From now on, nothing would ever be OK. Beth felt as if she’d lost half of herself.
Mary Kay released her slightly and palmed away tears on her own cheeks. “This sucks, doesn’t it?”
Beth laughed slightly because that was one of Lynne’s favorite phrases. “Sucks big-time.” A pit blew open somewhere inside her, directly under her diaphragm, a bottomless black hole as the truth sank in. Mary Kay must have come directly from Lynne’s house.
“How did you get over here?” she asked, concerned that Mary Kay had been behind the wheel in her state. “Did Drake drive you?”
“He was still talking to the paramedics when I left.” Mary Kay glanced up at the ceiling as if trying to recall. “I don’t know how I got here. I must have driven, I guess, but I don’t remember. All I remember is that I had to see you face-to-face. The two of us. . . we’re all that’s left of our group, our little society.”
“And Carol, don’t forget.” Beth crawled out of Mary Kay’s lap and sat on the floor. “I wish she were here now, with us.”
They sat like that, cross-legged on the floor of Beth’s tiny office, neither of them saying anything. For how long, they had no idea. Beth couldn’t erase the image of Lynne’s last hours, of her taking the morphine and dying on the back porch while she, her supposed best friend, was merely a few feet away, scrubbing the sink or taking out the trash.
“I should have. . .”
“Shh.” Mary Kay shook her head. “There are no should-haves. She did what she wanted to do. It was her choice.”
If Mary Kay hadn’t said that, Beth might never have left that floor, might be there still.
This had been Lynne’s choice.
Even if Beth disagreed with it, even if this choice robbed them of precious weeks or days they might have had together, in the end, all that mattered was that Lynne got her way at last.
It was a ring to grasp.
Beth set her lips firmly, wiped her eyes, and mustered the Yankee resolve that had sustained her grandmother and great-grandmother and generations of women before them. “We need to send her off in style, then, don’t we?”
Mary Kay grinned. “You got that right, tiger. Nothing is too good for our girl.”
Beth gripped the wall and brought herself to a standing position, despite her weak knees. “I want the reception to be at my house. No slapdash Flannery thing or something impersonal that’s catered. I want to cook it all. Everything. With my own two hands.”
“Whatever you say.” Mary Kay got up and plucked several tissues from Beth’s box of Kleenex. “But first, I think we need to call Carol.”
Beth blew her nose, fortified by the task she’d assigned to herself, to throw Lynne the most elaborate home-cooked spread Marshfield had ever seen. It helped to be
doing
something. Something that required sweat and hard work. “We can conference-call her from here and then I’m taking the rest of the day off.”
“Wise idea. Me, too.” Mary Kay removed the crumpled, wet tissues from Beth’s hand and tossed them in the wastebasket. “And then?”
“Then I’ll go to Costco. There’s so much to buy.”
“Like Lynne always said, when the going gets tough, the tough go shopping.”
A reminder that Lynne could always be counted on to lighten the mood. Beth and Mary Kay exchanged smiles, thankful for the small touches that kept her memory alive.
After they put in the conference call to Carol, Mary Kay drove back to find Drake. Beth turned off her computer and slipped on her canvas coat. Grabbing her purse and flicking off the lights, she exited her office to the front desk, where the assistant librarian, George, pretended to be reading.
“I’ll be out for the rest of the day,” she said.
George placed a finger on the page. “Mary Kay told me about Lynne when she got here. I wish there was more I could have done. You know, I’ll really miss her in our book club since she was the only one who didn’t talk nonstop.” They all knew Lynne. The whole library. The whole town.
Beth’s eyes started hurting again. “We’re planning a huge blowout reception at my house after the funeral. I’m going to Costco.”
This needed no further explanation.
“See you Monday. Need anything?”
Beth considered what would be easiest for him. “We could always use an extra case of Coke.”
“Will do.”
The weather had taken a turn for the worse and Beth was glad Lynne hadn’t stuck around for this, the rain and wind batting her car as she headed to Brookfield. It was a road she knew like the back of her hand. Twice a month, she and Lynne would head down to Costco to load up. You had to shop with someone at Costco, otherwise you’d be stuck with huge family packs of beef ribs or mega tubs of seafood salad.
When the boys were small, she and Lynne would turn it into a daylong excursion, hitting the store on Saturdays when meat was cheapest, letting the little guys run around and pick out cereals and snack bars. Meanwhile, they, the two mothers, would lean on their carts and talk, catching up on gossip or working out how to solve some family issue or another.
When Lynne got so sick she could barely keep down a cup of tea, Beth bought their groceries at the local Stop & Shop. Kevin, Kyle, and David were in college, and the days when she used to accumulate milk in multiple gallons were done. Come to think of it, she hadn’t been to Costco in about a year. She had never been without Lynne.
She would never be there with Lynne again. Ever.
Gripping the blue handle of the grocery cart in the cavernous Costco with its steel beams and blaring TVs, this realization left her paralyzed.
I am now alone.
I am with you.
It wasn’t so much that she
heard
Lynne say this as it was that Beth
felt
Lynne say this.
Beth set her jaw and pushed onward. Lynne would not want her to cry, not when a whole host of Flannerys and most of Marshfield would be showing up on her doorstep, famished. She tried to remember the menu she and Lynne had casually discussed, though she couldn’t quite recall what Lynne had wanted, since she’d tuned out whenever Lynne mentioned her own funeral preparations. Beth preferred to believe Lynne would beat this thing and go on forever. But now she was at a loss.
Soup,
she remembered Lynne saying. Make now and freeze for later.
Thank God for the deep freezer the group had chipped in and bought Lynne when the cancer returned. They’d set it up in the garage so well-intentioned neighbors could drop by and fill it with casseroles or garden vegetables without having to knock on her door and bother her when she was trying to rest. There would be plenty of storage.
Beth rolled her cart up and down the aisles and interpreted the sales as divine signs. Lemons were a bargain at ten cents apiece, so she decided to make her famous Lemon Buttermilk Cake. Turnips, carrots, leeks, onions, peppers. All went into making the soup stock. Garlic. Yes! She could make her Roasted Garlic Soup for the vegetarians.
Chocolate. One of the four food groups. Amanda had sent Lynne several bars of high-quality Callebaut Belgian she’d brought back from her junior year in France that Lynne had frozen, unable to eat even a nibble. Beth could make a flourless chocolate tart and then there were the apples on Lynne’s trees. Definitely needed picking. Pie? Sour Cream Apple Coffee Cake? She’d decide later. Already she had enough to keep her busy through the weekend.
At home, she set the oven to 350, pushed back her sleeves, and scrubbed her hands thoroughly before cleaning the chickens and slamming them into pans, grinding pepper and sea salt over each, rubbing dried rosemary into the skin and stuffing oranges into their cavities.
Her heart pounded, sending blood that pulsed in her head, throbbing. She mustn’t stop to reflect on what had happened. She
couldn’t.
Sean backed out of the driveway in his roofer’s truck toward town, so she washed her hands, wiped them on her apron, and dashed into the rain to take his apples. They were Lynne’s apples, anyway. They were for her, Beth thought, her arms aching as she plucked a high one. Cruelly, the branch snapped back, showering her with rainwater that ran into her eyes, stinging, fresh drops mixing with salt tears. For Lynne.
Crossing the soggy yard on her way back, an apple dropped from her apron and rolled into the burn pile, landing on the corner of a book she’d given Lynne last summer,
You, Too, Can Survive Cancer!
, half of it charred, its blue edges curled by heat. She nudged a melted amber plastic pill bottle with her toe, a sickening sensation rising in her throat. No. Not now.
In her kitchen, Beth dried off, put on the teakettle, and got down to business, shaving off the thick red peels of the McIntoshes, coring out their seeds, chopping them into even white bits, mixing butter and sugar, adding flour and cinnamon, and finally the sour cream and apples.
She thought of how Lynne had saved that tree when its leaves curled and the cankers appeared, how she’d whipped out her massive shears and sawed off the offending limbs disfigured by fire blight. Everyone told her it was too late, that the tree needed to be cut down and burned so it wouldn’t infect the neighborhood. But Lynne had faith. She refused to give up and with the same determination she used to fight the disease within her, she nurtured that tree back to health.
And now it was alive and Lynne was dead.
Beth stuck the cake in the oven and got down to cleaning and dicing vegetables for the soup stock, stopping only to wash utensils or her hands, perhaps sip her tea. With the chickens done and cooling, the apple cake on the rack waiting for its crumb topping, she whacked forty cloves of garlic so they popped apart, drizzled them with olive oil, and roasted them for an hour, the first step for Roasted Garlic Soup.
With an expert eye, she measured warm water and sugar into one of her grandmother’s ceramic bowls and added dry yeast that grew and bubbled. From death to life, she thought, amazed, as always, by the simple miracle of combining yeast, water, and flour to form bread. She slowly added the flour a cupful at a time, stirring. Finally, it became so thick she had to dump it onto the wooden board. She sank her fingers into the flat dough, massaging it, pounding until it turned spongy and sprang back.
From death to life.
But she couldn’t bring Lynne back from the dead. There’d be no Lazarus trick for her. Beth kept on turning and folding, pushing the dough. Turn, fold, push, until her arms, already sore from picking apples, cramped in agony.
Turn, fold, push
. Tears spilled onto the dough’s shiny, smooth surface. She didn’t even bother to wipe them away. There was no point.
Flannery kin arrived next door in droves, gathering on Lynne’s back porch and smoking in the rain. Lynne couldn’t stand the smell of smoke, but that wasn’t Beth’s business now. It was Sean’s house. Sean and the boys’. She would have to get used to that.
Marc came home later that night to find only the kitchen lights on. He put down his computer case and surveyed the scene: Beth crumbling brown sugar over the coffee cake, the stew pot with the chicken carcasses and vegetables bubbling on the stove, steaming up the windows, the seductive aroma of garlic in the oven, dishes everywhere piled on counters, on the sink. Beth wiped off her hands and came over to kiss him.
“For Lynne,” was all she said.
“I know.” He saw her pain in the heap of apple peels, in the scattered garlic cloves. “I’ll order us a pizza,” he said. “Unless you want to. . .” No. There was no point in asking if she’d like to go out.
“Can’t stop,” she said, wrapping the apple cake in foil and sticking it in a plastic bag. “Gotta go over to Lynne’s and put this in the freezer.”
Their house hummed with baking and cooking, day and night leading up to the funeral. One early morning, around two a.m., Marc came downstairs to find Beth furiously zesting lemons, mounds of bright yellow shavings in a bowl. He was about to beg her to come back to bed, but she was so intent on whipping buttermilk into the batter that he reconsidered and made them a pot of coffee. The two of them chatted in the predawn hours about nothing and everything, about Lynne and about their son, David, about the book Marc was reading and where they would go if they could, at that moment, drop everything and just leave.
Italy, they decided, the classic, romantic Amalfi coast. Dramatic cliffs overlooking deep blue waters. Mount Vesuvius looming in the distance. They could travel by motorcycle, Beth on the back, her arms around Marc, hugging tightly as they wound through medieval villages by day and indulging in seafood, wine, and glorious sunsets by night when lights twinkled from houses set into the rocky hills.
Travel had always been something they’d fantasized about rather than actually done, going all the way back to their initial encounter in the travel section of Broadside Books in Northampton, Massachusetts, where they literally bumped into each other and then spent the rest of the evening talking until the store closed. Marc, a senior at Amherst, was researching the coast of Portugal, where he planned to hike part of his summer after graduating. Beth, a senior at Smith, was putting off her paper on German Expressionism by lingering over a picture book on the South of France and thinking how much she’d like to be drinking a Bordeaux in Provence rather than interpreting the use of bad lighting in
Nosferatu
.
They were an unlikely couple. Marc was adventurous, confident, a cosmopolitan New Yorker accustomed to hundred-dollar haircuts and late-night bar hopping, while Beth was bookish and quiet, a country girl from Connecticut who was happiest alone in her room on her bed, a novel propped against her knees, a cup of tea and plate of cookies nearby.
Before he met Beth, Marc intended to explore the far reaches of Asia and India while writing sweeping international novels in the vein of Somerset Maugham. Marriage and kids were not in the cards. Even a serious girlfriend was a luxury he couldn’t afford.
To his surprise, he fell so hard for Beth’s sweet nature and her nurturing spirit that the summer he was supposed to hike the coast of Portugal he spent making love to her in his Northampton apartment. That fall, they eloped and the spring afterward moved to her hometown of Marshfield because Beth was pregnant and they were flat broke.