One Good Friend Deserves Another (15 page)

Evicted. Unemployed.
She scraped her fingers against her scalp. She thought she’d been doing the right thing. She thought she’d been removing one of the pressures that threatened to tip him over the edge. She thought that after she’d left him he would pull back, maybe realize how he was ruining his life, maybe ask for help to get better. And now she sat in a hospital waiting room, realizing that her decision to leave Cole may have been the very thing that sent him reeling.

“Dhara?” Kelly slid a hand on her shoulder. “Are you all right?”

No.
She felt as if she were going to be sick all over this hideous, battered blue carpet. What kind of doctor was she—what kind of
woman
was she—to leave him?

“How long,” Dhara said, forcing herself upright in the hopes of calming her stomach, “has he been staying with you?”

“About three weeks, except he was away last weekend, and then he came to get his stuff today because he’s moving out.”

“Have you noticed anything unusual?”

“Like what?”

“Anything. Eating habits, sleeping habits. Has he been sick?”

“Yeah, come to think of it, he’d been sick a couple of times.” Kelly wrinkled her nose. “He didn’t always tell me though. I could tell by the smelly towels.”

“Vomiting?”

“Yeah. He didn’t seem interested in food, though he’d eat it if I put it in front of him. I didn’t have much opportunity though. He kept weird hours.”

“How weird?”

“He wouldn’t come home until after two or three in the morning almost every night, and so he’d be asleep when I left. If he weren’t filling my whole living room with his stuff, I would have hardly known he was there. Are you looking for symptoms or something?”

“Sort of.” Dhara rubbed her face and sighed. The time for keeping secrets was long over. “There is something I haven’t told you, Kelly. I haven’t told any of the girls. It’s about me, and Cole, and his situation.”

“Let me guess. The reason you two didn’t marry is because Cole can’t handle your family.”

“Partly.”

“Raised by that mother?” Kelly said. “Screwed up by that father? It’s a wonder Cole can manage a relationship at all.”

“Listen, like you, I’m breaking a promise by telling you this.”

“For goodness sake, Dhara, what are you talking about?”

Dhara took a deep breath, then took Kelly’s hand and spoke the words she never wanted to speak aloud. The truth she hadn’t been absolutely sure of, until today.

“Cole is an alcoholic.”

W
alking cross-town was not the quickest route between Kelly’s apartment in Hell’s Kitchen and the hospital on East Sixty-eighth Street. But Kelly knew the subway would be a crush because of the Yankees–Red Sox game and the Gay Pride parade, so she opted to hoof it. Three blocks later she realized she’d forgotten about the street fair on Ninth as well as the swelling influx of Saturday visitors. Her trek across Manhattan became an obstacle course of pretzel carts, crick-necked tourists, tin-drum bands, and half-naked men wearing strategically placed feathers.

Rushing the last block to the hospital, she glanced at her cell phone and groaned as she dropped it back into her messenger bag. She was a good half hour late to the first real intervention she and the girls had ever attempted.

Kelly hurried through the glass doors, signed in at the desk, and headed straight to the elevator bank. She fussed with the strap of her bag as worries pecked at her. She thought she knew Cole to the bone, but he had been living in her apartment for weeks and she’d never suspected any problem. Dhara had told her that he’d always been high functioning, hiding bottles in the laundry basket and filling his Starbucks thermos with anything but coffee. But as Kelly entered the elevator and stabbed the button for the Cardiac Step-Down floor, a cold drip of fear slipped down her spine. It was one thing to confront Marta about her men issues or Dhara over an arranged marriage. It was another thing to confront a man whose own father denied his paternity, handed him a wad of dirty twenties, and shoved the devastated eighteen-year-old onto the first bus out of Memphis.

Kelly prayed that Dhara remembered to have a professional present. If Cole lashed out… There’d be more than one intervention today.

Kelly located his room and found Cole propped upright in bed, the window shelf beside him laden with flower arrangements and balloons. He looked more like his old self than when she last saw him. Above the neckline of his hospital gown his chest was shiny with sweat.

“Sorry, I’m late.” Kelly mustered a smile for Cole’s sake as she shrugged off her messenger bag. She set it with a clunk by the wall. “Pedestrian traffic slowed me up.”

“Hey, Kelly.” Wendy stood by the bed pulling wax-wrapped sandwiches out of a brown paper bag, turning the sandwiches this way and that, as if to decipher the cryptic markings on the wrappings. “You didn’t pick up your cell when I called for lunch orders so I just bought you an Italian hero with the dressing on the side. That okay?”

“Um…okay.”

Kelly tried to catch Wendy’s eye. They usually didn’t eat during an intervention. Talking around a wad of salami wasn’t conducive to telling a buddy that he was screwing up his life. But Wendy, tossing a sandwich to Marta, missed her silent query. So did Marta, who was swaying by Cole’s bedside to some tinny music coming through the earbud of her iPod.

“I just adore Jamaican accents,” Marta said. “They sound like tropical waves and kettledrums, and they make me think of hot nights and fruity drinks. What was that doctor’s name? Dr. Aghanya? Damn, why are all the good doctors married?”

Kelly looked from Wendy to Marta and back again, unable to read the strange currents in the room. “Someone want to tell me what’s going on?”

“As usual,
chica,
you’re late to the party.”

“Party.”

“My going-away party.” Cole laughed. The laugh hitched as if caught in his throat. “It’s the driest damn party I’ve ever been to. Something I’d better get used to after today.”

Kelly cocked her head, not understanding. She cast an appeal to her friends, but no one looked her way. Nobody was looking at anyone else, either, just going about his or her business. It was like one of those zombie apocalypse movies, the scene after the blast of a sound-dulling grenade, when everyone wandered in the wreckage and tried to act normal.

“If you’d been here twenty minutes ago, you would have caught the fireworks.” Wendy tossed a wrapped sandwich to the far end of the bed. “Cole was a monster. He got so riled up he called me a jerk.”

“I believe the word I used was
asshole
.”

Kelly, flummoxed, glanced at the institutional clock clicking above the door. “I’m only a half hour late.”

“Like I couldn’t figure out what you guys were cooking up.” Cole cracked open the soda Wendy handed him, his smirk doing a fair job masking whatever other emotions battled beneath. “So I’m sitting here, waiting for my discharge papers, and suddenly Wendy shows up, and then Marta, and then Dhara comes in with this doctor with a clipboard, and I’m looking at the three Vassar girls and a Rastafarian standing at the end of my bed, and I think—oh
shit
.”

“He collapsed,” Marta said, patting Cole’s arm, “like a hostile takeover whose funding cratered.”

Cole made a scoffing noise. “Like I was going to say no to a month in an upstate rehab resort. It has a golf course. Three tennis courts. A French fucking chef. I’m likely to make more business contacts there than I’ve made in the last eight years on Wall Street.”

Kelly shot a glance at Wendy, who’d taken a seat in one of the four chairs aligned around the bed, figuring the only one who could bankroll that kind of rehab facility was a Wainwright.

“You’ll get to meet my uncle Tad,” Wendy said, her voice falsely light. “He cheats in poker, and he’s a lousy loser, but you laugh so much at his stories that you don’t care.”

“You can close your mouth, Kelly.” Cole raised his soda in a self-mocking little toast. “Scrooge needed three ghosts to knock some sense into him; I only needed three Vassar girls.”

Kelly felt like a newly landed fish still trying to swim. She’d come here expecting to see the uglier side of Cole, the part of him that had driven Dhara away, caused him to lose his job, forget his bills, and be evicted from his apartment. The part he’d been so skillfully hiding, for more years than she cared to imagine.

Instead, as she tried to process this change, he abruptly straightened in the bed, by some illusion looking instantly broader, heavier, and more substantive. Dhara had just walked into the room. The air was full of funny little eddies, so strong that Wendy and Marta exchanged a glance, a glance that Kelly intercepted and understood.

“Dr. Aghanya is filling out some paperwork you’ll need for rehab, Cole.” Dhara focused her attention on the chart before her. “But even with that, I’m afraid I can’t delay your discharge much longer.”

Wendy put her sandwich on the paper in her lap. “Do we need to leave?”

“No, not yet. In about a half hour. I can stay for a little while, at least. Celebrate the moment.”

Kelly witnessed Dhara glancing up at Cole slowly, as if her friend knew the act would be painful. Kelly noticed the wary softness in Dhara’s eyes, the undeniable traces of old affection. She saw, too, how swiftly Dhara turned her attention away, asking Wendy which sandwich was hers, busying herself hanging the chart, sweeping up the sandwich, and retreating to one of the chairs.

Five days he’d been in this hospital. Today he’d agreed to rehab. Dhara was not yet married. For the two of them, Kelly felt a fluttering of hope.

“All right,” Cole announced, trying to break the awkward little silence, “I have a confession.”

“No need, darling.” With one hand Marta made an exaggerated sign of the cross. “You’re completely absolved.”

“Yeah, well, you’ll want to hear this. It’s my dirty secret. I’ve always wanted to be a part of one of your interventions.”

Marta made a little grunt of disbelief. “You probably thought they were girlie pajama parties.”

“Hey, do I not, right now, have four good-looking women surrounding my bed?”

“Oh, you are so misguided.” Marta pulled out her earbud. “Take it from me, Cole. Real interventions are no fun.”

“I’m not complaining.” Cole’s gaze centered, once again, on Dhara, who found sudden interest in the contents of her pita pocket. “It’s not so bad to be surrounded by people who really give a damn.”

A chorus of
aw
’s rose up, and Wendy and Marta leaned over to fold Cole in a group hug. Kelly watched the swift catch-and-skitter of gazes between Cole and Dhara with keen interest, noticing how quickly Dhara bent her head over her sandwich to hide a soft smile.

Maybe happily ever after really did exist.

“About this girlie pajama party thing,” Cole added as the girls settled back down, “just so you know, I’m always open for that too.”

“Oh, honey,” Marta said. “That’s just asking for another heart attack.”

“No, no, he didn’t have a heart attack,” Dhara said. “Arrhythmia, brought on by withdrawal, a lot less serious.”

Marta shrugged off the explanation. “Just no more hospital visits, okay? These places give me the creeps. No offense, Dhara.”

“None taken.”

“All right,” he said. “Next time I’ll do something less dramatic. Like reveal some really big, ugly secret.”

And Cole’s gaze slid, pointedly, toward her. Kelly froze with the sandwich halfway to her mouth. She saw in Cole’s eyes a friendly urging, a kind but firm insistence.

I made the leap,
his look said.
Your turn.

Goose bumps rose on her skin, and not because of the hospital air-conditioning. Kelly sensed the girls picking up the volumes of nonverbal communication now passing between her and Cole. She squeezed her sandwich. She wasn’t ready for this. She and Trey had just taken one fragile step closer to a deeper communion. Their relationship was like the first soft coating on a new mollusk, needing time to grow solid and sure.

But battle-hardened Cole pinned her with his red-rimmed gaze, leaving her nowhere to look.

“Guys,” Kelly heard herself say, “I have some news.”

She set her sandwich down. On shaky legs, she hauled herself out of the chair. She looked at each of her friends, and before her throat could close up, she yanked the pin from the verbal grenade.

“For the past three months, I’ve been dating Trey Wainwright.”

Kelly had been involved in enough of these interventions to know how swiftly the girls worked, but amid the shouts of denial and the fierceness of their fury, she marveled at how lightning-quick they rearranged the furniture. Soon it was she, Kelly Palazzo, sitting in a lonely little chair at the far end of the room with Wendy, Marta, and Dhara by the bed, and Cole in the middle, openly bemused to find himself on the other side of an intervention.

Wendy’s skin had washed to parchment white. She leaned near the window with all the flowers and balloons, bracing herself on the windowsill while her elbows bent under her weight. Kelly couldn’t quite tell if it was shock or distress, but Wendy seemed utterly incapable of speech.

Marta, taking her cue from her frozen friend, opened the argument. “
Chica,
what were you thinking, starting things up with Trey after all these years?”

“You know how strongly I fell for him.”

“I know he broke your heart.”

“No, that’s not true. He didn’t have a chance to.” Kelly gripped the arms of the chair. This was going to be a long, hard afternoon. “You guys stepped in the middle too soon.”

“He wrote about your hookup on a public forum!”

“He apologized.”

“Because Wendy
made
him!”

Kelly dared a glance at Wendy, who still leaned precariously against the windowsill. “He stopped hanging out on that forum right after that,” Kelly informed her, “and he dropped those guys cold.”

She knew this to be true for she’d joined the forum with a fake nickname and sought him out for months after. Blessedly, in vain.

“So hallelujah, he learned his lesson,” Marta said. “That doesn’t explain why you’d set yourself up for punishment again.”

“I didn’t set myself up for anything. Trey chased me.”

“Oh,
Dios mío
.” Marta crossed her arms. “Kelly, Kelly, that only makes it worse, don’t you see?”

“How? How could the fact that he
sought me out
at Wendy’s engagement party and
repeatedly apologized
possibly be a bad thing?”

“Because you’re a challenge again. He’s a player. He wanted to see if he could get you back, after all he’d done.” Marta collapsed into the closest chair. “I just can’t believe this. You’re a freakin’ genius, and you
know
what kind of man he is. No offense, Wendy.”