The Perfect Stranger (14 page)

Although he probably didn’t mean it like that . . .

Oh, please. Of course he didn’t. He was just being polite.

Look at her. She’s a middle-aged mom wearing jeans, a hoodie, and no makeup, her blond hair pulled back in a simple ponytail. She’d left too early to worry about what she looked like this morning and had been planning on having enough time at the hotel to pull herself together before she meets the others. Hopefully, she’ll still have it, but if not . . .

What you see is what you get.

She licks her finger, turning a page of the magazine, scanning it—a photo montage of celebrity bikini beach shots with plenty of cleavage, only serving to remind her that her own bikini and cleavage days are long behind her. She turns another page, and then another . . .

Then, oops! Remembers she’s supposed to be watching Mr. Coffee’s luggage.

Restless, she tucks the magazine back into her carry-on, checks her watch, and takes out her phone again.

There’s a text from Addison:
Dad said u called. Jumping into shower then have 2 leave 4 work. Talk 2 U later. ILY.

She smiles and texts back ILY2:
I love you, too.

Landry toys with her phone for a minute, remembering that she never did return her cousin’s call from the other night. Barbie June left another message—a slightly pissed-off-sounding one—last night while she was out to dinner with Rob. She meant to call back, but when she got home she still had to pack, and by then she wasn’t in the mood to talk to her cousin anyway, with the trip looming and the alarm set for 4:00
A.M.

She glances at the window again in time to see a large bolt of lightning zigzag the sky almost directly overhead. She has nothing but time on her hands for the immediate future, so she might as well call back now and face the wrath of Barbie June, who never takes kindly to being put off.

Her cousin answers the phone immediately, with a high-pitched, “Landry! I have been so worried about y’all!”

“Worried? Why?”

“It’s not like you to ignore your messages, and I’ve been trying to track you down all week!”

“I’m sorry, it’s been a rough week, and—”

“I heard what happened! Aunt Ardelle”—Landry’s mother—“told Mama that you were flying away to a funeral up North!”

That gives Landry pause. She’d called her mother yesterday to let her know she was leaving for the weekend; that an old friend had died. When her mother asked who it was, she said, truthfully, “No one you know.”

“A college friend?”

“Something like that.” Then she successfully changed the subject, asking about her mom’s roses. An avid gardener, Ardelle Quackenbush always welcomes the opportunity to talk horticulture.

Now, Landry tells her cousin the same thing about the funeral: “It’s no one you know.”

“Your mother told my mother it was someone from college.”

“She did? Bless her heart. Her hearing is getting worse by the day. It wasn’t someone from college.”

“Oh, thank the Lord! I’ve been on the alumni Web sites all morning trying to figure out who it could have been and why I wouldn’t have heard about it, too. Who was it?”

Landry sighs inwardly. “It was someone I met online.”

There’s a pause.

“One of those bloggers?” Barbie June asks. “The ones who are always writing notes to you like they know you?”

“How do you know that?”

“How do you think? I read your blog! I’m your cousin!”

Landry clears her throat. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know you read it.”

“Of course I do!”

Then why,
she wants to ask,
haven’t you ever said anything positive about it until now? Why are you always making disparaging remarks about anything having to do with social networking?

“Which friend died?” Barbie June persists.

“Oh, I’m sure you wouldn’t—”

“Landry! I just said I read your blog. I know who all the regulars are—the ones who always comment. I know you consider them friends. Who was it?”

Fair enough. If she’s been reading, then Meredith’s name will be familiar to her. Meredith was always one of the first to leave a comment whenever she posted a new entry.

“It was Meredith,” she tells Barbie June.

“Really? I didn’t even know she was sick again!”

Rather than inform her cousin that she wasn’t, in fact, sick again, Landry asks, “How could you know?”

“I’ve read her blog, too. You can link to them through their names when they leave comments on your page. I’ve read most of— Oh. Well, there it is.”

“There what is?”

“I’m on her blog now.” Keyboard tapping. “There are all these comments about it being sudden . . . What in the world happened to her?”

This feels wrong to Landry—Barbie June asking about Meredith, almost as if she knows her. Until now her real life and online life have been as neatly compartmentalized as Addison’s cases of beads. Now it’s all been upended and jumbled together, leaving her oddly unsettled.

“Landry?”

“It was an accident,” she says briefly, thinking that Meredith’s—or maybe just her own—privacy seems to have somehow been violated. Maybe it shouldn’t feel that way, but it does. She wishes she hadn’t called back.

“What kind of accident? A car accident?” Barbie June is asking when a voice cuts in to distract Landry.

“Thank you.”

She looks up to see that the owner of the luggage a few seats away has returned with his coffee.

Make that two cups of coffee. He gestures, offering one to her.

She pivots her phone away from her mouth to thank him.

“It’s black,” he says, “Do you take cream and sugar?”

“That’s all right, I—”

“Landry? Who are you talking to?”

“No one,” she murmurs into the phone. “I should go. I think we’re about to board.”

“But—”

“I’ll call you when I . . .” About to say
land,
she amends quickly: “ . . . get home.”

“When will that be?”

“Monday.”

“You’re not coming home until
Monday
?” Barbie June sounds as though Landry just told her she’d boarded the
Queen Mary
on a one-way cruise to Europe.

“Sunday night. Late.”
Too late to make phone calls.

“Oh, well . . . have a good weekend, sweetie.”

“You too.”

Landry hangs up.

Sure. I’ll have a great weekend—paying my respects to my dead friend.

She shakes her head, pocketing her phone, and the man hands her one of the cups of coffee. “I know you said no, but I figured you were just being polite.”

“I was.”
And I was thinking I shouldn’t accept a cup of coffee from a strange man.

“So . . . your mother?”

“Pardon?”

“Whoever you were talking to—that was your mother?”

“Oh—no. My cousin.”

He flashes a grin and she notices his nice white teeth. “I figured it had to be family by the way you were trying to shake her.”

“I wasn’t really—”

“Oh, come on, sure you were.”

“Sure I was,” she finds herself agreeing, returning his grin.

“Yeah. Thought so. Been there, done that, a million times.”

“I guess every family has one of those.”

“Mine has many. And they’re all in Cincinnati. I was thinking even twenty-four hours is a lot of time to spend with them, so . . . if there’s anyone who doesn’t particularly mind this flight delay, it’s—”

“That guy?” she quips, pointing at a college-age kid stretched out on the floor nearby, peacefully asleep.

“Him, too, I guess. Seriously, I wouldn’t mind if we sat here for hours. Oh, by the way, I almost forgot—” He pulls a couple of creamer and sugar packets out of his pocket, along with a plastic stirrer, and offers them to her.

“Thank you. Really.” She peels the plastic lid off the cup. “I got up so early that I really do need this.”

“Same here. And between being tired and what’s waiting for me when we land, if we don’t take off soon—not that I want to—I may have to switch over to something stronger.”

“You know, that’s not a bad idea.” As soon as the words are out of her mouth, she wants to bite them back. Does it sound as if she wants him to buy her a drink now?

No—of course not.

She’s just not good at this . . . solo travel.

Her phone rings. She jumps, almost spilling her coffee.

“Careful there. Here, let me hold that for you.”

He takes the cup, and she pulls out her phone, sees Rob’s cell phone number in the caller ID window.

“That’s my husband,” she says—maybe a little pointedly, and answers the phone. “Rob? Everything okay?”

“Everything is fine.”

“Oh, good.” She presses the phone to her ear with her shoulder as Mr. Coffee hands back the cup, gives a little salute and goes back to his seat.

“Tucker can’t find any of the shirts he needs for work,” Rob tells her, “and I looked everywhere—”

“Hanging up behind the door in the laundry room?”

“—except there.”

“Go check. I’m pretty sure that’s where they are.”

She dumps a sugar packet into her coffee as he goes to look, resisting the urge to tell him that she reminded him where to find the shirts when they were on their way to the airport this morning. And, of course, she told Tucker last night. Twice. But neither of the men in her life can ever seem to find anything around the house.

“Got ’em,” Rob says a few moments later. “Thanks. I’ve got to get him moving or he’s going to be late. Do you know it took me fifteen minutes to get him out of bed?”

Welcome to my world, Rob.

“He’s not really a morning kid,” she points out unnecessarily, stirring her coffee.

“Yeah, no kidding. I’d better go give him his shirt. He’s probably sleeping again.”

“Probably. Love you.”

“You too,” he says—sincerely, if hurriedly.

Mr. Coffee is busy on his laptop when she hangs up. He doesn’t even glance her way.

Relieved, she goes back to her magazine.

It’s much too early to check in when Kay arrives at the hotel on the suburban outskirts of Cincinnati. She drives past it, making note of where to turn later, and then decides to head on down the road to familiarize herself with the place where Meredith’s service is being held.

McGraw’s Funeral Parlor is a squat yellow brick building set back from the two-lane highway. Next door on one side there’s a bowling alley with a neon sign and a gigantic satellite dish that sits right on the property perimeter. On the other side sits a boxy duplex with an aboveground swimming pool in the small yard.

It bothers Kay, for some reason, to think of people swimming and bowling and watching TV in such close proximity to dead bodies and grieving families. She wishes the funeral—Meredith’s funeral—were being held elsewhere.

Meredith’s funeral . . .

Dear God.

She turns around in the empty parking lot and backtracks toward the hotel. For a moment she considers jumping right back onto the interstate and heading home.

No, don’t do that. You’re much too tired to drive, and hungry, too. You’ll feel better if you get something to eat and relax for a bit.

There are a couple of restaurants near the Wal-Mart shopping plaza. It’s too early in the day for Applebee’s or Chili’s, and she bypasses Starbucks as well. She entered one back home a few years ago, wanting a plain old cup of coffee, and was immediately intimidated by the sleek decor, unfamiliar beverages on the overly complicated menu, and the impatient girl at the register, who asked rapid-fire questions that might as well have been in a foreign language: “Tall, grande, or venti? . . . Blond, medium, or Bold Pick? . . . With or without room?”

Shuddering at the thought of repeating that experience—and in an unfamiliar city, besides—she opts instead for a Bob Evans restaurant, a familiar chain she’s visited back home.

The parking lot is full. Inside, she finds herself surrounded by senior citizens, truck drivers, and families with small children.

“What are you doing up so early on a weekend, hon?” asks the friendly waitress, after taking her order.

“Me? Oh, I always get up early.”

“Not me. If I weren’t here, I’d be in bed until noon, believe me.”

Kay smiles at her. She’s the motherly type. Probably a grandma, too. Women like this always make her wistful—not just for what she, herself, is never going to be, but for what her own mother chose not to be. And now, for what she found, and lost, in Meredith.

“Can I bring you cream with that coffee, hon?”

“Yes, please. And real butter with the biscuits, please, instead of that spread, whatever it is.”

“You got it.”

Meredith was always blogging about eating natural foods, avoiding chemicals. She taught her so much about nutrition.

Some of the bloggers—like Elena—might argue that it doesn’t matter much at this point. Not for them. As she put it . . .

Either you’ve already fought cancer and won . . . or you’ve lost, and at that point might as well throw caution to the wind.

Meredith’s diplomatic response:
To each his own.

Kay finds herself swallowing back the ache in her throat, thinking of her friend. It feels wrong to be here in Cincinnati, about to meet some of the others without Meredith.

She forces the sorrow away and notices a trio of white-haired women in the next booth. Two are smiling, chatting easily between bites of omelets and pancakes. The third is silently picking at a poached egg, wearing a dour expression.

Making eye contact with Kay, she scowls, and Kay quickly averts her eyes, wishing she’d thought to pick up a newspaper or something.

Dining out solo has never been very comfortable for her—though it’s preferable to dining out with Mother, back when she was alive. That didn’t happen very often, but on the few occasions when it did, Mother complained about the service, the prices, the food . . .

She was just like you,
Kay silently tells the dour woman, though she doesn’t dare sneak another peek.
A miserable human being.

Why would anyone, blessed with the gift of longevity, waste all those years finding fault with everything around her—especially with her own daughter?