenny died, when Kiera was still in that malleable Junior Girl Scout age, you said you just couldn’t bring yourself to do that list.”

  “I was exhausted. Six months of treatments, two months of at-home hospice—”