As Close as Sisters (18 page)

“I think about Matt. What was going on with you two because you were texting back and forth. She was just joking around.”

Janine and Aurora were next in line. I reached across the table. “You don’t have to tell them about your stripping days.”

She made a face. “They know about the
stripping
. Aurora always thought it was funny. She said I was probably bad at it, which I was
not
.” Lilly had gone to the University of Miami for two years, years we didn’t see much of her.

“What I mean is that you don’t have to tell them
the rest
.”

“I do. I was a prostitute, for God’s sake.”

I scowled. “You were not.”

“I took money for
sex,
” Lilly whispered, leaning closer.

I rolled my eyes. “We already talked about this. Sweetie, we’ve all exchanged things for sex. If not money, then favors, or a pretty piece of jewelry, or just some peace and quiet so we could go back to reading a book.” I took a breath. “That is old news. Old news that you don’t have to tell Aurora or Janine or Matt about.”

Lilly squeezed her eyes closed. “What you’re saying makes sense. I know it makes perfectly logical sense.” She opened her eyes. “It’s what I would tell you.”

I smiled, hoping Lilly knew how much I loved her.

“You’re right.” She regarded me from across the table. “You’re right, and I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to throw a snit. I just—I’m worried about Matt. What if that hussy with the fake boobies and the really white teeth has been into our office? I knew I should have called her company and told them to send us a different rep. I knew it!”

I would have laughed at Lilly using the word
boobies,
except that I wasn’t sure I had enough breath, and she was too upset to be laughing at her. “Tell me what’s going on. How is Matt being weird?”

She was halfway through her story about playing phone tag with Matt when Aurora and Janine returned with paper cups of iced water for everyone and frozen yogurt for them, watermelon sorbet for me. Aurora had gotten a cone of soft-serve with rainbow sprinkles on it. Janine had a scoop of coffee yogurt with chocolate chips on top, and they’d brought Lilly her Miss Lulu, a fruity version of a hot chocolate sundae.

“Eat some. You’ll feel better,” Aurora said, putting the big cup of frozen yogurt with its assorted gooey fruit chunks and syrups in front of her. She handed her a long-handled plastic spoon. “Then you have to tell us what the big secret is.”

I cut my eyes at Aurora. I was feeling better now that I had caught my breath. The sorbet actually looked good. “She’s worried about Matt. He’s been preoccupied all week. Not returning her phone calls—”

“He does eventually,” Lilly interrupted, “but he’s distracted. He’s not really listening to me. He just says what he thinks I want to hear. Lots of mmm-hmms.”

“Maybe he’s just having a bad week at work.” Janine took one of the chairs between Lilly and me. “If I’m having a bad week at work, Chris can forget it. I can barely hold up my half of a conversation. I can’t,” she admitted. “It’s not that Chris isn’t important, it’s just that . . . work is everything. It’s how I judge myself, you know?”

Aurora had taken the chair on the other side of me, between Lilly and me. We all scooted up to the cute, round, white wrought iron table. “That’s a guy thing,” Aurora said. “And a Janine thing,” she quickly added.

“Some woman has been flirting with Matt when she comes into the office,” I explained so Lilly could get another bite of her pineapple yogurt with blueberry topping. “Matt said he hadn’t even noticed her when Lilly brought up the subject, but Lilly knows the woman’s got her eye on him.”

“So was she there this week?” Aurora licked sprinkles off her ice-cream cone.

“I don’t know. She wasn’t supposed to be, but . . .” Lilly pushed the spoon into her mouth. “Matt says there’s nothing wrong, that he’s just preoccupied. He had a heavy patient schedule all week. The bookkeeper messed something up on our unemployment taxes, and I guess his mother has been calling about coming to stay with us after the baby is born.”

“His mother wants to
stay
with you?” Janine started to pluck napkins from the little aluminum dispenser on the table next to us and pass them out. “I didn’t realize you and his mom had that kind of relationship.” She made a face. “I didn’t think Matt and his mom had that kind of relationship. Isn’t she a professional golfer or something? I thought she lived in Arizona.”

“Not a professional golfer. She’s on some kind of national senior citizen ladies’ team,” Lilly explained. She took another bite of her sundae. “Matt’s overreacting. She’s just trying to be nice. You know. Since my mother’s dead. She thought I would want her to come.”

“You don’t though, right?” Janine gave Lilly a napkin and touched her own chin.

Lilly quickly wiped her mouth. “No, I don’t want her there. Of course I want her to come see the baby. But not right after we have her. I want some time for Matt and the baby and me to adjust. But I don’t see why Matt can’t just tell her that.”

“Wait a minute. Did I miss something?” Aurora asked, reaching for the napkin Janine had put in front of her. “Are you having a girl? How did I not know that? No one ever tells me anything.”

“We tell you things all the time.” Janine. “You don’t listen, Aurora.”

“I’m not having a girl,” Lilly explained. “Well, obviously I might be.” She gave a little laugh. “I just call it
she
.” She stroked her belly with her free hand. “Because it’s easier than he/she. Him/her. But we don’t know it’s a she for sure.”

“Ah.” Aurora nodded. “So back to Matt. You think he’s hiding something?” She’d worn her hair down rather than in a ponytail, and it shimmered over her shoulders and down her back. “But you don’t know what?”

Lilly dropped her spoon into her polka-dot sundae cup. “No . . . I don’t know. He just seems . . .” She exhaled and dabbed at the corners of her mouth with her napkin.

“Could he really just be preoccupied with having to tell his mother to get lost and having to pay the government a big penalty because someone screwed up his payroll?” I asked. “Which is what he told you?”

“I don’t know.” Lilly sat back in her wrought iron chair. “Maybe.”

“Boys and their mothers,” Janine commiserated.

“Not just boys. My sister is like that,” I said, taking a tiny bite of the sorbet and letting it melt on my tongue. “She hates to tell my mother no, no matter how crazy my mother’s ideas are.”

“And the nonpayment and the penalty is a big deal,” Lilly agreed. “It’s something Matt really would get upset about. And he didn’t even want to tell me about it, to begin with. He didn’t want to worry me.” She stared into her cup of frozen yogurt that was beginning to melt. “Maybe you’re right. Maybe I’m making something out of nothing.”

“Which brings us to the next topic, or rather back to the previous one.” Aurora took a bite of her cone. “What wasn’t McKenzie supposed to tell us? That she
didn’t
tell us, but now you have to, because you told on yourself.”

I licked sorbet off my spoon. “Let it go.”

Janine narrowed her gaze. “Big life-changing secret or just some little thing you should have told us fifteen years ago and now you’ve blown it up to be something big in your head?” she asked Lilly.

“Big thing,” Lilly said.

“Little,” I said at exactly the same time.

Aurora and Janine looked at me and then at Lilly.

“You wanna table it?” Aurora asked, taking me totally by surprise.

“Can I?” Lilly asked, almost in a whisper. “Aurora, that’s so nice of you.”

Aurora shrugged. “Not really. My guess is that it probably isn’t as big a deal as you think.” She took another bite of her ice-cream cone. “So you think on that.” She turned to me. “And in the meantime, tell us how pizza was at Grottos with your girls. They ask you all the gruesome details of Buddy’s demise? This guy I once knew wanted to do some kind of crazy calculation with blood volume from the crime photos. Needless to say”—she smiled her “gorgeous blonde” smile—“I didn’t go out with him again.”

22

Janine

M
onday morning I woke up nervous as hell. I wished I were anywhere but here at the beach house. Waiting. Having everyone watching me, then pretending they aren’t when I look at them.

I’d told them all the night before that I didn’t want to be grilled about the visit today. I’d promised not to provide details (beyond the fact that it was not my mother coming), so I wouldn’t be providing details. Lilly wanted to make some sort of celebratory dinner involving boneless chicken breasts, artichokes, and brie; I warned her not to. I was pretty sure our “guest,” as Lilly kept saying, wouldn’t be staying for dinner and aperitifs in the conservatory.

But Lilly wouldn’t listen to me. She went on a tear, cleaning the house. I told her it wasn’t necessary. She did it anyway. There had been no stopping Lilly and her nesting
before
she became pregnant. Now . . . I sure wasn’t going to take her on.

So I watched for a while as she buzzed around the house vacuuming and dusting. I shot the breeze with McKenzie on the front deck. Aurora finally graced us with her presence after sleeping in until ten thirty, and she and I got into a serious discussion, bordering on an argument, as to what was the best cheap beer. She insisted it was Lone Star. My vote was for PBR. Pabst Blue Ribbon.

Starting to feel nervous about the lightning that was about to strike, I tried to keep myself busy. I took out the recycling. I fixed the float in the toilet tank downstairs, which Aurora insisted was Lilly’s fault because she was using it so much. McKenzie recorded Lilly pulling her maternity shorts down to show us a cute butt cheek and telling Aurora to kiss it. Then McKenzie replayed it for us three times, and we all, including Lilly, laughed so hard that Lilly had to run to the bathroom again.

I was so desperate to keep busy, to keep from being nervous, that I got out the old electric lawn mower and mowed our postage-stamp-sized back lawn. Mr. Greene usually took care of it. He had a riding mower to mow
his
postage stamp. I mowed ours, and then his, just because with the mower running, I couldn’t hear Lilly, Aurora, and McKenzie talking about my love life
as if I weren’t even there
.

They were scheming. Conjecturing. Even Aurora, which surprised me because she rarely fell into gossipy-female mode the way McKenzie and Lilly could. Someone brought up marriage, and Lilly took that and ran with it; I was pretty sure I heard her planning a reception in the Hotel du Pont’s Gold Ballroom.

That was when I decided to take Fritz for a run in Cape Henlopen State Park. I had time before our
guest
arrived. Fritz and I went to the park all the time, year-round. It’s a good place for both of us to blow off steam. He’s required to be on a leash, but when we got on the trail in the pines, if the place wasn’t busy, I let him run off leash.

I ran his legs off and mine.

It felt good to push myself. To clear my mind of a tangle of anxieties. About a year ago, I figured out that I didn’t need Zoloft if I ran fifteen miles a week. I’m not sure if it’s the physical exercise or the opportunity to be alone with my thoughts that calms me. I don’t care. Running makes me feel good. Zoloft doesn’t.

After a mile and a half, I slowed my pace and began to systematically tackle my
problems of the day
. Right away, I decided I wasn’t going to think about what was going to happen this afternoon. It didn’t make sense to worry about all the ways the shit might hit the fan. I’d just wait to see what happened and then stress over it.

McKenzie was, of course, right on the top of my list of things I
needed
to worry about. I’d miscalculated with Mack. I’d had ideas, before we all came to Albany Beach, ideas about how this last time together was going to go. I thought that if we had this time together to prepare ourselves, prepare
myself
for her death, I’d be okay. I had it all wrong. I’d miscalculated, misconstrued, misjudged.

After a week with McKenzie, I felt as if it was going to be
harder
to say good-bye, not easier. Somehow, I’d gotten the idea in my head that if we could all be together, if we could talk about the shit we needed to talk about, that I’d be able to distance myself a little from McKenzie. Maybe
distance
wasn’t the right word. I didn’t want to
distance
myself so much as
insulate
myself. I didn’t
want
to separate myself from her physically or emotionally, but I had to know I could let go, right? I had to know that I could
literally
survive without her.

This morning, watching McKenzie record Aurora plucking her eyebrows on the front porch, I felt like my heart would just shrivel and die. Or maybe explode. It actually physically hurts to watch Mack. People always talk about heart
break,
but because I’d been to Afghanistan, I tend to see life as something that ends with an explosion and the flying apart of body pieces, rather than just a splitting in two.

There was no way I was going to be able to live after McKenzie died. Maybe I’d explode right there at the funeral. The idea, in a freakish way, kind of intrigued me. How would my mother feel then? Would she be relieved I was dead? No longer around to remind her of how she failed her daughter in the greatest way a mother could fail her child? Or would she mourn the loss? Would
her
heart be at risk of shattering into a million raw pieces?

Fritz and I circled a copse of pine trees. There were no rocks, but the area reminded me of northern Afghanistan. The memories flood back every time I run this route. Americans think about Afghanistan as being a big desert, and part of it is. But up north, it’s mountainous, rocky, and covered in evergreens and undergrowth.

Breathing hard, I pushed for the next mile marker on the trail. Fritz stayed ahead of me. Encouraging me, staying with me, even when his natural instinct was to run ahead.

As I pumped my arms and legs, I moved on to door/crisis number two: the lawsuit against me. For weeks, I’d been going over the whole thing in my mind, wondering if there was some way that I could have produced a different outcome. When I caught the public nuisance on the beach, I hadn’t been adequately forewarned by dispatch. To be fair, a teenage lifeguard had called it in. Dispatch didn’t have enough information. How could the lifeguard have predicted when he called 911 how quickly the incident would escalate?

And he wasn’t trained in crowd control, but I was. Why hadn’t
I
seen the signs the minute I came over the dunes?

The thing was, I
had
. I called for backup
before
my newbie partner and I had walked down to the water to look into the call. In my first interview, after the incident, I’d been asked by my lieutenant why my partner and I didn’t wait for backup before going down on the beach. I couldn’t have done that because the skinny kid-lifeguard was down there trying keep the incident from escalating. I had a duty to that kid. Before my duty to my partner and me.

The alarm on my cell in my pocket went off, startling me. I turned it off and made a loop around a Frisbee golf goal. “Back to the car,” I told Fritz. I was sucking wind.

The subject of Chris was next on my agenda.

Was I in love? Was that even possible, less than a year after Betsy and I broke up the last and final time? Was it rebound love or not love at all? Did I want to be in a relationship so badly that I was willing to fantasize that there was more to Chris and me than just me being scared and lonely? Had McKenzie’s devastating diagnosis played a part in my moving so fast in this new relationship with Chris?

I hadn’t come to any conclusions by the time Fritz and I made it back to the Jeep. I gave him some water in the bowl we carried in the car and finished off the liter bottle while I walked in circles around my vehicle to cool down. Then I checked the time. I had to get my ass back to the house or I was going to miss all the action. Which was tempting.

Approaching Route 1 in the Jeep ten minutes later, I seriously considered turning right instead left. Going north instead of south to Albany Beach. I wondered what it would be like to pull an Aurora and just take off. As I sat at the traffic light, leaving Lewes, I wondered where I would go if I ran away from home. Mexico? I’d been there once with an old girlfriend and had liked it. Or would I go farther south? South America appealed to me. The slower pace of life and all. I’d once read a John Grisham book where a lawyer had changed his identity and gone to Brazil. Fritz and I could go to Brazil.

I looked at the German shepherd in the rearview mirror. He was perched on the rear seat, looking back at me.

“How do you feel about Brazil?” I asked him.

Fritz whined. I cussed under my breath and headed south.