Friendship Makes the Heart Grow Fonder (9781455517763) Page 9

  Monique sank into the booth and glanced out the window. On the deck were two rows of tables, one up against the railing and another closer to the wall. Though some hardy souls were walking the deck, no one sat out in the rain. Even inside she could smell the iron-tang of it, and feel the seeping cold. She curled her fingers around the coffee cup, wondering what Lenny would have had to say about this soggy adventure, as the boat wobbled off the pier and chugged into the choppy current of the Rhine.

  “So,” Judy said, “last night on the phone I had the pleasure of a stern lecture from Maddy.”

  Monique lifted her mug in a vague toast. “Welcome to the teenagers-know-best club. Kiera’s a founding member.”

  “Maddy’s no teenager anymore, but she spent her junior year abroad in Mainz. So apparently that means she’s an ‘expert’ in foreign travel.”

  “Oh, boy.” Becky bit into a donut.

  “I told her about Amsterdam,” Judy said. “Does she ask me about the herring sandwiches, about the canals, the museums? No. She screams at me that I’m crazy for walking the red light district. She says I may as well be walking the Patpong Road in Bangkok.”

  “If that’s some Asian red light district,” Monique said, “then I’ll just note that Maddy’s got a point. We did wander through a pretty dangerous area last night.”

  “Come on.” Judy flung out her arms. “Who’s going to sell this into sexual slavery?”

  Behind the rim of her coffee cup Monique suppressed a smile. If she looked like Judy did in five years, she’d be one happy woman. Judy was a smidge soft in the middle in the way Monique felt herself getting lately, despite the regular exercise, but Judy’s light brown hair was thick and shiny. Judy’s best feature was the gathering of lines at the corners of her eyes—proof that she’d spent a good part of her life laughing.

  Becky wiped the crumbs from her mouth. “I’m surprised at you. You should have told Maddy you were just trying to find a reputable smart shop to buy some weed.”

  “But you had trouble,” Monique added, “and decided to opt for mushrooms.”

  Judy shook her head. “It wouldn’t work.”

  “Why not?” Monique reached for the strudel. “Are you telling me Maddy doesn’t know about your sex-drugs-and-rock-and-roll past?”

  “Absolutely not. She thinks I’m completely naive. If I’d had my wits about me, I would have told her I was stocking up on sex toys for myself and her father.”

  Becky nearly spit her coffee across the table. Monique thrust a fresh napkin at her before she stained her shirt.

  “Now you’ve heard my tale of woe,” Judy said, “so spill, Monique. How did Kiera correct you last night?”

  Monique didn’t answer right away. She pulled another napkin and soaked a few drops of coffee off the battered tabletop. She had called home late last night while standing in the dim hotel corridor, near an interior window so her service could roam and find a signal. There’d been particularly long, awkward pauses between her intentionally upbeat questions and Kiera’s curt responses. She couldn’t even blame the disconnect between them on the delay or the terrible static. It had been a relief when the call finally dropped.

  “As expected, Kiera still hasn’t forgiven me,” she said, tucking the wadded napkin aside, “for the unspeakable act of abandoning her in the middle of her senior year.”

  “Drama queen.” Judy raised her palm in humble defense. “And I mean that in the fondest of ways.”

  “She is milking it. Like a true director, she has decided to cast me in the role of the Bad Mommy.”

  Becky said, “You know she’ll come around.”

  “Maybe after my mother has softened her up with fried cod and shark and bake and katchouri.”

  “Ohhhh.” Becky gave herself a little shake. “I love those vegetable fritters. You think there’ll be leftovers?”

  “See? I’m doomed. My mother’s got sweet hands and I don’t. When I get back, Kiera will move in with her.”

  “You know this is emotional blackmail.” Judy stretched her arm across the back of the booth. “Kiera’s reacting in that knee-jerk, thoughtlessly hurtful way teenagers do. You can’t allow her to do that.”

  In a cold-blooded intellectual way Monique understood what Judy was saying. But she was emotionally attached to her daughter by deep hooks. After Lenny’s death Monique had dug them even deeper, mooring Kiera even closer to her, so the grief of her father’s death wouldn’t sweep the sensitive young girl away. “I’m here, aren’t I?” Still feeling guilty as sin. “No law says I can’t feel bad about making that decision.”

  “Wow.” Becky picked at her apple strudel. “I guess I ought to be grateful I didn’t get international calling on my cell phone.”

  “That is ironic, because of the three of us,” Judy said, tapping the table in front of Becky, “you should definitely call. Your kids are young and malleable. They won’t lecture you or chide you or make you feel guilty. They’ll slather you with love and transatlantic air kisses on demand.”

  “You’re welcome to use my phone.” Monie nudged the daypack she’d hung on the spindle of the chair. “Just say the word.”

  Becky turned her dark blue gaze to the window, to some fixed but indeterminate spot. In the stretching silence, Monique noticed a muscle twitch at the corner of Becky’s eye and the sudden tightness of her jaw. Monique couldn’t help but remember the whole difficult conversation they’d had the other night in Amsterdam. Becky was holding back secrets upon secrets. Monique wondered how long it would be before the woman finally broke down.

  So Monique unzipped her hoodie and deliberately changed the subject. “Ugly river, isn’t it? I can’t see a darn thing out there.”

  “You know what? I need some air.” Becky shot up, knocking the chair back. “I’ll be back in a little while.”

  *

  Monique sat with Judy for as long as she could, worrying over their mutual friend, while a distracted Judy tried to parse out the slangy conversation of the young Germans at the next table. Finally, swinging her leg onto Becky’s chair in order to massage her knee, Judy ordered Monie to stop squirming and just chase Becky down. Monique leapt up, pulled on her damp raincoat, tugged the hood over her head, and set off to search the boat.

  She caught up with Becky twenty minutes later, doing brisk-walking laps on the mostly empty upper deck.

  Monique fell into step beside her. “Old habits die hard, huh?”

  “That Wiener schnitzel is still expanding in my stomach.”

  “It’s already taking up residence on my hips. I’ll join you. It’ll feel good to work off some of those calories.”

  “I’d be happy to work off the damn black cloud hanging over me. The one that I’ve thrown over this whole vacation.”

  Huh, Monique thought, so she wasn’t alone in that feeling. “I’m holding up my end of the wet blanket too.”

  “Why did Lenny want to do this, anyway? You told me he hated boats.”

  “That’s true. My uncle in Trinidad once took him trolling for bait fish in Las Cuevas Bay, and Lenny spent the whole time vomiting off the side of the dinghy.” Monique remembered how Lenny looked that night as he stumbled in, his skin as gray as a dead fish. “He called it ‘chumming the waters.’”

  “I guess this is a big, lumbering engine-driven boat,” Becky conceded, “and on a river rather than the open ocean…but still. It seems so un-Lenny.”

  “Lenny’s list was a collection of dreams. In dreams no one gets seasickness.”

  “Ah.”

  “Besides he was lured by the promise of German beer.” Monique glanced toward a cluster of Germans at the bow, seemingly oblivious to the needles of rain, raising steins as they belted out a drinking song.

  “Didn’t Lenny know he could get German beer onshore?”

  “The Rhine cruise he’d read about involved stopping at various cities and touring breweries. I told him while he hit the breweries I’d do the churches and castles.”

  She re
membered him sitting with a hospital blanket over his lap giving her a full-cheeked grin and a rumble of approving laughter as he’d murmured, that’s why I married you.

  “Well, this is one butt-ugly industrial stretch of river.” Becky nodded to the enormous smokestack-like structures looming up on the bank.

  “I believe that’s a nuclear power plant.”

  “I hope it’s reactive. Mutate away, oh nuclear power plant.” Becky found interest in the gray froth of the boat’s wake. “Maybe I should drink this river water. It’s not like I’m going to breed anymore.”

  Monique didn’t look at Becky. Instead she tugged her hood farther over her hair as the drizzle persisted. Becky must have been that kind of teenager—the kind that only really talked about serious things in the dark, or while power-walking, or riding in the car, eyes facing forward. Kiera wasn’t like that at all—she was the oversharing kind—so Monique’s experience was limited. But Judy once confessed that all three of her boys had been uncommunicative. Judy would abandon dinner while it was frying in the pan, just so she was available for any drop off or pick up, in order to seize an opportunity for ten minutes of real conversation.

  And so Monique waited in stillness, her breath coming in little cold puffs. Her professors never taught this while she was studying nursing in school. It was a technique she’d learned over years of coping with grieving patients and devastated families in the ER. Hard news sometimes took weeks or even months to fully sink in. There was simply no substitute for time. So Monique did what she’d been doing since the day she found out about her friend’s diagnosis. She gave Becky all the time and space and silence the woman might need to gather her courage. And she made sure Becky knew by her constant presence that she was available whenever Becky was ready to talk.

  It took one circuit of the boat deck.

  “Monie,” Becky said. “Why didn’t you and Lenny have more children?”

  Monique kept walking briskly but her mind had come to a complete stop. So, apparently, had her breathing, because halfway across the deck she found herself choking in deep gulps of air that smelled of damp ink and moldering paper, rising up from the discarded newspapers on the scattered tables.

  Her mind hurled back to her first date with Lenny, casual over coffee in the hospital cafeteria. It had been raining then too, fat droplets hitting the glass window by their seat. He’d talked about what he aimed on doing with his life.

  She’d expected him to say what the young doctors always chattered about: Choosing their specialty, how many more years of training they had, how little they slept, how they couldn’t wait until they made a real salary. But the first thing out of Lenny’s mouth, Louisiana-slow in that rumbling baritone of his, was his insistence on having a sane life. He didn’t want to get torn away from his wife in the middle of the night to deliver babies. He didn’t want to travel the world teaching one special, specific surgical technique. He was happily bumping from one department to another right now, he’d told her, doing six-week rotations to see what’s what, but he already knew he was going into radiology. He wanted to stay married, buy a decent house, work in a solid practice, and coach his kids in soccer.

  She’d all but melted into the molded plastic seat.

  “You don’t have to answer, Monie.” Becky reached out to trail her cold-pinked fingers along the boat railing. “It’s none of my business. It’s just that a year after he died, you were training for the NICU. We all wondered why the change. Why that change.”

  This question had an easier answer than the first. Monique grasped it so she wouldn’t have to respond to the earlier one. “The ER is a crazy place to work, Beck. When I came back after taking family leave, I’d forgotten how frenetic it could be.”

  “You used to thrive on that.”

  “I guess I’d spent too much of my leave with the hospice nurses.” She shrugged her hands into the sleeves of her hoodie, warming them in the thick cotton. “They were wonderful. They were wise. And they got to spend a lot of time with only a few patients. Which is the whole reason I chose nursing over medical school in the first place.”

  “Why NICU over hospice then?”

  She shook her head sharply. “I couldn’t do hospice. Too soon. I couldn’t watch another man die.”

  Becky hesitated only a beat. “But preemies die all the time, don’t they?”

  Every day she held those little lives in her gloved hands, wizened creatures she could splay upon her forearm, their bellies distended, and their little immature lungs flexing for air. Tiny sparks of life. It was her job to spend weeks, and often months, blowing gently on those embers. Nurturing their undeveloped bodies and stimulating their emergent minds until they could be released to the parents who would love them. Those preemies developed personalities, too, while they were in the NICU. There was one there right now, one she’d left behind with trailing regret, a skinny-legged boy who instead of crying, tightened and loosened his fists and crumpled his face when he needed something, as if holding on to life by sheer will.

  But preemies never lingered. At least not long enough. Some died, fading before they’d really sparked. But others she got to release to the world, like butterflies.

  Monique let the thought go and gathered her wits. “You sure are asking a lot of questions about babies, Beck.”

  “I know. After my experience with Gina, you’d think I’d have had my tubes tied.”

  “You can’t blame yourself for that. You didn’t raise Gina from infancy.”

  “But I welcomed the idea of bringing Gina into my house. I couldn’t wait, in fact. The more the merrier, I thought.”

  “Confess: You thought—instant babysitter.”

  “Guilty as charged. But can you imagine? She’d be sitting them in front of R-rated movies and dosing them with cough syrup.”

  “That’s harsh, Beck. And absolutely not true. You know she adores them.”

  “I know, I know. I’m being sarcastic. Just like I was when she stumbled into the house stoned, and I told her that she was a fabulous role model for her little brother and sister. That might have been the only thing I ever said to her that had any effect on her behavior.”

  “Brilliant strategy,” Monie conceded.

  “Props go to Judy.”

  “Mother of five to the rescue again.”

  “Still it turns out I prefer kids when they’re young. Not snarky and hormone-crazed and vomiting fruity vodka drinks.”

  “You know there’s no guessing what’ll happen to Brian and Brianna once the hormones kick in,” Monique warned. “Maybe Brian will crash cars. Maybe Brianna will sneak away to get a belly-button piercing.”

  Becky raised her head, blinked up at the gray sky, and slowed to a stop. “It doesn’t matter, Monie. I’ll take whatever comes.” She turned toward the water and sagged against the railing. “If it weren’t for my diagnosis, I’d do it again in a heartbeat.”

  Monique sank her elbows on the rail. Mothers always talked about the rush of love they felt for their newborn children, yet when Kiera was born, Monique hadn’t been prepared for the all-consuming nature of the feeling. She drowned in it willingly. She threw herself into the raising of her daughter, almost to the exclusion of all else. When Lenny started hinting about having a second baby, she’d put him off, put him off, and put him off…until he just stopped hinting altogether.

  Of the two of us, Monique thought, Becky is the braver.

  “I was afraid.” Monique forced the words out before she could change her mind. “I was terrified to have another baby, Beck.”

  Becky shook her head dismissively. “No, no, no, no. Monique Franke-Reed is not afraid of anything.”

  “You have been sorely misinformed.”

  “I once saw you yank a splinter the size of a number two pencil out of Kiera’s foot.”

  “You’re mistaking a nurse’s training for courage.”

  “I saw you bury your husband.”

  Monique blinked. She didn’t remember much about
those days after Lenny died. It was a blur of service arrangements and choosing a casket and too many casserole dishes left on the dining room table.

  “I told myself I couldn’t handle the schedule with two kids,” Monique said. “I didn’t want to quit my job because we needed the money to pay off all our school loans.” She gazed at the German river, from the boat she was cruising on, with the bank account full, those concerns long gone. “I worried about the dangers of getting pregnant at my age. I worried whether Lenny and I could put away enough for two college tuitions.”

  Excuses. Every last one of them. Excuses she’d told Lenny and herself, so she wouldn’t have to admit what she was really afraid of: That she’d never be able to love a second child as fully as she loved Kiera.

  “There you two are.” Judy arrived, walking across the deck as she raised three bottles in her hands. “I thought you might like some good cheer.”

  Monique raised a brow. “It’s ten thirty in the morning.”

  “It’s cocktail hour somewhere.” Judy held out a bottle. “Besides these beers are already opened. Lenny would strike you dead if you finished this cruise without drinking German ale in his memory.”

  Monique wrinkled her nose as she took a swallow. The beer was warm, yeasty, and strong. “There, now I’ve had a beer in Lenny’s honor. But I haven’t seen a single castle yet.”

  Judy rolled her eyes. “I guess you guys were too busy wallowing in gloom to notice that we just passed the Ehrenbreitstein fortress.”

  “An unpronounceable pile of rocks,” Becky muttered, hunkered against the rail.

  “In English it means the ‘Broadstone of Honor,’” Judy retorted. “And it’s got a rocking youth hostel.”

  Monique sighed. “Let’s just get off at the next stop, what do you say?”

  Becky, with the beer to her lips, muttered agreement.

  “Geez, this is like babysitting two cranky toddlers.”

  “Judy,” Monique said, “it’s gray, it’s cold, it’s boring, and if Lenny were here, he’d agree while vomiting up his motion-sickness pills.”