Friendship Makes the Heart Grow Fonder (26 page)

Kiera, all shiny eyes and widening grin, stopped abruptly at the threshold as if she suddenly realized she wasn’t acting nearly
cool enough for a seventeen-year-old senior welcoming her mother home from a long trip. Lightning-quick her stance shifted
into the usual cock-hipped pose, and she gave her mother a look from head to toe.

“Ma, you’re a mess!”

“Shut up and give your mother a hug.”

A bit of the little girl was still in her, Monique thought, as Kiera launched herself into her arms and squeezed her tight.
Monique could almost believe the young woman rocking in her arms was still that girl, if her cheek wasn’t level with Monique’s
and her hair didn’t smell like the fancy coconut relaxant she favored, and the laugh that bubbled out of her wasn’t throaty
and confident and fully, undeniably mature.

“I’m
so
glad you’re home.” Kiera pulled away and then bounced on the end of the bed. “Nothing against
Grand-mère
’s fabulous cooking, but after two weeks I am just dying for a burger and fries.”

“Callaloo for dinner.” Monique returned to her suitcase, searching the zippered compartments, wondering where she’d tucked
the little ceramic gargoyle from Notre Dame. “
Grand-mère
left me a note.”

Kiera puffed out her cheeks and clutched the micro-pouch of her stomach. “Can’t you talk her into McDonald’s?”

“I doubt it. I’m looking forward to a few cheap American meals myself,” she said, gently slapping her own hip, “but it’s good
to know you see me as a dependable purveyor of fast food.”

“If I eat another curried chicken thigh, I’m going to sprout feathers.”

Monique tossed a bunch of flyers on the bed. “I’ve got a boatload of stories for you.”

“I’ve got a few for you too.”

“The best part is that I’ve still got a little money in the bank.”

“This is a surprise?”

“Enough so that—if you were so inclined—you could look through those flyers and see if any of them catch your interest. Between
what I’ve got left and my new frequent-flier miles, you and I can afford to do a trip to Europe next summer before you go
off to school.”

“Oh…we don’t have to do that.”

“Only if you want to.”

Kiera spread the flyers with one finger, cocking her head to read the headings, going still in a way that suggested she wasn’t
really reading at all.

Monique unzipped pockets, dislodging ticket stubs, train schedules, and her cache of costume jewelry while her motherly senses
tingled. “So,” she said, “did anything interesting happen while I was gone?”

“Well, we won two crew meets but lost the one against Irvington.
Again.
” Kiera braced herself on the heels of her hands, stretching her feet out before her. “And I got my mid-term report—all As
except a B in AP World History.”

“What do you know, you
are
human.”

“It’s a high B.” Kiera’s jaw tightened in determination. “I’ll make it up before the end of the quarter.”

“Don’t break a sweat.”

“If it sticks, it’ll be like an oil blot on my transcript. I don’t want to send a transcript with a B on it to NYU.”

Monique paused, noting the mention of New York University less than twenty miles away and not the mention of UCLA, on the
other side of the continent. Maybe her fatigued mind was not quite catching the subtext of the conversation.

“It’s weird but I found out that UCLA doesn’t ask to see a transcript until they let you in,” Kiera said into the moment of
silence. “They just trust what you tell them. But NYU wants an official one, plus mid-year grades.”

“I see.”

“Although I have been rethinking UCLA.”

Monique opted to stay very, very still, even though she’d found the stuffed fat rat she’d bought for Kiera at the catacombs
hiding under her sneakers. “Rethinking?”

“Well, yeah.” Kiera feigned intense interest in the sight of her bobbing legs. “It was real quiet here while you were gone,
Mom.” She slouched back, her head sinking between her shoulders. “In fact, it was sort of lonely.”

Monique was a little surprised that Kiera hadn’t noticed this before. The house had grown so still since Lenny had died. Lenny
had the kind of presence that filled up a place. Monique didn’t like to think how desperately this house was going to need
warmth and life and noise after Kiera left.

Then her thoughts began to drift, once again, down a road she’d never before considered. She shook the thought free. That
idea would have to wait until she returned to work on Monday at the NICU.

Monique tossed the stuffed rat into Kiera’s lap. “I understand lonely, Kiera. But quiet? Didn’t
grand-mère
drive you crazy playing her calypso music while she cooked?”

“She shut it off whenever I came home. And since it’s crew season, I usually didn’t make it home before seven. She was asleep
in front of the TV by eight thirty.” Kiera ran her fingers across the wiry rat whiskers. “You know that I can’t go wrong with
either school, right?”

“Well.” Monique knew she wasn’t ready for this discussion, but she couldn’t avoid it either. “You did make a point of telling
me that UCLA would be the better film school for you.”

“It’s too far away. And I don’t like the idea of you banging around this house all by yourself, drinking wine at the kitchen
table on a Saturday night, wandering into Daddy’s old closet to smell his clothes.”

Monique muffled her own sharp response. Another vice revealed. She’d been doing a pretty dismal job of shoring it up for the
world, it seemed. Then again Monique knew she wasn’t the only female in the house who occasionally stepped into that closet.

“So I’ve been thinking,” Kiera said, squeezing the stuffed rat. “Maybe it’s best that I stick around local for a few more
years rather than haul myself across the country.”

Monique swung a pair of shoes from her fingers and thought of how wonderful it would be to have her little girl coming home
every weekend, sweeping into this house with all the energy she’d inherited from her father. She loved the image of Kiera
laying her books and schedules and plans and ambitions all on the kitchen table as she filled the house up with chatter.

But Judy’s words rang in her ears.
We birth them and feed them and raise them and give them hell, and, when it’s time, we just let them go.

“No, Kiera.”

Monique swallowed hard and lifted the now-empty suitcase to settle it on the floor. She took a seat on the edge of the bed,
close enough to touch her daughter if she’d let her, but far enough away to give the girl the space she might need. “You’re
sweet to consider it. But I’m going to have to say no.”

Kiera’s brow knit. “What do you mean, ‘no’?”

“You can’t make this decision because of me. It’s too important. You should go exactly where you want to go. You should go
where you believe you’ll get the best education. If that school happens to be three thousand miles away or even half a world
away, well, so be it.”

Kiera’s lips parted but no words came out.

“You and me, we’re really lucky.” Monique glanced toward the photo of Lenny on her bedside table. “Your daddy made sure that
you and I had the freedom to make these kinds of choices. There was no better man, Kiera. No better man in the whole wide
world.”

Kiera kept blinking at her, like Becky did sometimes when she emerged out of a great darkness. “So you’re saying,” Kiera stuttered,
“that you don’t mind if I apply to UCLA?”

“Nope. Just be warned. I’ve got a heck of a lot of frequent-flier miles now. If you do decide to go to UCLA, you might find
me at your dorm room door more often than you’d like, kiddo.”

Kiera’s eyes grew round and steady and serious. Confusion rippled across her face, confusion and some other emotion Monique
couldn’t name. “You finished Daddy’s list, didn’t you?”

Monique nodded, as her limbic brain sent her soaring once more off the edge of a bridge into a cavernous gorge.

“Okay.” Kiera nodded sharply. “That’s good.”

“It was good, Kiera,” she said. “It was something that I had to do, more than I even knew when I started.”

“Well maybe now you won’t be mad at me for what I’ve done while you were gone.”

Monique felt a pinch of unease. “You couldn’t have done anything drastic. The UCLA application isn’t due until the end of
November, right?”

“I really didn’t mean for it to go quite so far.”

Monique’s motherly instincts started to tingle all over again.

Kiera said, “I just thought it’d be better if I checked them out before I go away.”

“Check what out?”

“You’ve been alone for so long, I figured you probably forgot everything. About how to dress, how to present yourself, how
to choose sensibly.”

“Choose?” The tingling turned to needles. “Choose what?”

Kiera avoided her eye as she launched herself off the bed and into the position that Monique recognized as her spine-straight,
debate-team pose. “I’m just a little more
in tune
with that world, you know what I’m saying, Mom? I’m in high school. I deal with this every single day. So I’ve got more street
smarts than you.”

“Kiera. Franke. Reed—”

“I used that photo of you from last New Year’s Eve. The one taken at the hospital party, when you let me do your makeup and
you looked so good? And after working on college essays all summer, I figured I’ve got the chops now to really write a kick-ass
profile. And who knows you better than me, huh? Who can tell the world who you
really are
better than your own daughter?”

The horrible realization sank in. “You signed me up on an Internet dating site.”

“I just posted your profile.”

“Oh, God.”

“I didn’t wink at anyone or send an email or do anything else. I left that for you.” Kiera suddenly sidled next to her on
the bed, seized her hand, and then squeezed the fingers tight. “Don’t be mad at me, Mom. I just don’t want to leave here,
and leave you all alone.”

Monique stared in choking disbelief at Kiera’s hopeful face, the encouraging smile and the cheeks that were the same shape
as Lenny’s, but brighter, higher, stronger. She told herself not to be furious—Kiera’s heart was in the right place. She meant
well. Kiera just didn’t know that her mother was developing her own ideas right now, ideas that had a lot to do with a certain
determined, sweetly stubborn, abandoned preemie, hopefully still thriving in the NICU.

“Kiera Franke-Reed,” she said, “I ought to ground you for six straight months.”

Kiera did a little jump, sensing as she always did that she wasn’t going to be scolded. “I
knew
you wouldn’t be mad.”

“Give me a minute to work up some fury.”

“But there’s no reason to be angry.” Kiera bounced on the bed. “You’ve got three winks already!”

J
udy kneeled in the middle of the attic, just in the spot where the sun streamed through the window and heated a square of
dusty floorboards. The unheated attic was chilly, but something about the slanting, autumn sunlight and the warmth of the
floor under her knees reminded her of the little hilltop patio in Neive, Italy.

She rested there, soaking it in, looking up at the tower of boxes that held the outdoor decorations for Halloween. The blow-up
pirate ship. The fog machine. The bags of spiderwebbing and the strings of jack-o’-lantern lights. The plastic skeletal bones
to be half buried and the collection of humorous tombstones (“See, I told you I was sick!”). Usually long before now, she
would have spread the spiderwebbing over the bushes in front of the house, festooned the porch with the lights, and dragged
out the extension cords in anticipation of placing the strobe lights and the equipment for the sound effects.

Instead she just sat here, passing her gaze across the whole sweep of the attic: Over the blow-up pool that hadn’t been dragged
out to the backyard in at least a decade; the six-foot wooden turkey she put on the lawn every year on November first; the
collection of Legos and Polly Pockets and Playmobil castles in labeled boxes in the corner. She eyed the three sets of crutches
between the old fish tank and the sagging zip-up rack of graduation gowns and prom wear. She cast her gaze over the tumble
of computers and monitors and printers that, considering how swiftly technology changed, were now sliding out of vintage and
into pure antiques.

It’d be a nice two-month job putting this room in order, separating the stuff into piles to be junked, donated to charity,
given to friends. It was a job that had to be done. Her wonky knee had finally shrunk back to its normal size, once she’d
given it a good week’s rest. She’d slept well since she’d returned home and was starting to feel human again. Most importantly
she’d come to a conclusion she hadn’t been ready to face before she’d jetted off to Europe. It would be a good thing, to just
let all this stuff go.  

But right now, at eleven a.m. on a Saturday, dressed in her ripped and paint-splattered jeans, she found herself thinking—to
hell with it. She had more important things to do.

She pushed herself up off the boards. She slapped her hands over her knees and watched the dust puff away, scattering in the
air lit by a ray of sunlight. She turned her back on the piles of boxes and ducked her head under the low attic doorway, pulling
it shut with a satisfying click before rounding the landing to the stairs.

She passed that plaster crack in the wall she’d been meaning to fill with mesh and spackle. She passed the boys’ bedroom she’d
been working in before she left for Europe, scraping thirty-five years of paint off the baseboards to restore the original
walnut wood. As she reached the first floor and rounded the dining room, she saw the old laptop she’d left open on the table,
where she’d spent the last few days Googling crazy ideas.

Bob poked his head up above the Sunday paper as she entered the kitchen and made a beeline to the coffeemaker. She grabbed
a cup, filled it, stirred in some half-and-half, and plunked herself in the chair opposite her husband.

She said, “I’m giving all the Halloween decorations to the Lorenzinis.”

With slow and deliberate care Bob lowered the newspaper. He gave her that long, steady look that reminded Judy of her uncle
George, a Maine lobsterman who liked to keep his thoughts to himself while squinting off at the horizon, as if he were gauging
the weather by the swirl of the distant clouds or the direction of the wind.

“It’s not like our kids are around here to enjoy them anymore.” She planted the cup on the table. “Or even help us put them
up.”

He bobbed his head in a brief, noncommittal nod as he sought his own coffee cup around the edge of the paper. “Sounds good,
Jude.”

“Next summer,” she added, “I’ll give Brianna and Brian the blow-up pool.”

“I’ll check it for leaks first.” He took a long, deep drink. “I can’t remember the last time we put that out.”

“I’m also thinking of helping Becky out.”

Bob paused, his coffee cup in midair.

“You know, in the bakery thing,” she explained. “You remember her talking about that on the deck last night. She’s going to
sell blueberry scones and banana muffins through the coffee kiosk at the train station.”

“Oh.”

Judy narrowed her eyes on her husband, the man she loved desperately, almost as trim and fit as when she’d first met him,
though with a lot less of his golden-boy hair. “You have no idea what I’m talking about, do you?”

“Beck makes great blueberry scones.” He feigned scanning the columns of the newspaper. “She eats lots of muffins.”

“Becky hunted down the owner of the kiosk. She tempted him with a tray. He’s going to put them out for sale on a trial basis.”
It was amazing that any man could remember every score to every Giants game for the last twenty years, but he couldn’t seem
to remember what they’d all discussed at a barbecue last night. “You didn’t catch that, but I bet you remember the photo slide
show Kiera put together about our trip to Europe.”

He twisted his lips in that sexy half smile that made Judy’s thighs tighten. “I’m still trying to wrap my brain around the
sight of you on a Harley.”

“Kiera might have overdone it with the Beethoven soundtrack. In any case, Becky may need help baking for a little while until
she figures how much she needs to produce in the morning.”

“Should I ask what has this to do with the Halloween decorations?”

Sometimes Judy felt as if her mind worked at one hundred miles per hour while Bob’s lagged at fifty. “The boxes got me thinking
about holidays. The holidays got me thinking about the seasonal jobs available at the mall. Mrs. McCarthy down the street
used to work at department stores during Christmas to make a few bucks.”

His coffee cup was still frozen in midair.

 “We’re going to need a few more bucks coming into the house, Bob.”

The poor guy’s brain was going to explode. “Jude,” he stuttered, “you know we’ll manage Audrey’s tuition. We always have.”

“I’ve got a few other plans.”

“Like giving the Lorenzini kids the old pool? Helping Becky out at the bakery?” His eyes brightened. “Finishing the paint
job in the boys’ room so I’ll have a home office?”

“Hell no. That’s busywork. A couple of buckets of paint and a few hours of labor ought to take care of that. Maybe I could
pay Kiera to do that over her Christmas break. In any case, my plans have nothing to do with home improvement projects and
everything to do with bringing in a little more disposable income.”

Poor Bob.
He was bracing himself for anything. She knew she’d been a puzzle to him these past months, and even more so since she got
home, sleeping till noon, tossing frozen meals on the table, regaling him with random non-chronological Europe stories, and
completely ignoring the overgrown lawn.

“Did you know,” she said, “that there’s an adult school at the high school? They run two sessions a year. They pay a nice,
tidy sum for skilled professionals to give twelve-week courses.”

He mimicked, “Twelve-week courses.”

“Ich spreche gut Deutsch.”
She gave him a little smile. “
Et aussi, français.
I still speak two foreign languages, pretty damn well too.”

“I’m still trying to interpret your English.”

“Listen carefully, hon. I thought I’d pitch an adult conversation class to the school, in either or maybe even both languages.
There’s still time for me to write up a full proposal for the spring session.”

“Oh.” He exhaled, long and slow. “I thought you were going to tell me you’re taking up ceramics or something.”

“Please. Can you really see me throwing clay, painting watercolors, going to bingo?”

“I’d like to see you doing all three naked.”

She flushed and sputtered and then, after a moment, she gave him a slow smile. That part of their life, well…that was really,
really
nice to return to.

“Ha ha,” she said. “But I’m serious. A class like that wouldn’t take much prep, it’d only be a few nights a week, and it’d
make me a few bucks toward tuition.”

“But Audrey’s tuition—”

“
My
tuition,” she interrupted. “For the community college. Did you know how cheap their per-credit cost is?”

“Wait—you’re going back to school?”

“They have a two-year master’s program.”

“Masters?”

“In education, Bob.” Judy tapped her fingers on the table. “Try to keep up. I’m planning to blow the dust off my bachelor’s
degree in German and French. With the master’s degree in education, and a certain number of hours of classroom time, I could
be certified to teach language classes in about three years.”

“Teach.”

“High school, Bob. Teenagers.” She watched his dear, dear face as she took a long, deep breath that was a little unsteady.
“That is, if I can find a school system willing to hire a teacher over fifty.”

“They’d be damned fools if they didn’t.”

Judy sank into herself, touched by his trust.

“But,” he said, “if I’ve got this straight, then this is a more serious commitment than wrapping presents at the mall.”

“Thank God.”

“A full-time commitment, Judy.”

“You might have noticed I’m driving myself crazy bouncing around this house with no kids to take care of anymore.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“You’re a terrible liar. But you’ve shown admirable restraint.”

“It’s easy when you’re six paces behind.”

“Old man.”

“Not so old yet.” He gave her a wink. “If this is what you really want to do, well, you’d be a damn good teacher, Jude. The
kids in your classroom? They’ll be the luckiest kids in the world.”

Her heart tripped at his words, and she felt a new flush spread through her. She was such a bundle of emotions. She was excited
about the idea of teaching, but also anxious at the huge step she was about to take. She felt a swelling gratitude for Bob,
who didn’t question when she came to him with full-blown plans, and also for Becky and Monie with whom she’d first hashed
out her thoughts.

 “The job will be great,” she said, “and so will the money and the summers off. But I do have an ulterior motive, you know.”

He shook his head as he took a sip of coffee. “Albert Einstein couldn’t figure out how your mind works.”

“With the money I make and no more tuition bills to pay, you and I will finally get a chance to do something guiltless and
wonderful and completely for ourselves.”

“We did that last night.”

“Oh, honey.” She came around the table and wrapped her arms around him. “I’m talking about two long, lazy weeks alone with
you—in Italy.”