Between Friends (8 page)

I nodded. I knew all about it.

“A fistula isn’t really an option for you with these narrow veins—”

“I know,” I interrupted. “We’ll have to do an arteriovenous graft.”

He smiled slightly. “Yeah. We’ll get you set up for it this week, and if we have to go to dialysis sooner, we can use a catheter. You’re going to do fine.”

“I know,” I said, sliding off the table.

Dr. MacKinnon stood and put his hand on my shoulder.

“I’ll meet you out there,” he said, “and we’ll make an appointment for the graft and to set up a dialysis center orientation. You should at least start to get familiar with the process, even if you’ll be doing it in Seattle.”

I nodded, his hand still heavy on my shoulder. Did he think I would run?

As I pulled away from him and stepped into the hall, it took all I had to not do exactly that.

By the time I left for work in the morning, my anger had mellowed to a calm, determined patience. I reconciled myself to the fact that the baby discussion was going to go more slowly than I had anticipated. With Cora in town, I changed tactics. I would talk to her first.

Benny and I kissed good-bye after breakfast as if everything were fine. I managed to keep from driving by Cora’s and pounding on her door, and I spent the morning practicing deep breathing exercises whenever I thought of either of them.

I ate lunch at the counter, pricing boxes of guitar strings in between bites of salad and mulling over Cora’s undercover arrival. I clipped the phone to the pocket of my jeans and hooked the earpiece over my ear so I was ready for her call and wouldn’t have to dash across the store.

By midafternoon she still hadn’t called. I started going back over the last times we’d talked or e-mailed, looking for a reason, any reason, she might be angry with me. Had she e-mailed last? Or had I?

By four I was in the full throes of paranoia, and at ten minutes to closing I had made my plan to go straight to her house and ask her what her problem was and feeling quite righteous about the whole thing, when something slammed into the door hard enough to make my entire front window shake and my heart leap.

It was Cora, plastered against the glass like a bird, her face comically screwed up in surprise, her eyes crossed, a bottle of wine in one hand. I burst into laughter, completely forgetting everything but the joy I felt at seeing my friend. She stepped back and laughed, and then I saw what Benny had neglected to mention in his “looks like hell” assessment, as if she had merely looked a little tired.

She didn’t just look tired. She had dark circles under her eyes, and she’d . . . expanded. She hadn’t exactly gotten fat; it looked too soft, somehow. She looked bloated. Not period bloated, not I-drank-way-too-much-wine-and-ate-too-many-pretzels-last-night bloated, but
wrong
bloated. That was it, she just looked wrong.

But she was still there, in the mouth, that crazy grin, those eyes, and now that she was here I didn’t care if she’d eaten a salt lick and drunk a bottle of gin rather than calling me. I pulled the door open and held it for her, and she didn’t bother setting down the wine before she wrapped her arms around me.

“Hey,” I said into her long hair, hugging her back, rocking with her, and laughing. I started to pull away, but she held on, and after a moment I realized her shoulders were hitching slightly.

“Whoa, hey,” I said, pushing her back more forcefully. She dipped her head down, avoiding my gaze. “Cora, honey, what’s wrong? Are you okay?”

She laughed and held the wine out to me. I set it on the counter while she wiped her face and pulled her hair back. She gave me a tremulous smile and said, “Oh, Ali, I’m so sorry. I’m just jet-lagged and—”

“Okay,” I assured her, taking over, doing for her what she’d done for me countless times. “Go on and get out of here. Go home, put that wine in the fridge, and relax on the couch. I’m going to close up now, run home and grab some things, pick up some takeout, and I’ll be at your place in less than an hour.” I brushed her too-long bangs out of her eyes and made her look at me. “Hey, it’s okay. You’re home. We’ll have a sleepover and by tomorrow you’ll feel so much better. All right?”

She sniffed, but her smile was steadier now. “All right. You sure?”

“Sure about what?” I asked.

“You don’t have plans or anything?”

“Plans? You kidding? Have you seen my life lately? Besides, if the queen were coming to dinner I’d cancel. Now go on, let me get closed up.”

She hugged me again, tightly, then took the wine and left, hitting the horn on the little Toyota she’d had since we were in high school, and I watched her drive away, completely mystified. At least my concerns about her being mad at me were gone. I had no idea what was going on, but I was going to find out.

I rushed through my closing routine and got home before Benny. I gathered everything I thought I’d need, and plenty I probably didn’t, like magazines and books and deep conditioner and facial masks. I was almost excited that she was in such a state. Cora had always held me up, always had the solutions, been the one I turned to.

I’d been the one looking like hell, trying to not cry—and most often failing—more times than she had. Now I could be strong for her. As I packed a duffel bag I went over all the things that could have gone wrong. Maybe she’d been fired.

Maybe she and Drew had broken up. Again. They’d been in and out of it for years, but she’d never been so upset that she’d come back home.

I didn’t think anyone could have died. She had no idea who her father was, her mother had been killed when Cora was just eight, and Barbara had died almost ten years ago. Technically, Cora didn’t have any family left at all.

I settled on Drew. That had to be it.

Benny came home while I was tossing my bags in the car, and I followed him back into the house.

“Leaving me?” he asked lightly as he began putting his work away, teasing, his way of easing back into our relationship after an argument.

“Only for a night,” I said, playing along, but on guard.

Benny and Cora might not have been crazy about each other, but he was grateful to her for our daughter, grateful to her for being the shock absorber of my crazier emotions, my darker moods during those years.

There had been times throughout my relationship with Benny—started and ended frivolously at fifteen, begun again in all seriousness at seventeen—when I thought the combination of Benny and Cora would make the world’s perfect husband.

And when she came back into town, no matter how long it had been, how long Benny had had me to himself, there was still a bit of resentment at my being a ghost of a presence in the house while she was here. It wasn’t that he minded my being gone, it was Cora; specifically, her free spirit, her adamant personality.

I imagined it had started as adolescent jealousy over my time, but neither of them had fully grown out of it. He didn’t trust her independence, and she didn’t trust his conformity. I needed both, and I usually had the best of both worlds. I swung between them like a hammock, gently at times, tangled at others.

But right then, when it came right down to it, I thought my absence was likely a welcome break. When he teased me about leaving him rather than falling silent, I could tell he was looking forward to an evening at home alone, hanging out with the birds and a beer. I decided to tread lightly, making conversation before dashing off.

“So how was it?”

“How was what?” he responded, slipping his shoes off.

“Your day, Benny, how was your day? Do you like being back out there? Anything happen? Catch any bad guys?”

He smiled at that, but he looked tired. I’d grown used to his face aging above a button-down and tie. Seeing it above a uniform again was a little startling, and for the first time I stopped thinking about the fact that he hadn’t consulted me about the job change and wondered if he wasn’t taking on more than he could handle at this point in our lives.

“No bad guys today,” he said. “Lots of speeders, red-light runners, the usual. I caught a couple of kids trespassing at the Jasper place. It’s still a mess there. Talked to them for a while. Good kids, just curious.”

“Okay, good. You happy you’re doing this?”

“Ali,” he said, “stop worrying. I’ll get back into the swing of things. Give me some time, okay?”

“Okay,” I agreed.

“Going to hang with Cora, I take it?”

“That all right with you?”

He shrugged. “Would it matter if it wasn’t?”

I closed my eyes briefly. “Of course it would. Do you need me here?”

He didn’t answer that. “How long did you manage to hold off before calling her?”

“I didn’t, actually. She showed up at the store. But you were right, she does look awful. I think she and her boyfriend must have broken up.”

“That’s too bad,” he said, but he wasn’t really listening. He pulled on his after-work clothes, ready to get out to the yard. “Anything in the fridge for dinner?”

“Not really, unless you want a sandwich. I left a couple of delivery menus on the counter for you.”

He nodded. “Letty check in yet?”

“No, but she’s over at Emily’s tonight, remember? Your night stretches out before you, totally unencumbered by women, my dear.”

He reached his arms above his head, grasping the door trim, and stretched his back with a happy groan. “Sounds lovely,” he admitted. I playfully punched him in his exposed stomach, and he dropped his arms around me and kissed the top of my head. “Have a good time,” he said, giving in. “Call if you need me.”

“Love you,” I called to him as I left, unable to keep from smiling at the echo of his “You too” just before the sliding glass door closed.

I rested my head against the steering wheel when I got back in the car, exhausted by my unexpected breakdown. I’d done my bird-against-the-window routine for her before with great success, and I’d just wanted to see Ali with all that laughter and joy on her face.

But the second her arms were around me, all I wanted to do was break down and sob.

I’d occasionally wondered over the years if there had been anything wrong, ethically, with what we’d done. But then I would see Ali with Letty, or be the recipient of Ali’s mothering instincts myself, as I was today, and I wrestled no more. Of course I had done the right thing. Ali was supposed to be a mother, there was no question.

But now I wrestled with something that was not so abstract. What, exactly, had I given her? A loving gesture from a best friend, or heartbreak? And feeling her arms around me made me wonder if I had fooled about with something that I shouldn’t have. Perhaps the reason I’d never felt any maternal itch was because I wasn’t supposed to have children. Perhaps my flawed genes were being flushed out of the great Darwinian pool.

I wanted to go back to when those thoughts were abstract. Once I started getting specific, other specifics began creeping in. How did Letty feel about me? How did I feel about her? How would she feel if I died? How would she feel if she had the same gene? It wasn’t a given. She had a fifty-fifty chance.

I did have the option of simply saying nothing, going back to Seattle, getting the hemodialysis, hoping for a kidney, and if things didn’t pan out, or the dialysis didn’t work well for me, well, then eventually I’d die and wouldn’t have to worry about it any longer anyway.

I never said it was a good option.

I did some deep-breathing exercises on the drive home, determined to hold myself together and have a good night with Ali. I panicked slightly when I saw the state of the house. I hadn’t had the energy—or the time, thanks to Dr. Cho’s zippy referral—to open the storm shutters, and I certainly hadn’t bothered to neatly remove my clothes from my bags. Things were strewn about, and I was ashamed of myself, ashamed to imagine what Barbara would think of how I was treating the home she’d so generously provided for me.