Between Friends (9 page)

I hurried around gathering my clothes together and shoving them in my dresser drawers, drawers I hadn’t looked in for years. I continued to stay in my old room, not out of some misguided respect for Barbara’s room—she’d have expected me to move into it—but because I liked my old room in the back corner of the house, its French doors leading out to the patio and pool, doors I used to sneak out of in high school to meet Ali and our friends down at the beach.

When she rang the bell, the interior was as good as it was going to get, though it was still dark without the shutters open. I forced a smile on my face, and when I opened the door, it softened into something more natural. Ali had arrived laden down with enough stuff to stay a week.

“What all did you bring?” I asked, throwing bags onto the sofa while she went back out to her car for more. I laughed when she brought in a stack of DVDs and books. I nearly expected her to whip a puppy out of her pocket.

We both fell back onto the couch and just looked at each other for a moment.

“It’s good to see you,” Ali said.

“Oh, honey, you too, you have no idea.”

“How long are you staying?”

I surveyed the array of supplies she’d brought spread before us. “Apparently not as long as you are.”

“Well, I wanted to plan for every contingency,” she said. “I’ve got heartache movies, funny movies, funny heartache movies, books on changing careers, books on midlife crises, books on cultivating coleus . . .”

“Cultivating coleus?”

“I don’t know. It looked pretty,” she said, holding up a book with photos of brightly colored plants with white veins running through them. “I had no idea what sort of mood you might be in, so I just grabbed everything within reach,” she said with her old Ali grin.

I shook my head and took the book from her. “You’re a nut,” I said, “but I do love you.”

“Okay,” she said briskly, standing and surveying the living room. “Let’s get the shutters up.”

I collapsed back against the couch. “Really? Isn’t it nice and soothing in here?”

“Yes, it’s quite soothing. For mental patients. And if I can help it, you’re not going to become one just yet. On your feet, lady.”

I stood with a groan. “All right, but if I collapse, I’m holding you personally responsible.”

“The fresh air will do you good,” she said. And, as usual, she was right. It took well over an hour, and by the time we’d worked our way around the house cranking the rolling shutters up into their cases, I’d worked up a fine sheen of sweat. It exhausted me, but it felt good, too.

Granted, Ali was doing most of the work, physically and emotionally. She’d kept up a constant stream of chatter, and I hung on every word. She told me about Letty, how she was getting used to high school, how her grades had slipped a little, but that was to be expected with the tougher classes.

Letty was going to be fifteen in a couple of weeks. My God. Fifteen.

“She says she doesn’t want a party, can you believe that? She says she’s too old for a party. The girl who had to have pony rides at seven, a bounce house at eight, all those ridiculous theme parties we threw every year with all those screaming girls?”

I did remember. I’d been there for a few of them and had always thought they were the most absurd waste of money. I thought they were spoiling her, but I kept my opinion to myself, of course. They kept her limbs intact and air pumping through her lungs, and what more could you ask, really?

“So, will you be here for her birthday?” Ali asked, and if I wasn’t mistaken, there was a slight edge to her voice that I couldn’t readily explain.

“I might,” I said. “What’s the plan if there’s no party?”

“Well, dinner out, I guess, and we’ll go ahead and start looking for a car—”

“What? I thought she was fifteen?”

“She is,” she said, sounding surprised. “But we thought it would be good to have her learn to drive on the car she’d actually be driving. Besides, we’re just starting to look; it’s not like it’s going to be sitting in the driveway with a big red bow on it. We’ll get it during the year and make it low-key; you know, we don’t want it to look like we’re spoiling her.”

I gaped at her.

“What?” she demanded, hands on her hips. “That’s not that unusual, you know. You don’t have kids; you don’t know how it is now.”

“Oh, come on,” I protested. “You and I both had to work for our cars. What’s Letty doing?”

“Letty is being a kid—”

“Kids don’t have cars,” I pointed out. “Young adults have cars, and young adults work, and pay for their insurance and their gas—”

“Cora!” Ali interrupted me. “Look, yes, we did all that, but things are different now. You have no idea how much work these kids do at school, how crazy and busy their lives are. And I don’t want Letty to have to work yet. We can afford to get her a car, a good, safe car so we don’t have to worry about her breaking down on the side of the road.”

I started laughing. “Remember when your Fiat lost half its gears and we had to drive home from the beach in first gear the whole way?”

I thought she’d laugh over the shared memory, but she frowned.

“That’s exactly what I’m talking about,” she said. “Do you know how dangerous that was? What were we even doing out that late at night? Anything could have happened, and we’d have been able to go all of twelve miles an hour to get to safety. I don’t want Letty in any situation like that.”

“Well, we managed to live through it,” I said, turning back to the shutter on the front window, the final one. Ali was still standing in the driveway looking at me with her arms crossed over her chest. “And I don’t think we turned out too badly. Do you?”

I didn’t know why I was pushing this. I didn’t want to fight with Ali.

“It was a different time,” she said, narrowing her eyes at me. “And I have no idea what my parents were thinking, letting me stay out so late, letting us do some of the stuff we did.”

“Wow, I think that’s pretty harsh.”

I was truly surprised. Ali’s parents had been great, ideal parents as far as I had been concerned, and after my mother, foster homes, and then Barbara, I had certainly considered myself something of an expert on what constituted a good family.

“They let you do things because you’d proven yourself reliable and responsible,” I said. “You worked at the store from the time you were ten; you saved your money; you made good grades; you made good choices, I’d like to think, in friends.”

She snorted at that. “Well, I guess I did at that. Sorry. Benny’s been a bear lately, and I’m feeling a little frazzled this week.”

“Me too,” I said, trying to give her an understanding smile, but puzzled by the pained look on her face.

“What’s going on?” I asked, and she laughed and shook her head.

“I’m supposed to be asking you that,” she said, then gave the house an appraising look. “Come on, let’s get cleaned up and start downing some wine. I’m feeling like we’ve done enough work, how about you?”

“I thought you’d never ask.”

I got in the shower, and Ali passed various potions and unctions in to me, directing me as to what part of my body they were to be used on. At one point I smelled like a pine-infused mango with lemon zest, but still, it was lovely to feel taken care of.

“Here,” she said, talking over the patter of the shower and handing in a white device. When I took it from her, I realized it was vibrating and nearly dropped it in surprise. There was cream on one end.

“What the hell am I supposed to do with this?” I called from behind the curtain.

Ali pulled a bit of the shower curtain back and looked at me disapprovingly, but she was unable to keep from laughing, too.

“It’s for your
face
, Cora. My God, where have you been for the past five years? It’s microdermabrasion. Just rub it around on your face.”

She let the shower curtain drop, and I applied it to my face, still giggling.

“And try to not get any in your eyes or your mouth,” she called to me, making us both laugh again.

When I finally got out of the shower, microdermabraded, deeply conditioned, and loofahed until I tingled, I had to laugh at Ali’s disheartened face.

“What? You thought I’d look better, didn’t you?” I asked with a grin.

“You look great,” she said, but I’d seen her face. I believe
dismay
was the predominant emotion, though it was lightly tinged with concern.

“We should get massages this week,” she said brightly, and I could see her mentally cataloging the procedures I’d need to have done in order to look myself again. She was probably thinking about lymph node-draining rubdowns, toxin-releasing wraps, and all manner of luxuries that weren’t going to do a thing.

I wanted to reassure her that it was merely an incurable disease I had, just to make her feel better about her ministrations’ lack of power to transform me.

“You want to go up with me tomorrow?” I asked, surprising myself.

Her eyes widened. “I have to open the store,” she hedged.

This was an old tug-of-war between us. “You know, people actually ask me to take them flying. I’m trusted, sought out, beloved for my safety record.”

“How ’bout I belove you for staying on the ground?”

I turned my head upside down and rubbed my hair dry, and Ali pointed to the low stool we used to sit on to apply makeup. I sat and rubbed lotion on my arms—the one beauty regimen I’d embraced in recent years, trying to combat my dry, itchy PKD skin—while Ali started running a comb through my hair.

If I didn’t look in the mirror, we could have been fourteen again. She gently worked out tangles and then began tugging my hair into a French braid.

“Come on, Al. Go for a ride with me?”

She avoided my eyes in the mirror. “Maybe.”

“What are you afraid of?”

“Crashing in a ball of fire.”

“That’s all?”

“Crashing in the Everglades.”

“Uh-huh. Anything else?”

“Crashing on I-75.”

“I’m sensing a theme here.”

“The crashing part?”

“Yes, that seems to come up a lot.”

“As will my lunch if I get in one of those little planes.”

“I’d be ever so careful. Come on, please? It’s perfect flying weather.”

“How do you know you can even get a plane?”

“I’ll call Keith. Season’s over, he’ll have one open.”

“Maybe.”

“What about Letty? Think she’d like to go up?”

“Oh, I’m sure she’d love to. You kidding?”

“Well, why don’t you see if she’d like to go, and I’ll pick her up at the store tomorrow afternoon. You can meet us at the field after you close.”

“She’s staying with Emily tonight,” she said. “They usually go to the beach on Saturday.”

“We should go down in our bikinis and mortify them.”

“Please. The only place I wear a bikini these days is at my own pool. At night. When there’s no moon.”

“Remind me to call the pool company to come out next week so we can swim while I’m here. It doesn’t look like it’s been done this month, and I don’t feel like cleaning it. I never get the chemicals right anyway.”

Her hands paused in my hair for a moment. “You’ll be here for that long?”

“Maybe,” I said.

“I’ll call for you tomorrow. Okay,” she said, snapping a band in place at the end of my braid. “My turn. You get started with a glass of wine, and I’ll be out in a few minutes.”

I smoothed my hands against the sides and top of my head, feeling the satisfying bumpy line of the braid. “You’ve still got it,” I said.

“You too, hot mama,” she said, and we smiled at each other in the mirror, both painfully aware that she was lying.

I didn’t bother using any of the beauty products I’d given to Cora on myself. Not that I didn’t need them, but I wanted to get some wine in her and loosen her tongue as quickly as possible. There was obviously something major going on.

The last time she’d been here for more than two weeks was when Barbara died. I’d stayed with her most of that time, going home only to pick up more clothes. She’d tried to get me to fly with her then, too, and I’d finally gone just to make her happy, but I was nauseated and kept my eyes closed the whole time.

I trusted her skill. Cora had always done exactly what she set out to do, and then she did it better than anyone else. She was an excellent pilot, I was certain. But I’d have been terrified with Lindbergh himself. I did not trust it, I did not want to, and I did not have to.

Letty would love it. I paused for a moment with my fingers tight against my scalp, suds dripping down my face, and then began to massage again, slowly. Yes, it was true. Letty was a lot like Cora. Okay, there it was.

And Cora was right. We’d been little hellions, and we’d partied, and we’d taken outrageous risks, and we were very lucky nothing awful happened to us as teenagers, but we’d been pretty good kids, too. I still looked back and wondered that my parents had been so permissive, but we’d come through it all right.