The Girls of Tonsil Lake (4 page)

Instead of calling back, Jake knocked on my door a half hour later. He swept me into a bear hug that lifted me right off my feet. “Suzy-Q, it’s been too long.”

He put me down and held me away, looking me over with a sparkling blue gaze that was like a caress. As God is my witness, if he’d said the word or even swept those long eyelashes down in a suggestive manner, like Jean writes about in her books, I’d have gotten naked right then.

Although I’d seen him to wave to, I hadn’t spent time with him since his and Andie’s son young Jake, Jean’s daughter Kelly, and my daughter Sarah had graduated from college four years ago. We’d had a big party to celebrate and Jake—along with both my ex-husbands—had come. I had kept my distance from my exes, but Andie and Jake were like old friends, laughing and drinking toasts and standing with their arms around each other. They’d looked almost as married as Jean and David did, and I remembered feeling jealous. Which wasn’t very nice of me, I guess, but I just felt so alone, and I’ve never learned to like that.

I’d thought then that Jake was just about the handsomest man I’d ever seen this side of a movie screen and I still thought so. “But you’ve gotten so thin,” I said. “Why is it men eat everything that’s not nailed down and lose weight while women gain just by walking through a kitchen?”

He laughed and hugged me again. “Are you going to let me buy you dinner?”

“I could be convinced.” I gave him a Mae West look and a little flip of hip.

“Be still my heart.” He grinned at me. “Get your purse. If you’re nice, I might even take you dancing.”

He didn’t take me dancing, but we did go to the Comedy Shop and laugh ourselves silly before he delivered me to the door of my room before midnight.

“Oh, Jake.” I put my arms around him. “How could Andie have let you go?”

A shadow seemed to fall over his eyes, dimming the ever-present twinkle. He was silent for an instant, his face a mask, but he recovered so quickly I thought I’d imagined it. “What, and deny the rest of the world the pleasure of my scintillating company by keeping me?”

“There is that,” I said, and raised my face.

He took the hint, kissing me there in the hallway of the eleventh floor of the hotel. I couldn’t really afford to stay here, but had given myself the night as a reward for the upcoming promotion. It was a first-date kind of kiss, and I broke it with every intention of going back for more, but he stepped away slightly, covering my mouth with two fingers.

“You need your rest for your big meeting tomorrow,” he said, “and I need to be going.” He kissed my cheek. “Good luck, Suzy-Q. I’ll call you.”

I thought about the evening as I undressed and showered. We’d talked about Andie’s illness, about what all of our children were doing these days, about the pitiful state of gas prices in the Midwest. He’d asked about my job and I’d told him more than he probably wanted to know, but he hadn’t talked about himself, something I found unusual and endearing in a man.

The lighting in hotel bathrooms is uniformly cruel to any woman over twenty-two. I kept my back to the mirror as I dried off, slathered on body lotion, and dropped a silky gown over my head, but I had to face it to take off my makeup.

The plastic surgeon did a good job with my eyes—I never have that vaguely surprised look I’ve seen on other women—and the partial facelift I had five years ago is holding up well. But as I looked at myself that night, I saw the hint of a double chin when I turned my head, and there were faint lines around my mouth and below my eyes that it took two coats of concealer and a healthy application of makeup base to hide.

I applied moisturizer, then applied it again just for good measure.

“You’re damned near fifty-one,” I told my reflection. “You can’t fight gravity forever.” I grinned at myself. “Well, maybe you can fight it, but you can’t win.”

I remembered Jean’s joke about me having my breasts sewn into place and looked down at my chest, wondering if I should go ahead and invest in another surgical procedure.

Andie used to say, “I’ll do something about them when they smack me in the knees when I walk, especially since my fallen ass will be smacking the backs of them at the same time.” We’d always laugh, but it wasn’t so funny anymore. I couldn’t go braless in public anymore, because my nipples were exhibiting a definite downward trend, but I wasn’t sure I wanted the expense or the pain of more cosmetic enhancement.

One of the things I tell the ladies who use my makeup is that the best things they can do for their skin have nothing to do with what they put on it. They need to drink lots of water and they need to get plenty of sleep. I tell them I may have to get up in the night to pee a lot, but I look good while I’m doing it.

It was hard to follow those rules that night. The water in the hotel room tasted terrible even with ice, and I wasn’t about to pay the price of taking a bottle out of the little refrigerator.

Then I couldn’t get to sleep when I finally lay down. Instead, I hugged the extra pillow to my stomach and planned how I would run my own region when I got my promotion.

I overslept in the morning, but still arrived for my appointment by ten. Amanda and I exchanged hugs, compliments on hair color, and air kisses, before taking seats in the conversation area over by the floor-to-ceiling windows in her office. She buzzed her secretary with a request that we not be disturbed. I felt a little shiver of trepidation.

Amanda opened a folder on her lap and took out a slip of paper. “First things first,” she said, beaming. “You had a spectacular Christmas and spring season. The company is grateful for your hard work and creativity.”

The bonus check was the biggest I’d ever had, nearly twice as much, as a matter of fact, as I’d ever received before. It nearly took my breath away.

Maybe I would get my breasts done.

“Now,” said Amanda briskly, laying the folder on the table between our chairs, “let’s get down to business. We need to discuss your future with the company.”

Vin

I woke in the middle of the night, which isn’t like me at all. Mark used to say I must be eternally innocent, because I’d sleep through an earthquake and wake at my regular time wanting to know what the fuss was about.

Menopause seems to have robbed me of that innocence in a way even his death had not. I slept around the clock in the days after losing Mark, but nowadays night sweats were attacking me at unexpected times.

I stripped off my soaking wet nightgown and took a shower, which served to leave me wide awake at four-thirty in the morning with nothing to do. I could have worked on Andie’s book, I guess, but I really wanted to wait till we were together in Maine.

I brewed a pot of coffee and sat at the kitchen counter with a cup in front of me. I wished suddenly and desperately for someone to talk to. Another sign of menopause, I suppose, since I’d never been the type to exchange confidences over coffee. But then, I’d always had Mark.

Tears threatened, and I shook my head even though there was no one to see. “I know,” I said aloud, looking up—because if there’s a heaven, Mark is there. “I promised I wouldn’t do the bereaved widow thing.” But I am bereaved, goddamn it.

The Andie-like thought made me smile, but I still wanted to talk, and no one I knew got up at this time of the morning. Except one.

Jean answered on the first ring, sounding cautious.

“Were you up?” I blurted. “If you weren’t, I’m sorry.”

“Oh, Vin. No, I was up.” Now she just sounded exhausted. “I’ve been up since three, trying to finish this dratted book.”

I made what I hoped was an appropriate response, and when Jean spoke again a few seconds later, it was as though she’d just been awakened from some kind of dream state.

“Vin?” she said. “Are you okay?” It was her normal voice, laced with the concern and compassion-if-you-need-it that were an inherent part of her personality.

“Yeah, I’m fine,” I said. “No, I’m not. This menopause thing is for the forny birds.”

“Ah.” She laughed softly. “Don’t be brave. Go to your gynecologist and tell him or her to give you anything, you don’t care what it is, just to survive.”

I tried to imagine Jean rushing off to her gynecologist and couldn’t. “What do you take?”

There was a second of hesitation, but when she spoke, her voice sounded normal. “Me? Nothing. It hasn’t been so bad for me, but I thought we were going to have to shoot Andie to put us all out of our misery.”

“What about Suzanne?” I was pretty sure if Suzanne woke up with night sweats, she’d have to go into rehab.

“She had a hysterectomy when she was forty, remember? It threw her into instant menopause, but hormone therapy’s worked great for her.”

Silence hummed between us, then Jean said, her voice as coaxing as if she were talking to a child, “Come on, Vinnie. What’s wrong?”

The soft sympathy in her voice was the last straw. Before I could even draw a deep breath, I was sobbing and speaking in a rush of hiccups. “I don’t know, Jean. It’s like there’s no reason for living anymore. I never envied you guys having kids before, but now I do. I don’t have anything without Mark.”

“Oh, honey, I’m so sorry.”

“I rattle around this brownstone all by myself except for Attila—”

“Who?”

As abruptly as the spate of tears had started, it ended, the sobs segueing clumsily into giggles as uncontrollable as the sobs had been. “It’s what Suzanne calls my housekeeper. Archie’s just the slightest bit...er...militant about screening my phone calls.”

Jean laughed, and I was glad I’d called her just because the sound of her laughter is enough to brighten anyone’s day. “Oh, Jeannie,” I said, “please come to Maine with us. We’d have such fun.”

“Oh, phooey, you all just want me to cook because you’re afraid you’ll poison yourselves.”

She was still laughing, but it struck me that maybe that’s what she really thought. It also struck me that she was right.

We’d counted on her to rescue us from our cooking limitations of canned soup and frozen entrees. We’d been counting on her to rescue us for forty years.

“Nope,” I said stoutly. “I’m taking along that cookbook series we published a couple of years ago and we’ll all learn to use it.”

“Oh, good heavens.” There was another little silence. “Maybe for a few days. A long weekend,” said Jean. “David’s got a golf trip coming up. I know he’d like not worrying about me being home alone. And, believe me, after I send in this book, I’m ready for a break.”

It irritated me that she always put David’s and her children’s needs before her own, but the thought crossed my mind that if Mark were only here, I’d put his needs before anyone else’s forever and ever.

“You think about it,” I said. “We’d love it if you came.”

Silence again, then, “Okay,” she promised. “I’ll think about it, but not till I get this book done and to my editor. I’ll call you Sunday.”

I got to the office early and stayed late, making large inroads into clearing my desk in preparation for devoting a month to Andie’s book.

Back at the brownstone, I ate the dinner Archie had left in the oven for me, took a shower, and went to bed. Although I consider myself a morning person, I don’t believe morning starts at four-thirty a.m. I was exhausted.

The clock beside the bed read eleven-seventeen when the phone rang. I’d been dreaming, I think, because when I picked up the receiver, I fully expected to hear Mark on the other end.

But it wasn’t him, would never be him again. Instead, it was Suzanne, speaking in an almost unrecognizable voice, one that made me sit up and say sharply, “Suzanne? Are you okay?” God, how often we said that to each other, we girls of Tonsil Lake.
Are you okay? Are you all right?

“I’m fine.”

That’s what we always said, even when the damned sky was falling. “Are you okay?” they asked after Mark died, and I said I was fine even though I knew I’d never be fine again.

And Suzanne wasn’t fine now. “Talk to me,” I ordered.

“I really don’t have anything to say.”

I could hear her swallowing, her glass clinking against the telephone. “Suzanne, what are you doing?”

“I just”—her voice faded away, then came back strong—“just wanted to say goodbye to someone.”

Chapter Three

Andie

I felt pretty proud of myself this morning. In the first place, I got dressed. Not in sweats but in a pair of khaki shorts and an aqua tee shirt Miranda bought me for my birthday. I’m a size smaller since my illness and not too many clothes fit well, but these did.

I washed my hair and ran a pick through it while it was still wet so that it lay in waves instead of kinking up. I was getting used to the white, and I kind of looked forward to not having it colored every five weeks.

I even put on makeup, something Jean and I do well only because Suzanne’s drummed it into us when she gives us our free samples. All of her practice on us is the reason, we tell her, that she does the best makeovers in the Midwest.

I gave myself a critical look in the mirror. As long as I was wearing a bra, you couldn’t really tell that my boobs didn’t match. The discovery made me ridiculously happy, and I turned away from my reflection quickly. There was coffee in the kitchen calling my name.

Jake called, as he’s done every few days since I got sick, and we talked while I drank my first cup. He said he’d seen Suzanne the night before.

“It was fun,” he said. “You should come up here for a weekend sometime, Andie. It would be good for you. Things don’t have to interfere.”

“Maybe sometime.” I frowned. “But, Jake, have you told Suzanne?”

The smile left his voice, and I was sorry I’d asked. “No,” he said, “but I will. Nothing’s going to happen there. Trust me, okay?”

We’d just hung up and I’d poured my second cup when there was a knock at the back door. Expecting Miranda, I hollered, “Come on in,” and set about making a fresh pot.

My children are as addicted to coffee as I am. Only young Jake says my coffee is too good for him. He’s a cop and considers himself a specialist in sludge.

But it wasn’t Miranda at the door; it was Paul Lindquist. He was holding a green Mason jar with a ribbon tied around its neck and eight tulips inside it. He had on long denim shorts and a polo shirt in a peculiar faded green that turned his eyes the exact same color.