Friendship Makes the Heart Grow Fonder (3 page)

“—made me a cake like Cinderella’s castle in Disney World.” Kiera tapped her knife against the edge of the plate.

“Right. But Becky has never actually
seen
any of these castles. Not a single one. And I thought, wouldn’t it be a wonderful thing to bring Becky to Europe? Show her
the Tower of London or Chambord or Neuschwanstein?”

Monique left out the obvious addendum:
before Becky goes completely blind.

Kiera hunkered a fraction farther over the table. “So is this it? You want to take Mrs. Lorenzini to Europe?”

“I want to take her,” Monique said, as she stretched her hand across the table, “and I want to take
you
.”

Kiera stilled. Her hand curled up underneath Monique’s palm. Monique tried to read the shifting currents of Kiera’s expression,
sensing storm clouds of danger ahead but not quite sure of their source.

Kiera slipped her hand out from hers. “Mom, it’s my senior year.”

“I know it won’t be easy to schedule.”

“I’ve got applications due at the end of November, and more in January, and semester grades are going out to those schools.“

“I’ve already looked at our calendar. We can arrange it over the Jewish holidays, the parent/teacher conferences, and stretch
it into Columbus Day. You’d miss a total of six full days and one half-day—”

“To go tripping across Europe with you and Mrs. Lorenzini, fulfilling your and Dad’s silly bucket list?” Kiera pushed away
from the table so hard the chair screeched against the floor. “Wow, Mom, what a teenage dream.”

Monique narrowed her eyes. Her senses were tingling. “It’s Europe, Kiera. This is a wonderful opportunity. You might find
another idea for a college essay.”

“My college essay already rocks. And I told you, I’m coaching the freshman crew team. We’re just starting the season.”

“Then let’s just work it out for when the timing is better.” Monique suppressed a spurt of worry. Becky’s disease was degenerative,
and there was no knowing the rate at which her tunnel of vision might tighten. “Maybe during the April vacation—”

“My college acceptances will just be in. I’ll have to visit schools to make a final decision.”

Monique squashed the urge to ask about next summer. Next summer Kiera would be working in the city again, interning with the
producer she’d met through one of the neighborhood block parties. Monique mused that there once was a time when she and Kiera
planned everything together, a time just after Lenny died when they spent a whole month in Trinidad, seeking solace in the
sun and the easy living, braiding each other’s hair.

Now her daughter had plans of her own, appointments and schedules.

“Let’s do it right after you graduate then,” Monique conceded. “Before that producer sucks up your summer.”

“Mom, you just don’t get it. I’m
not going
.” Kiera pushed up from the chair. She seized her plate and strode to the counter, where she pulled open the cabinet for the
garbage and started violently scraping the remains. “Why do you always have to
finish
things, Mom? Why can’t you just leave something undone?”

Monique went very still. The question made no sense. She and Kiera were most alike in this particular way: Neither one of
them ever left anything undone.

“This has nothing to do with Mrs. Lorenzini going blind.” Kiera tossed the plate on the counter next to the sink. “That’s
an
excuse
. You just want to do that bucket list.”

Her daughter’s feelings billowed over her, and Monique struggled to parse them out—anger and frustration and, most upsetting,
a deep sense of confusion and hurt. None of this made sense. She and Kiera had discussed Lenny’s list no more than two or
three times since his death, and then only in passing. Monique thought she’d been clear: she’d always intended to do the list,
someday. It was Becky’s diagnosis that drew her, for the third time in one week, to seriously consider the idea. Becky
deserved
to go away.

So she looked at her tight-jawed daughter and answered the only way she could. “Kiera, you know I promised your father I would
do it someday.”

Kiera’s eyes narrowed with incredulity. “And what’s going to happen when you’re all done with that list? Are you going to
set up an account on Match.com? Start bar-hopping with that crazy divorced nurse in your ward? Bring home skeevy younger men
to meet your grown daughter?”

Monique blinked. She didn’t just hear those words come out of her daughter’s mouth. It was…absurd. She would laugh at the
idea of dating, if she could muster air into her lungs. The sad, sorry truth was that no matter how many people told Monique
she should move on, get herself out there, start dating again—Monique knew she could never, ever bring any other man into
this home.

“Kiera.” Monique took a deep breath, striving for equilibrium. “Clearly, you’re upset—”

“Yeah, I’m upset.” Kiera pushed away from the counter. “It must be nice, Mom. I mean, it really must be nice. You know, to
just check things off a list, and then completely forget about Daddy.”

“
S
o Kiera threw that comment like a punch and then—like a true diva—made a dramatic, sweeping exit.”

Judy shook her head in sympathy as Monique finished relating what had happened last night. Judy’s two oversized and hyper-energized
dogs propelled her along the park path, past women jogging with strollers, kids biking with their backpacks lurching, and
seniors perched comfortably on benches. “Boy,” she said, “that daughter of yours sure chose her career well.”

“She wouldn’t talk to me all night.” Monique kept pace along the path, swinging two-pound weights in her hands. “She wouldn’t
even open her bedroom door. She just stayed inside, blasting her emo rock.”

Judy fixed her gaze on the dappled path. In her experience, teenagers during this difficult year before college shifted their
behavior like quicksilver, from cruel mockery to icy distance. It was an evolutionary impulse—at least that’s what she’d told
herself while she’d been suffering through the same fluxing emotional banishment, five times over. It was the only way teenagers
could handle the fact that they’d soon be leaving home.

But Judy sensed Monique was too distressed to absorb the truth. “C’mon, Monie, you must have figured that your proposal was
going to take her by surprise.”

“I thought she’d be thrilled. It’s a trip to
Europe
, not a root canal.”

“It has something to do with her father, which means it’s a minefield.”

“And it blew up in my face. Can you believe what she said to me?” Monique’s ferocious striding threatened to outpace Judy’s
chocolate lab and her lunging golden retriever. “Kiera really seems to think once I’m done with Lenny’s list, I’ll be dressed
in leopard skin leggings and strutting on the singles circuit.”

“You
do
own a pair of leopard skin leggings.”

“Halloween costume.” Monique shook her head in dismay. “You have a memory like an elephant.”

“You and Lenny sporting the Tarzan-Jane thing seven years ago at the neighborhood Halloween party? I’ll be taking that image
to my grave.”

“I haven’t even looked sideways at a guy since Lenny died. Honestly, if I weren’t still having my period, I’d wonder if I
had any hormones at all. As far as I’m concerned Lenny’s still
here
.”

Monique tapped her chest with the ball end of one of her weights. Judy imagined she could hear a hollow, unhealthy thump.

“Maybe Kiera will come around.” And maybe Kiera would, Judy told herself, when
Monique
finally came around. “Maybe she just needs a little time to think about it.”

“Time.” Monique let out a frustrated sigh. “The one thing Becky doesn’t have. She’ll be losing more of her vision every year.”

Judy’s insides did a sliding drop like they did whenever she imagined Becky rendered, by slow and unpredictable degrees, into
utter darkness. The dogs, sensing weakness, plunged onto the grass in pursuit of a squirrel. She put the whole force of her
shoulders into restraining them, and the whole force of her mind not to think how this villain of a disease would steal from
Becky the sight of her own children’s faces.

She’d Googled the disease after Becky’s bad news, but her mind just couldn’t grasp the kind of scientific and medical jargon
that, in her early academic life, sent her fleeing to the humanities. So she’d focused most of her Internet searches on what
she really wanted to know: the possibility of a cure. The only one she could find lay in retinal implants, a speculative and
untested therapy that might not be viable for decades.

Judy often found herself these past weeks trembling in the living room in front of the bookshelf, staring at the photographic
history of her own scattered brood.

“Here’s the kicker, Judy.” Monique’s feet scuffed across a patch of gravely path. “I was getting a little excited about it,
you know? Before I spoke to Kiera I’d been mapping out a couple of possible routes, thinking about the castles Becky might
want to see. Trying to squeeze in all those things on Lenny’s list.” Monique tipped her head back, closing her eyes for a
moment under the light of the sun. “And I’d so really,
really
wanted to do this for Becky.”

Judy understood. The whole neighborhood was trying to find a way to help the Lorenzinis. Everyone was offering rides to drive
Brianna and Brian to their various activities, now that Becky had determined that it was better that she just didn’t drive
at all. She herself had been making some preliminary phone calls to determine how much it would cost to buy Becky a seeing-eye
dog when the time came.

But Judy knew from personal experience that there probably wasn’t a more powerful or effective or immediate treatment for
an emotionally traumatized Becky than a glorious two-week trip to Europe.

“In fact,” Monique added, “I was going to ask Becky today. This very morning.” She swiped her sweat-beaded forehead with the
back of her sleeve. “But after that spat with Kiera, I guess that’s done. I may as well just shove the whole idea of doing
that bucket list out of my mind.”

Judy shook her head sharply. “Bad idea.”

“Yeah, maybe it was a bad idea. Maybe Kiera was right to refuse. It’s a difficult year, with the applications and essays—”

“No, I mean it’s a bad idea to axe the trip.” Judy pivoted on one foot as they rounded the playground end of the park, the
dogs leaping and straining at the sight of the kids climbing the jungle gym. “Next year, Monie, there’ll just be another excuse.”

Monique’s pace slacked. “Excuse me?”

Judy surrendered to the tug of the dogs, wishing they’d drag her so quickly away that she’d save herself from her own foolishness.
She eyed the canopy of leaves that turned the path into an emerald green tunnel and told herself she should keep her mouth
shut. But the words were expanding against her sternum, an unrelenting pressure. Over the past few months, it was becoming
more and more difficult for her to resist the urge to just say exactly what was on her mind.

Like when people came up to her and asked how she was enjoying her “new freedom,” now that her last child had flown the nest.
Or opined on how they couldn’t wait until their teenage son took his smelly socks and his growling, wolfman attitude off somewhere
far, far away. Or worse, gazed deeply into her eyes and asked her how she was holding up.

Well, she wasn’t holding up. She was in swirling little pieces. She wasn’t talking about her wonky knee just starting to twinge,
or the excess of gray that was threading through her hair, or the fact that she’d missed another period. She was falling to
pieces
inside
. And one of the pieces that was falling away right now was the pleasant social nicety that insisted she hold her tongue.

“The bucket list, Monie.” The words tumbled out of her. “You’re scared to death of it.”

Monie’s protest was a stutter of unformed syllables.

“The summer after Lenny died, when Kiera was still in that malleable Junior Girl Scout age, you said you just couldn’t bring
yourself to do that list.”

“I was exhausted. Six months of treatments, two months of at-home hospice—”

“One summer later,” she continued, throwing all caution to the wind, “I suggested that filling Lenny’s bucket list might be
a fabulous way to spend what was probably your last
free
summer with Kiera. Before Facebook and boys and the whole generational social scene sucked that girl into the inevitable teenage
void.”

“I’d just started at the neonatal ICU.” Monique gesticulated with a two-pound weight. “That’s the summer when I hadn’t accumulated
enough hours to justify taking off for two or three weeks of vacation.”

“You had enough hours last summer.”

A puff of air expelled violently. “Kiera was working for that producer.”

“Kiera will be working next year too. And probably every summer through college, and every year through the rest of her life.”

Monique opened her mouth, closed it, and opened it again, but no sound emerged.

“Monie, hanging around in Munich sounds like a great time for you and Lenny, but think about this. Why would you want a teenager
around? What makes you think Lenny wrote that list for Kiera anyway?”

Monique stopped dead in her tracks. She blinked as if she had something in her eye, and then squeezed her eyes shut altogether.
Her reaction told Judy what she’d always suspected. Lenny hadn’t said anything about bringing Kiera along.

Judy stumbled forward with the dogs and then pulled mightily on the leash, digging the heels of her walking sneakers into
the gravel to try to stop their forward motion. She was halfway to the corner of the park before the mutts finally relented,
panting and sniffing around the large granite stone that marked the park entrance.

Monie followed more slowly, scraping the path before her. “Tell me this,” Monie said, a ribbon of annoyance in her voice,
“how can I
not
bring my daughter on the last trip her father and I ever planned?”

Judy noticed with a twinge of guilt the tightness of Monie’s long, slender neck. “Your daughter doesn’t want to go.”

“She’s not thinking straight.”

“She’s behaving just like any other teenage girl facing the prospect of going to college. She’s pulling away from you.”

Judy saw the white line forming around Monie’s lips, and a further tightening of the cords of her throat.

“She’s supposed to pull away from you.” Judy stepped onto the side of the path as two joggers approached from beyond Monique,
sweaty and gripping iPods and not really paying attention. “It’s what she’s hard-wired to do. That’s why she hit you with
UCLA last night. She’s warning you she’s growing up. Going away.”

“Believe me,” Monie said darkly, “I know she’s going away.”

“And by hitting her with that bucket list, she knows
you’re
going away. And not just to Europe. She’s thinking ‘If Mom is doing that bucket list, then Mom is moving on.’”

“I hate that expression.”

Monie dropped the weights on the ground and then sank into a crouch, dragging her fingers through her braids. The dogs rumbled
over and sniffed at her, nudging their noses against her forearm to try to get a lick upon her face. Judy reeled up the leashes
and then finally pulled on the collars until the dogs sat back, heads cocked, tongues lolling, wondering when the crouching
Monie was going to uncover her face and give them the vigorous ear-rubs they deserved.

Monie opened one palm and peeked up at her. “I hate you, you know.”

A muscle spasmed in Judy’s chest, a tightening pull of regret. “I suppose I could have been more diplomatic.”

“You’re right.”

“There’s something about turning fifty that severed the link between my tongue and discretion.”

“No, I mean you’re right about Kiera.” Monique planted her hands on her knees and pushed herself up to her full height. “Damn
it.”

“Honey, I’m five teenagers ahead of you. Wisdom or insanity, that’s the choice.” Judy glanced at her watch and then toward
the street, searching among the strolling moms, skateboarders, and joggers. “Becky’s late. She should have been here by now.”

Monique dusted off the seat of her yoga pants, and then started shaking her legs to loosen them up after their brisk walk.
“She’s probably shampooing another rug.”

“Are you going to ask her?”

Weary, pleading brown eyes looked up at her. “I don’t know, Judy.”

“Personally, I think you should.”

“It’s complicated.”

“I can look after Kiera while you’re gone.”

“That’s not it. My mother would love to move in for the two weeks.” Monique bent over to retrieve her hand weights, rolling
them over in her palms. “Kiera would love the home cooking. My mother would spoil her rotten as usual. The thing is, Kiera
is not my only worry.”

Judy shifted her attention to the dogs who were now doing their best to water every sapling in the area, thinking with irritated
resignation that Monique was determined to find an excuse—any excuse—to put off what the woman most feared.

“It’s the logistics,” Monique said. “They have me in knots.”

With a grunt Judy backhanded that lame excuse. Before working the NICU Monique had been an emergency room nurse, juggling
patients, handling crises, coordinating care, as efficient and quick-on-her-feet as anyone Judy had ever known. “This from
you, the woman who raised enough money to fund the entire crew team during school budget cuts? The woman who has juggled a
full-time job and an ultra-needy brainiac like Kiera all by herself? The woman who—”

“I’ve never been to Europe.” Monique appeared to be counting the stitches in the pleather ends of the weights. “The only trips
out of the country I’ve ever taken have been to family in Trinidad.”

Judy rolled her eyes. Judy had traveled through Europe as a twenty-two-year-old with nothing but a rucksack, a train pass,
and ignorant bliss.

“The truth is,” Monique said, “I’ve never had to do anything but check that my passport was up to date, make a reservation,
and let family know I was coming. I’ve been online trying to work things out with hotels and airline tickets but it’s so complicated.
So many languages.”

“This is the twenty-first century, babe. When I was living in Strasbourg, I’d be practicing French or nailing down the verbs
with a native German, and everyone I spoke to would immediately switch to English.” A memory hit her with a startling vividness
of the painted, half-timbered, steep-roofed buildings of the old city, with their “sitting dog” windows and jutting dormers.
“It was months before I realized that it wasn’t that they couldn’t bear an American butchering their language—they just wanted
to practice English.”

“Well, there’s also the issue that this wouldn’t be a chartered bus tour.” Monique rolled kinks out of her shoulders. “It’d
be hectic and draining in an
If-It’s-Tuesday-This-Must-Be-Belgium
kind of way. To save time, I considered sleeping on an overnight train.”

Air hitched in Judy’s throat as she remembered the time she’d taken an overnight train from Paris to Amsterdam. She’d slept
on the top bunk, rocked in the berth, and dozed to the sound of rattling wheels. The scent of a clove cigarette had drifted
up from the lower bunk. Whenever they passed through little towns, the train had sounded its long, mournful whistle.