Friendship Makes the Heart Grow Fonder (2 page)

“Yeah, I heard the tumbling of the garbage can that heralded her arrival.”

“Actually, that was Brian’s Big Wheel, which she knocked into the garbage can. The thing is, Becky came by, but then left
right away.”

 “Did she forget to bring that red velvet cake? If she brought that cake, I’ll reconsider my antisocial tendencies and put
up with Joe’s fish tales.”

“She didn’t bring the cake.” Judy frowned, concern filling her anew, the concern that had urged her to seek out Monique in
the first place. “Something’s up with her.”

Monique wandered toward the doorway and tilted her head in unease, her fall of tight braids brushing against her throat. “It’s
Marco, isn’t it?”

“That’s where I’d put my money.”

Marco, Becky’s husband, had been put on unpaid furlough three weeks ago as a cost-cutting measure imposed by the architectural
firm he worked for. The company was struggling to hold on to its talent through a grim economic time, but couldn’t afford
to keep everyone on full payroll. Marco was one of the architects with the least seniority, one of the later hires. Gina,
his eighteen-year-old daughter from a previous marriage, was now in college, while Becky stayed home raising the younger kids.

“The timing is right,” Judy said, “for the financial strain to show.”

“It can’t help that Becky dented the car again.”

“Body work is expensive.”

“It couldn’t have happened at a worse time.”

“Yes, and Marco’s not home tonight. He took the train to his brother’s house in Hicksville so he could borrow their second
car while theirs is in the shop.”

Monique paused. “So she’s alone.”

“Yup.”

“And her kids are next door, having fun on the trampoline.”

“Monie, I saw her through the window tonight. She’s sitting at her kitchen table with her head in her hands.”

She could do this.

Becky pushed herself up from the kitchen table and slipped into the den, rounding the couch to confront the usual scattering
of toys. She picked up the Matchbox fire truck and little yellow car, and then she scooped up the Spiderman and Green Goblin
action figures and tossed them unerringly into the big wicker bin in the corner. She gathered the fashion dolls. She squinted
at the rug, searching for the little shoes, belts, and sparkling fabric purses. She lifted pillows off the carpet and tossed
them on the L-shaped couch, pausing to fold the throw blankets and tuck them in the lower shelf of the coffee table.

See? She was perfectly fine. She could take care of her house. There was nothing wrong with her at all. She’d finish cleaning
out this den and then she’d move back to the kitchen and make sure the last of the flour had been scrubbed from the counter.
She would hand-dry the bowls she’d used to make the cake. By then the pans should be well-soaked enough that she wouldn’t
have to scrub to loosen the baked-on crumbs.

After that, it’d be time to call Brianna and Brian home from the trampoline. On summer nights, they always tumbled in streaked
with grass stains, sticky with mosquito repellent, and sweaty around the hairline. She’d have to bathe them tonight because
early tomorrow morning they were going to her mother-in-law’s house for the annual Labor Day weekend cookout. She should probably
start packing snacks for the car.

A knock on the back door startled her. Shadows shifted through the window, and then someone turned the door handle and stepped
right in.

“Hey, Becky.”

She recognized Monique’s voice before her friend stepped into the light of the kitchen. Monique wore a tank top that showed
off her arms, honed by kickboxing. Judy, a shorter, sturdier shape, followed behind.

“I told you she was an alien.” Judy hiked her fists onto her hips as she scanned the room. “Mothers of three children aren’t
supposed to have clean houses.”

“It’s only two of the monsters now. I can’t blame Gina for this.” Becky pulled open the lower cabinet to toss a paper towel
into the garbage. “I haven’t seen hide nor hair of Gina since she left for Rutgers. But I’m not complaining.”

Becky smiled tightly. No use bringing up that other concern about Gina—that, if Marco’s unpaid furlough stretched much longer,
the college girl might actually have to move out of the dorm at Rutgers and back into this house. She and her step-daughter
didn’t have the best of relationships. If Gina came home again, the girl would take inordinate pleasure in flaunting the tongue-stud
she had done on her eighteenth birthday.

But Becky had bigger things to worry about now. She let Gina slip away, like water through her fingers.

Monique pulled up a chair. “We missed you at the barbecue, Beck.”

“That’s quite a trick,” Becky said, “since you weren’t there either, Monique.”

“I bailed when I thought your red velvet cake wasn’t coming.”

Becky turned toward the sink to avoid those clear, all-knowing eyes. “I think you bailed when Mrs. Davis started talking about
her colonoscopy. I hear the Miralax powder is thorough.”

Judy asked, “Marco not home yet?”

“The charmer won’t be back until ten or eleven.”

Monique said, “You want to talk about it?”

Becky concentrated on pulling one of the cake pans out of the sink and attacking it with the scrubbing side of a blue sponge.
No, she really didn’t want to talk about it. She hadn’t even told Marco what was bothering her. For so long she and Marco
had been living in strained little silences. The act of keeping explosive information from him had been easier than she’d
expected. The financial squeeze they were feeling was only the latest hit in a long string of odd distrusts and not-so-subtle
misunderstandings. And he’d been so angry lately, for the fact that his salary had been cut to nothing, for the bills piling
up, for the car accident. It didn’t help that she’d just found out from the dentist that Brianna was going to need braces.
She hadn’t yet dared to mention that, if Brian was going to play hockey this season, he would need all new equipment because
he’d grown so much. And no matter how many elaborate fantasy-castle cakes she made for friends and their referrals, she couldn’t
bake and sell them fast enough to fill the gap between what Marco had been paid and what the mortgage demanded. It was a long
list of worries.

They all seemed so silly now.

“Hey, Becky,” Judy said, peering at the calendar hanging over the desk in the corner of the kitchen. “Don’t you have a birthday
coming up?”

“Yeah. In April.” Becky held the pan up while water dripped into the sink. “I didn’t think you’d so quickly forget the margaritas
at Tito’s last spring.”

“April, September, whatever. It’s close enough for a celebration.” Judy wandered over to the table and ran her hand over the
back of a chair. “Don’t you agree, Monique?”

“I think I could talk Kiera into donating a little community service time toward watching your two little monsters.”

Judy added, “I hear that new tapas place on Main Street is great.”

Monique murmured, “A little Spanish guitar…”

“A little Spanish wine…” Judy nodded in decision. “I think you and Marco could use a fun night out.”

A night out.
Becky shifted her gaze to the window over the sink, to the smudgy, shadowed reflection of her own face.

Nights were the worst.

She gave the dripping pan one last shake and then slipped it onto the drainer. At least she tried to slip it onto the drainer.
Somehow instead, she cracked the corner of it against a glass mixing bowl so precariously piled that the force made the bowl
tumble over the edge and knock a whisk and two wooden spoons out of the utensils bin. While the bowl clattered on the wet
counter, one wooden spoon flipped into the air and then rattled onto the tile floor.

In the uncomfortable silence that followed, Becky felt a hot prickle of embarrassment. Clumsy Becky, again. Always tripping
on uneven sidewalk pavements, stumbling over garbage cans, knocking over wineglasses, and dropping whole trays of cupcakes
off the edge of tables.

So adorable.

“Hey, nice flip.” Judy turned the bowl upright and pushed it deeper onto the counter. “Did you see the spin on that thing?”

Monique retrieved the spoon and handed it to her. Becky took it and saw the flicker of a look that passed between her friends.
It was a subtle thing, a quiet zipping of information. The kind of nonverbal communication that would, soon enough, pass right
by her, unnoticed.

Monique flicked a drop of water on her arm, to get her attention. “Are you going to tell us what’s wrong, girl, or do we have
to do this kabuki dance until we tease it out of you?”

Becky picked the other cake pan out of the water, setting the sponge upon it with new ferocity. She wished they would just
go away. They knew her too well. Just like Becky could tell by the strain in Monique’s voice that something was bothering
her, or by the way Judy acted crazy when she was upset, Becky knew they saw the signs in her, too. When you form an alliance
to mutually raise a passel of curious, risk-taking, hormone-crazy teenagers, you become comrades in a very narrow foxhole.
She, Monique, and Judy had survived raising-a-teenage-daughter boot camp. They were bonded for life.

But Becky wasn’t in the mood to share. She hadn’t yet wrapped her own mind around the news. Every time she looked at Brianna
and Brian, her throat closed up. She found herself cataloging the tangle of their lashes, the way Brian’s nose tilted up at
the tip, Brianna’s shoulders dusted with freckles.

If she spoke the words out loud, then it would be real.

“Marco didn’t believe me,” she said, casting about for any reasonable excuse for her behavior. “About the accident.”

Judy wandered to the far cabinet where, by stretching her solid frame up on her toes, she could just reach the bottle of whiskey
on the third shelf. “Beck,” she said, “you aren’t the best of drivers.”

“So I’m repeatedly told.”

“I mean,” Judy continued, “it’s not like this was your first fender bender.”

“It was a deer.” At least, she thought it was a deer. It might have been a big beige dog. Or an odd-colored garbage can. It
had all just happened so fast, and the sun was right in her eyes. “I clipped it on that road just by the nature preserve.”
Twenty-five-mile-an-hour speed limit and she was riding just under it. “The place is lousy with deer.”

Monique shifted her stance, a line appearing between her eyes. “How bad is the damage?”

The damage to the car, at least, was repairable. She shrugged. “It’s more than we can afford right now. Marco is understandably
angry.”

Judy nudged her and held out a whiskey on ice. “Listen, when Bob had his so-called retirement and was home for four months,
he took every frustration out on me. Thank God he was hired by this start-up online news corporation or we’d have killed each
other by now.” Shrugging, she pushed a lock of brown hair behind her ear. “Marco is tense, Becky. He’s feeling like he can’t
provide.”

 Becky let the pan drop right back into the water as she took the drink. “Marco made me go to the eye doctor to get my vision
checked.”

“That’s like when I sent Jake to get his hearing checked.” Judy rolled her whiskey glass in little circles on the kitchen
table. “Perfect hearing, the doctor told me. Apparently my kid just doesn’t listen to me.”

“Becky, you’re coming up on forty, yes?” Monique said. “Well, it’s a sad, dreary little fact that you’ll be wearing rhinestone-studded
reading glasses before long.”

Judy took a sip of her whiskey. “Hey, it’ll raise the chance that
one
of us will remember our glasses when we go out to eat. We’ll be like those three witches in that Disney movie, sharing one
eye.”

Becky clattered her glass onto the table. Her hand was shaking, and she’d already spilled some of the liquid onto her fingers.
She tried to rub it off, but only succeeded in spreading it over her other hand. Maybe Monique would understand all this,
she thought, digging her nails into her palms. At the very least Monique could explain it to her in a way she might be able
to comprehend.

Becky strode to the small desk in the corner of the kitchen and riffled through the permission slips and flyers she’d pulled
from her kids’ backpacks until she found the information sheet she couldn’t bring herself to read. She glanced at it briefly
and then, closing her eyes, thrust it behind her, toward Judy, who was closest.

Judy took it and held it at arm’s length. “Wouldn’t you know I didn’t bring my reading glasses?” She squinted as she moved
her head back a little. “And it’s in Latin, no less.”

Monique started. She came around the table to peer over Judy’s shoulder. Becky watched Monique’s face as she swiftly read
the text, her eyes moving back and forth. As Becky watched Monique read to the bottom, she noticed that her friend’s lips
went tight, revealing a pale line around the edges.

 “I don’t get it,” Judy murmured, squinting ferociously. “All I can see is the title. What the hell is retinitis pigmentosa?”

“It’s a disease.” Monique lifted her troubled gaze to Becky’s. “A degenerative one.”

Becky saw the shock in Monique’s eyes and the dawning dismay in Judy’s. Then she spoke before her throat closed up.

“Apparently, ladies…I’m going blind.”

M
onique pushed the curried chicken around the iron skillet. The scent of onions, garlic, diced tomatoes, and green seasoning
rose up with the steam. Through the kitchen window, she glimpsed Becky’s kids playing in her backyard on the old wooden swing
set, the one she couldn’t bring herself to take down though Kiera hadn’t gone near it in years. At least Becky’s kids were
enjoying it, their laughter bright and sharp.

Monique stopped stirring, her fingers tightening on the wooden spoon. She knew that Becky still hadn’t told the kids. Kids
that age would struggle to grasp the meaning of such bad news. They wouldn’t really understand the incremental progression
of the disease, or what it all meant to them on a day-to-day basis. With the diagnosis so fresh, Monique suspected that even
Becky and Marco hadn’t fully absorbed the consequences—certainly not enough to explain to Brianna and Brian in plain terms
the grim, long-term repercussions.

Dread shifted within her, a solid weight that pressed against her spine. Earlier in the week at the hospital, she’d spent
a coffee break with a specialist in degenerative eye diseases, pumping him for information. Monique knew the prognosis. She
knew how it would play out. She knew more than she wanted to know—enough to break her heart three times over.

“Hey, Mom.”

Kiera busted through the back door. With a solid thunk, she dropped her backpack onto the floor of the mudroom. She sailed
into the kitchen and gave Monique a quick peck on the cheek.

“Hey, baby girl,” Monique said. “How did the physics test go?”

Kiera rolled her eyes. She scooted to the sink, rolling up the sleeves of her hoodie. “Let’s just say I wouldn’t mind pushing
Mr. Orso off a cliff to calculate how long it would take for him to reach terminal velocity.”

Monique suppressed a smile, momentarily grateful for the spoon in one hand and the oven mitt in the other, because they prevented
her from running her palm over Kiera’s hair to smooth down the short pieces that stuck up from around the braided headband.
Such fierce, affectionate motherly urges were usually repaid with affront. “I’ll make sure not to mention that at the next
back-to-school night. You hungry?”

“Starved. That smells awesome.” Kiera peered into the skillet as she ran her hands under the open faucet. “Curry chicken?”

“And callaloo.” She lifted the top off another pot to show the greens simmering in coconut milk. “Swiss chard and spinach,
though. Don’t go expecting dasheen leaves like
Grand-mère
would have made you, hunting them down in some side-alley Caribbean grocer.”

“So what’s the occasion?”

The kid had a sixth sense. “Since when do I have to have an occasion to whip up some comfort food for my hard-working high
school senior?”

“You’re still in scrubs.”

Monique shrugged as she glanced down at the duck appliqués on her blue scrubs. She’d had one of her colleagues cover for the
last hour of her shift because she was no fool. She hoped Kiera would adore what she was going to ask her, but since it involved
her father, there was no way to tell. “Takes a long time to chop all these vegetables, you know that. Didn’t have time to
change.”

Kiera narrowed her dark-chocolate eyes as she shut the faucet off, grasped a dishtowel, and worked her hands dry. She made
a little mumbling sound, the kind of sound Lenny might have made if he had an opinion and was tamping it down for the time
being.

The similarity was like a needle in her heart.

“I know what this is about.” Kiera tugged the dishtowel through a cabinet handle below the sink. “You shouldn’t poke around
my room, you know.”

Monique gave her daughter a raised brow. Kiera was a good student, a strong-minded individual who rarely got in trouble. Her
daughter’s room was an oasis of privacy Monique had allowed her, one that Monique had never felt compelled to invade.

Course, that didn’t mean she wouldn’t let her daughter think she
would
invade it—if she had due cause. “Is there something in there that your mother shouldn’t see?”

Kiera flung herself in a kitchen chair. “I
was
going to tell you. I was just waiting for the right time.”

A cold tingle washed up her spine. She ran through the usual dangerous possibilities—body piercings, tattoos, sexting with
strangers, drug paraphernalia. She pulled the oven mitt off her hand and turned toward the cabinet, more to hide her expression
than to pull down plates.

“And just for the record,” Kiera said, “it’s not going to work.”

“What?”

 “The great meal, the whole nice attitude, your aura of unshakable calm. I’ve made up my mind.”

“Kiera,” she said, placing the first plate on the counter, “when have I ever tried to talk you out of anything?”

“Well, I
know
you’re going to try to talk me out of UCLA.”

Monique fumbled the second plate. It slipped out of her grasp and onto the counter. She pressed it to stop it from clattering.

Los Angeles.
Three thousand five hundred miles away.

Monique feigned calm as she dished a chicken thigh on each plate, smothering them in the onion, garlic, and diced tomato sauce.
This wasn’t what she’d planned to talk about tonight. But she’d been a mother of a teenage daughter long enough to understand
the importance of seizing the moment.

 “I’m glad you’re telling me now, Kiera.” She added a healthy helping of the dark green callaloo. “You have to admit your
mother deserves to have a voice in this discussion, since I’ll be writing the checks.”

“It’s trust money, Mom. Daddy put it aside for me.”

Her throat tightened at the sound of the word
daddy
. “Yes, it is. And we’re both lucky that your father had prepared so well to take care of us, long after he couldn’t physically
do it anymore. But you know he’d want to discuss this with you, too, if he were still here.”

 “Low blow, Mom. Guilt is not a fair weapon.”

“But it’s ageless and ruthlessly effective.”

Turning around, Monique gave Kiera a little smile as she slipped both dishes on the table in the breakfast nook—where they
took all their meals now that there were only two of them at home, and the dining room table had morphed into a staging surface
for the college search. Kiera chose that moment to drop her gaze and fuss with her napkin.

Monique settled down across from her, watching her daughter with the word “Los Angeles” echoing in her head. She looked lovingly
at Kiera’s hair, shining with raven-blue highlights. On weekends, Kiera took great care to fluff and condition it into a flattering
cascade of relaxed curls, but during the active sports season, she just pulled it back flat. Monique liked it better this
way. With the stub of a ponytail, the open plaid shirt, the tank top and ripped-knee jeans, Kiera retained some remnant of
the active little girl who once tore swaths through the backyard, catching ladybugs and sorting them by spots.

Sometimes she missed that little girl, hidden within the perceptive, years-ahead-of-herself teenager that Kiera had become.

Monique waited for Kiera to say something. Kiera straightened in the chair and switched her knife and fork from one hand to
another, before idly digging into the chicken thigh. Her daughter was a deep, deep well. Monique knew this. Monique loved
this.

Finally Kiera glanced up through sullen lashes. “You know it’s the best film school in the country, right?”

Monique didn’t argue the point. UCLA had always come up on their early searches for the best film schools, and it was just
as quickly waved off as geographically undesirable. She also knew that two of the other best film schools in the country were
in California, a fact she would pointedly not mention. “A month ago you were saying the same thing about New York University.”

“NYU has one of the top film departments too,” Kiera admitted, “but I’m applying from New Jersey.”

“Yeah?”

“It’s a disadvantage. Lots of people from New Jersey will be applying to NYU—I mean, it’s right
there.
We can commute.” She chewed another bite of chicken. “But there won’t be nearly as many people from New Jersey applying to
UCLA, so I’ll have the advantage of geographical diversity.”

“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 light-hearted, 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—”