Friendship Makes the Heart Grow Fonder (20 page)

“Rien ne va plus.”

Judy moved them just in time. Betting was over. She curled her finely manicured fingers into her sweaty palms. She might have
increased the odds but she hadn’t staved off a swift, sharp end to the evening, like the fall of a guillotine.

The dealer set the wheel spinning.

Judy couldn’t watch the roulette wheel spin like Becky did, with her hand cupping her mouth. Judy watched Monique, observing
the table with utter indifference, as all one thousand bucks of Lenny’s casino money teetered on red. Staring at her friend’s
stone-cold face, Judy understood with a new clarity that Monique just wanted to get it over with. This list that Monique had
anticipated for so long…now it just brought the widow pain.

Her mind buzzed forward, trying to anticipate how she should deal with the fallout. There’d be no more gambling. They’d enjoy
the Swiss folklore show, and she’d make jokes about its corny little skits and oompah music. They’d laugh about the whole
thing and make it an early night, which was probably best considering how little sleep all of them had gotten after the previous
night’s shenanigans. Tomorrow they’d set off for Munich like they’d decided so that Becky could see Neuschwanstein, King Ludwig’s
fairy-tale castle, and Monique could finally cross Oktoberfest off the list.

It’d be a new adventure. She’d have to make it good.

“Neuf rouge.”

Becky’s squeal pierced her ears. Judy watched with horror as the dealer clinked on Monique’s pile a token of a color that
no one else at the table sported. Judy flattened her palm on the edge of the table as the dealer pushed everyone else’s chips
off the betting green.

“I won?” Monique frowned. “That wasn’t supposed to happen.”

Becky bounced on the balls of her feet. “You just doubled your money.”

Judy didn’t know whether she was seeing black spots in front of her eyes or if she was having a seizure from all the blinking
slot machine lights. By shoving Monique’s money off of red nine, she just cost the woman who took her to Europe nearly the
full cost of the trip.

“She would have won seven grand,” Judy sputtered, “if I hadn’t moved those tokens at the last minute—”

“Thank goodness you did. It’d take me forever to blow seven grand in this place.” Monique leaned forward and pushed the pile
of tokens back onto red. “It can’t happen twice, right? What are the odds of that, Beck?”

“Forty-eight percent. Same as—”

“Rien ne va plus.”

Judy twitched at the sound of the wheel spinning. She blinked her eyes open to see Monique’s tower of tokens on the baize,
again on red, as the wheel made a clatter and the dealer released the rubber ball. Judy opened her mouth to say—
no, no!
But the tokens were committed, all of them—the original thousand and the additional piece, perched on top like a little black
hat.

She had a fleeting, wicked thought that, if Monique won again, at least she would be partway to the seven thousand dollar
payout that Monique
should have had
,
had Judy not at the last minute yanked all of Monique’s chips off red nine.

“Deux rouge.”

The words didn’t register at once, nor did the sight of the red rubber ball sitting in the hole of number two red, as Becky
released another dolphin-like squeal.

Monique hiked her fists to her hips as the dealer clicked two more black chips on top of her pile. “Oh, for goodness sake.”

Judy seized her arm. “Cash out, Monie.”

“How’s a girl supposed to lose money in this place?”

“Pull the chips,” Judy insisted. “Just take them off the board.”

“I mean, what are the odds? Twice in a freakin’ row.”

“I think,” Becky said, “that the odds are about—”

“Pull them now,” Judy interrupted. “Take your winnings and be done.”

 “It’s Lenny, Monique.” Becky nervously tugged a lock of her hair, blown out in shiny, blond perfection. “He’s trying to tell
you something.”

Monique’s gaze shot up to the rafters of the casino. The gleam in her hazel eyes turned bright and sharp.

“He wanted you to be crazy with money, right?” Becky said. “So he’s just sending you more.”

Judy shot daggers at Becky, but Becky’s gaze lay on the piles of chips, one kid’s worth of orthodontic bills. Judy had no
illusions about the money; Monique
would
lose this money because, well, that’s what you did at casinos. It was just a matter of time. Becky was only throwing gasoline
on the fire by mentioning the possibility of Lenny’s heavenly intervention.

Then Judy heard the scrape of tokens against the baize and saw Monique push all the tokens right smack in the middle of red.
Judy couldn’t watch. She turned her back.

Four thousand dollars on red. A murmuring began all around them, as the crowd started to take notice.

“You hearing me now, big boy?” Monique stood with her arms crossed, eyeballing the dome of the ceiling as she tapped one foot.

“Rien ne va plus.”

The long clatter of the wheel. The release of the ball, the thud as it bounced around in the depression, rebounding off the
edges of the holes, cast into the sides, and veering with a spin across the numbers. Becky turned away and seized Judy’s arm.
Judy slapped her own hand over it, acutely aware of Becky’s uneven breathing. Judy
wanted
Monique to lose. Losing four thousand dollars at the boule table might be cathartic, and the only way this widow would finally
stop being so angry at her dead husband.

The ball did a few short, lazy bounces along the edge of the slowing wheel until it sank, finally, into a hole.

Monique’s gasp was full of frustration.

“You’re having a drink.” Judy took a seat at the linen-covered table and waved for a waiter. “I don’t care if you’re still
hung over from last night. We’ve all had a shock. Unless you want to pick your own poison, I’m ordering the best bottle of
Chasselas they’ve got.”

Monique collapsed like a bundle of bones into the chair. Becky guided herself around the other side of the table and then
sank into the opposite seat. Theirs was one of sixty tables arranged in front of a tiny stage where Judy presumed the Swiss
folklore show would begin once they’d ordered their appetizers. The room was quiet enough that Judy could still hear the ringing
of slot machines in the casino.

When wine and food was ordered Judy dug into her purse and tossed the tokens worth eight thousand bucks in the middle of the
table. The little plastic disks rolled amid the wine and water glasses, bounced off the crystal salt and pepper shakers, and
collapsed in a random pattern around a bowl of water with three floating candles.

Becky made a small, choking sound. “They look like oversize game pieces for tiddlywinks.”

Judy snorted. “My boys would use them for drinking games.”

Judy had rescued the tokens from the baize, taking advantage of Monique’s shock to toss them in her purse. She’d dragged both
her friends away from the casino as if she were staging an intervention for gambling addicts. By the time Monique caught sight
of the exit, she dug in her heels to protest, but Judy had been ready with an excuse. They were nearly late for their dinner
reservations. She’d be damned if she’d miss a dancing Heidi in the opening act.

At least Judy didn’t have to feel guilty anymore for her initial folly of pulling Monique’s chips off nine red.

“When we go back,” Monique said darkly, “I’m putting them on nine red, and this time you’re not going to stop me, Judy. Let’s
see if Lenny could pull that one out.”

Becky sputtered, “Then we’ll be dealing with sixty-four thousand. We’d have to hire an armed guard back to the hotel.”

Judy slid the stem of the wineglass between the tips of her fingers. “We’re not going back to the casino.”

“Oh yes, we are.” Monique splayed a hand toward the center of the table. “I have to see how long these last, remember?”

 “And I thought you didn’t want to do Lenny’s bucket list anymore.”

“I was perfectly willing to salt my scrambled eggs with the ashes of that list this morning.” She jabbed a finger at each
of them. “You were the ones who dragged me here.”

“You came here on your own four-inch stilettos, Monie.”

“I never liked casinos. They give me the creeps.” She looked skyward and raised her voice a notch. “There are other ways to
cut loose, Lenny. You could have tried just
communicating
with me. We used to be pretty good at that.”

“It’s done.” Judy fortified herself with another gulp of white wine. “Just check the item off the list.”

“That’d be lying.”

“He told you to see how long a thousand bucks could last in a casino. Here’s the answer: It can last just about as long as
you please.”

“Fine.” Monique kicked her chair out and slouched against the back. “Consider item number seven checked.”

Judy frowned at Monique’s flippancy, but she let the comment pass. Seven items on Lenny’s list were done. There were five
more to go and six more days of vacation. The list was no longer physically impossible.

Monique’s forehead puckered as she glared at the chips. “Now I have to figure out what to do with all this.”

“Oh, honey,” Judy sputtered, “be creative.”

“I’m serious. I was supposed to lose this.”

“I’m sure Becky and I can help you figure out how to spend eight grand.”

Monique stilled. A strange expression passed across her face. She eased up from her slouch and then leaned forward. With quick
fingers she started flicking the tokens to one side or another, making two piles.

Judy’s breath caught as she figured out what her friend was doing. “I was kidding, Monie.” She seized one of the chips that
threatened to slide off the table. “That’s
your
money—”

“Unearned.”

“—and you should consider it a return for what you’ve spent on me and Becky. Or think of it as a dozen plane tickets to California
for when Kiera goes to UCLA.”

Monique shoved one pile toward Becky and the second pile toward Judy. “If I can’t lose this money in this casino then I’m
giving it to each of you.”

Four thousand bucks in Swiss tokens now teetered on the table next to her bread plate.

Becky’s thin chest rose and fell. “Monie, I can’t possibly—”

“It’s play money.” Monique waved a dismissive hand toward the ceiling. “And it’s all from Lenny, not me. I don’t want a damn
penny of it. Pay for Brian’s hockey gear. Buy Brianna a piano. If I’m going to ‘lose’ money, I want to ‘lose’ it to my friends.”
Monique closed her hand over Becky’s wrist. “Take it, Beck. You’ll be doing me an enormous favor.”

Monique gave Becky an encouraging smile while Becky softly shook her head. Judy looked at the chips pooled by her plate, thinking
about a different vacation, a different set of wailing girls, a different sort of chaos.

“What about you, Judy?” Monique settled back in her chair. She looked like she’d just shrugged off a hundred pounds of solid
rock. “Plenty of money there to shack up with Bob on the Adriatic coast, if that’s what you’ve got in mind.”

Judy’s thoughts leapfrogged from one possibility to another. She thought about Lenny’s list, and how important it was for
Monique to finish it with less stubbornness and more joy. She thought about Becky’s impending blindness, the aching load of
troubles awaiting the young mother at home. And she thought about her own volcanic yearning for adventure—adventure that could
only be seized while she was still far, far away from her empty nest.

The tokens glittered on the table before her. Play money, Monique had called it.

Judy closed her fingers over the pile. Then she thought about the craziest thing a woman in midlife crisis could do with four
thousand bucks.

A
s a young girl, sketching thistledown fairies under a maple tree, Becky used to dream that the speck crossing the sky wasn’t
an airplane ferrying luckier girls to cities like Minneapolis, where she had lived before her father’s fatal accident. No,
no, it was something far different. Any moment it would careen out of the blue, swoop down, and materialize into something
that would take her away from the teeth-aching loneliness of her rural life—a magic carpet, curved and oriental and rimmed
with golden tassels.

Now, pressing her head against a soft leather headrest, Becky revised her image. Her mature magic carpet looked a hell of
a lot like a Porsche 911 Carrera 4S Cabriolet.

“Can you hear that?” Becky felt soft vibrations through the leather of the passenger seat. “This car actually purrs.”

“I hardly need to touch the gas pedal,” Monique said, “and it just zooms.”

The magic carpet was Judy’s idea. She’d pulled up to the hotel this morning with the rental agent in tow to fetch Monique
and her international driver’s license out of bed. The car was jewel blue, a little ragtop bonbon of engineering that could
rev up to 185 miles per hour in less than five seconds. The seats were custom upholstered in creamy white leather, the steering
wheel radiated its own warmth, and the rental cost as much in tokens as Monique had pushed over to Judy at last night’s dinner.

Later, Becky thought, when she could get Judy aside for a private conversation, she would offer up her own half of Monique’s
winnings to split the cost. That money felt like a stash of druid gold found buried in the corner of a garden, magical in
a way that was not meant to be spent on orthodontics or hockey equipment, but rather laid upon fairy mounds as tribute, pierced
and worn around the neck as a talisman, or paid to a crone to redact a curse. And right now this magic carpet was sweeping
her away from care and worry in a way that left her breathless and a little stunned.

“Wave to Lichtenstein, ladies.” Judy sprawled sideways on the narrow backseat of the car, eating from a bag of Zweifel Pomy
paprika chips perched on her abdomen. “The map says it’s about twenty miles that way.”

Monique waved distractedly. “Do you see how this car is handling these curves? When I get home my minivan’s going to feel
like a Big Wheel.”

They’d just passed through the border checkpoint between Switzerland and Austria at St. Margrethen/Höchst, on their way to
Munich. It was a four-and-a-half-hour drive from Interlaken. With every mile they drove it was getting easier for Becky to
allow her troubles at home to grow smaller and smaller in the rearview mirror.

“So much better than the trains.” Judy lifted a peppered chip for emphasis. “No nauseous swaying back and forth, no annoying
tourists, no sticky gum on the seats, no rattle of train wheels—”

“Hey,” Becky said, “train travel is romantic.”

“You like the smelly toilets, too?”

“Of course not.”

“The crackle of unintelligible vital instructions over 1950s-era sound systems?”

“That happened once, on the milk run to Brussels.”

“The molded plastic seats not wide enough to accommodate a certain middle-aged woman’s well-rounded ass?”

 Becky turned against the seat so she could eye Judy in a space meant for packages from Gucci and Henri Bendel rather than
a healthy woman from Jersey. “Hey, how’s that backseat working out for you?”

“I’m lolling on the finest leather. My shoes are kicked off. And if we want, we can change destinations on a whim.” Judy took
a crisp bite of a chip for emphasis and then talked around the crumbs. “Hey Monique, let’s go off road and get completely
lost.”

Monique’s grin could have lit up a room. “You’re the devil.”

“We could head off to St. Petersburg. Spend some time in Moscow. Let the rental company come looking for us on the steppes.”

Becky’s mind flooded with images of the striped soft-serve domes of St. Basil’s Cathedral in Moscow’s Red Square.

Monique said, “Two words restrain me: Grand larceny. Oh, and the fact that Kiera may object if I spend the next ten years
in a Swiss prison.”

“Are you sure of that?” Becky asked. “Last time I eavesdropped she was barely on texting terms with you.”

The sidelong glance Monique sent her was secretively gleeful. “Three texts yesterday, all in a row.”

Judy’s bark of laughter filled the inside of the car. “I told you that all she needed was time.”

“Mind, they were petulant texts, scolding in her Kiera way, but I still take that as a step forward.” Monique checked the
road in the rearview mirror. “How long have we been driving now, ladies?”

Becky flicked her wrist to look at her watch face. “An hour and a half?”

“So you’re saying that, for an hour and a half, I’ve been sitting in the driver’s seat of a Porsche, tooling through Switzerland,
and now Austria, around the southern point of Lake Constance.” Monique ran her fingers over the stack of controls. “That’s
an awful long time for this to be a hallucination, or some residual effect of the absinthe.”

“Oh, honey,” Judy murmured, “it’s four thousand dollars of real.”

“I feel so odd. I feel like I’m
watching
myself drive.”

“This half-blind woman is looking directly at you,” Becky said, “and you do appear to be actually driving.”

But Becky knew what Monique felt like, all the same. She’d spent half her youth with her head in the clouds. After her father
died, her mother moved them back to the farm in western Minnesota, a place where the nearest neighbor was a mile and a half
down the road. That neighbor was Milly Hanson, and she’d been collecting Social Security for two decades. With no close neighbor
kids and a school filled with oversize corn-fed farm boys and ruddy-cheeked mean girls who’d laughed at her sketches, it had
been easier to just live in her drawings amid the bee-hum glade of a woodland cottage.

“You know,” Judy said, “the Germans have an expression for that sensation of detachment, that sense of seeing yourself doing
something even while you’re doing it.”

Monique snorted, “So it’s not just the ventilated seats?”

Judy said something in German, a swift, effortless, and guttural sound. “Literally, it means you feel like you’re walking
beside yourself.”

“I’d have to be walking darn fast to keep up with this baby.” Monique reached for the radio dial. “But I get it. Right now
I am more tuned in than this bad German pop station. In fact, I’m going to give that feeling my own special name. It’s called
Porsche.
As in I’m feeling really Porsche right now.”

“I’ll have a shot of Porsche,” Becky added.

“Honey,” Judy added, “let’s go upstairs and Porsche.”

Becky exchanged an amused glance with Monique.

“What?” Judy exclaimed. “Am I wrong? It’s just incredible, the way this engine rolls and growls. It’s just like sex.”

“Clearly my ovaries are dead.” Monique made an abrupt, humorless laugh. “Or maybe I just don’t remember sex.”

“Sure you do. All this vibrating and purring and yielding skin.” Judy released a long, satisfied sigh. “I need to get me one
of these when we get stateside.”

“No way,” Becky said. “Sports cars are the answer to a man’s midlife crisis. You were jonesing for an Italian lover, if memory
serves.”

“What the hell would I do with an Italian lover when I’ve got Bob the Mormon Stallion at home?”

Becky chuckled along with Monique and Judy because it was expected, but then her breath hitched and a shudder went through
her as if the Porsche had rattled over a pothole. Sex was something she used to have with Marco, before mortgages and motherhood
settled a whole world of worries in bed alongside them. What they’d been having furtively between bath and bedtime these past
years, well…it wasn’t the revving excitement or the purring vibrations she felt riding along in this Porsche.

Becky pressed her head against the window as an excuse to hide her face. Judy hummed in the backseat to bad electro-pop music
as Monique wove the car through the lines at the German checkpoint at Lindau. Becky tried not to feel guilty as she willed
her troubles to recede again, to diminish in the side mirror like the checkpoint booth as they passed through. The past couple
of days had been a crazy-sweet interlude, a gentle loosening of the knot that had tightened in her gut over too many years.

She tried to rustle up a good memory to distract her again, and ironically the first one that popped in her head had everything
to do with Marco. She’d been young and working as a pastry chef in the little kitchen of a ritzy restaurant, daring to gaze
across the stainless steel worktables where Marco labored as a sous-chef. It was an electric shock to glance up and meet his
brown eyes through a haze of steam. She remembered her nervous expectation in the late hours, after the kitchen had been cleaned
up, when the staff gathered to have a beer or a glass of wine to unwind before heading back home. She’d finish her wine, sling
her bag across her back, and pause a moment hoping that fine Italian prince with the longshoreman’s shoulders would finally
offer to walk her to the subway. So many nights he’d look at her, just look, as she bantered with the Mexican dishwashers.
So many nights he’d duck his head and focus on peeling the label off his beer.

One particular day she’d been exhausted, her lower back aching, her feet sore. But when Marco muscled up the courage to offer
to walk her out, the jolt of adrenaline had erased all weariness. The January cold bit her cheeks as they stepped out onto
the New York streets. The heat of his knuckles brushed against hers as he moved close to let some partiers pass them by. His
skin felt rough, as if crystals of sea salt still clung to the backs of his fingers. She tensed as they touched, just imagining
what those fingers would feel like scraping against the underside of her breast.

The heat that surged to her skin countered the chill on her jean-clad thighs. She knew she was blushing. She hoped he would
blame her flush on the cold. They’d barely exchanged words as they walked, just pleasantries about his classes in architecture,
the taste of the raspberry sauce she drizzled over cheesecake, murmuring little nothings that covered up what they both were
thinking.

What they both were hoping for.

He broke first. He just stepped in front of her. Those broad shoulders blocked out the world. He thrust his fingers in her
hair, and she stumbled two steps backward. The bricks of a storefront dug into her back. His eyes, inches from hers, were
bright with wanting. The juniper-berry taste of his breath.

The whole city could have gone up in flames and she wouldn’t have moved an inch.

Yeah, she remembered great sex. That was the magic carpet that had finally swept her away to a castle in the suburbs and to
the birth of her strong little elf and her bright little fairy. Judy was absolutely wrong. Sex like that was a hundred thousand
times better than rolling down a European highway in a Porsche.

Zooooooom

Becky jerked away from the window. A car reeled out from her peripheral vision and shot past so fast that she barely registered
the color. It sped ahead a few car lengths and then zipped in front of them.

Monique said, “Looks like we’re not the only ones with hot cars on this road.”

Becky pressed her hand against her sternum to keep her heart in her chest. “Tell me that you saw him long before I did.”

“He’s been looming larger and larger in the rearview mirror for a while now. Nice wheels.” Monique grinned. “Not as nice as
ours, though.”

“It’s a sign.” Judy straightened up and put the bag of chips on the floor before leaning between the seats to squint at the
road signs. “We must be on an autobahn.”

Monique nodded. “Practically every major highway in Germany is an autobahn, Judy.”

“I always thought the autobahn was one road.” Becky stretched out her toes against the dark flooring. “You know, like one
wide straight road through the heart of Germany, where all the rich guys with their fancy cars burned up fuel by speeding
from Frankfurt to Berlin. Like a go-cart track for yahoos.”

“The guy who passed us wasn’t tooling around at”—Judy peaked over the steering wheel and squinted at the smaller print on
the odometer—“a mere sixty miles per hour.”

Monique said, “He was a crazy driver.”

“Then it’s time to join him. What do you say, Monie? Ready to check another item off the list?”

“Down, girl. We only just entered Germany.”

“Are we on an autobahn?”

“Yeah.”

“Are we in a hot sports car?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Then give me one good reason why you’re not blowing our hair back going one hundred miles an hour?”

“Speed limit.” Monique gestured behind her. “Back there at the checkpoint. There was a speed limit sign for sixty kilometers
per hour.”

“Which feels like ten miles an hour," Judy said.

“It’s about forty miles an hour, which I’m now surpassing. And not all German autobahns allow you to go as fast as you want,
you know.”

“Monique, see that sign?” Judy pointed toward the side of the road. “The blank white circle with the diagonal black line?”

Becky, temporarily blinded by the glare, saw nothing more than a white blur as they passed quickly on by.

“I’ll tell you what it means,” Judy said as Monique didn’t answer. “It’s the universal sign for ‘no speed limit.’”

“And you know that because…?”

“I read German. Punch it, Monique.”

Monique’s knuckles tightened on the wheel. “Too many cars. Can’t do it now.”

“It’s wide open up ahead.”

“You really are the devil.”

“Rumor has it that this baby can do a hundred and eighty miles an hour.”

“I’m
not
doing a hundred and eighty!”

“How ’bout a hundred and fifty then?”

“No way!”

“One twenty?”

“Lenny said—”

“Oh, so we’re back to a literal interpretation, are we?”

Monique’s answer was a sharp glance in the rearview mirror then a hard press on the gas. The car engine revved and the Porsche
thrust forward, throwing Becky back against the passenger seat. The vehicle ate up the asphalt. Becky tugged her seat belt
until she felt the comfort of resistance. She looked straight ahead, where her vision was most sharp, and saw a gray ribbon
of road, the car that had sped past them long out of sight.