Between Friends (16 page)

I closed my eyes, savoring the sound of his voice.

“Thank you,” I said.

“I’m going to get it together, okay?”

“Okay. Why don’t you call me after your appointment on Tuesday?”

“All right. And you call me whenever you want, doesn’t matter what time it is.”

That was more the Benny I knew, and when we hung up, I looked around my borrowed room at Cora’s and took a deep, shaky breath. I never thought I’d be in this position, never thought I’d have left my home, left Benny, but then I’d never thought my gentle husband was capable of frightening me into leaving.

Thank God Cora was here. I didn’t know what I would do with Letty, what I would do with myself. I changed into a bathing suit and inspected one of the old bikes in Cora’s garage, pulling out a cobwebbed pump and plumping up the tires before throwing a towel and some water bottles into the basket and heading down to the beach after Letty and Cora.

When we were kids, we’d make this short trek almost every day, even in the rain. The beach was open season, always, trusted by us and by our parents. We’d drop our bikes next to the sea grapes, no need to lock them up, and when we actually had shoes on, they’d go next to the bikes.

I carefully locked Cora’s bike onto the stand and pulled the removable basket off the handlebars, stuffing my flip-flops into it before heading down the walkway. The sand was still hot enough to hurt, and I hurried down to the water before looking around for Cora and Letty. They were nowhere to be seen, but I spotted Cora’s beach quilt, an ancient, faded thing that made me smile with nostalgia.

I dropped my things and lay down on my back, pushing my sunglasses to the top of my head to get some sun on my face. When we were teenagers, the need for sunscreen had not yet appeared on our radar, and we drenched ourselves in baby oil and iodine, and, oddly enough, I’d not yet begun to be sorry for it.

In fact, considering we were in our forties, both Cora and I seemed to be holding up pretty well. Aside from her being a little sick and bloated on this visit, Cora still had the smile and personality of the girl I’d met on this very beach thirty years ago. She could still drive me crazy, too. I’d been trying to talk to her about Drew all week, but she’d avoided my questions and sought out ways to include Letty in our every conversation.

I should have been able to relax. It was quiet on the beach but for the soft, rhythmic rush of the Gulf meeting the edge of the beach and the occasional cry of a seagull. But my mind wouldn’t settle, wouldn’t accept this rare moment of quiet. I put my sunglasses back in place and sat up, scanning the beach for Cora and Letty again. I finally stood and waded out into the water. As I cooled off I spotted them, walking along the water’s edge, back toward the quilt, and my breath caught at the sight of them.

Letty was almost as tall as Cora, and seeing them side by side, in bathing suits, brightly lit by the sun and framed by the blue backdrop of a cloudless sky, I realized that they could have been sisters, or, more accurately, mother and daughter.

They had the same shape: the slender neck, slim hips, long legs, the same hair, the same jawline. The few die-hards left on the beach faded from my sight, and I was suddenly alone except for those two women walking toward me. The current pushed lightly, and I let it take control of me, weaving back and forth with it, hypnotizing me with its rhythm, Cora and Letty like identical, hazy mirages in the distance.

As they drew closer I saw the differences, but now that I’d seen the similarities I couldn’t pretend they weren’t there. They split as they approached, Letty headed toward the quilt, Cora headed toward me.

“Hey,” she called as she waded in. “I thought that was you. Glad you changed your mind.”

I forced a smile to my face, seeing Letty in Cora’s wide grin, in the light freckles across her chest, hearing her in Cora’s voice.

“Yeah,” I said. “I wanted to talk to Letty. You know, this thing with Benny has sort of taken the heat off her—”

“Oh no,” she interrupted me. “If anything it’s made her feel even worse. She thinks this is all her fault, you know.”

I sighed. “Of course I know that, but there’s only so much I can reassure her that it’s not. And this was serious, Cora. There are things we need to talk about, things that were in those notes. If Benny and I weren’t in the middle of this, I can tell you she sure wouldn’t be having a day at the beach.”

“Oh, Ali, let it go, huh? Look, her birthday is coming up, she’s been beating herself up over something she doesn’t understand and that isn’t her fault, and—no, wait a second—she screwed up, and she’s feeling pretty badly about it. I think if you wanted to punish her, you’re doing fine. Just relax, huh?”

I laughed, I couldn’t help it. She looked so earnest.

“All right, well, if you won’t do it for her, then could you do it for me?”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“Ali, I’m only here for a little while. I want to have some fun with you.”

“Well, I’m sorry it doesn’t happen to be a fun time in my life right now, Cora.”

“I know. But, it’s not a fun time in my life right now, either, and it’s definitely not a fun time in Letty’s life. So, since we’re all not having a fun time in life together, couldn’t we just forget about it for a few days? I’ll be gone soon enough, you and Benny will work things out, and you can punish hell out of the girl. Lock her in the basement and feed her scraps. I’ll send manacles.”

I shook my head at her. “You’re crazy.”

But I listened.

And we did have fun. Cora picked Letty up from school and either took her back to her house to swim and do homework, or brought her to the store to work, and I even agreed to another trip to the airfield as a birthday treat.

But the most fun we had was when we walked down to the beach for the sunset each evening. The absence of the things that seemed to take up our time when we were at home—bills and grocery shopping for me, texting and Internet and television for Letty—turned into freedom to do something we hadn’t done for a long time: We talked.

I had forgotten, at some point in the past few years, that I could have a fun conversation with my daughter, and she added a new dimension, a valid viewpoint, to the same conversations that Cora and I had been having for almost thirty years. I watched her, and listened, and was surprised by the fact that Letty was funny, as clever as Cora, and as thoughtful as Benny.

On Tuesday Benny called after his appointment with Dr. Weist. I didn’t ask for a blow-by-blow account, though I was intensely curious. I thought he should have some sense of doing this as much for himself as for me and Letty, and respecting his privacy felt like an important part of that.

“What about Letty’s birthday?” he asked.

“I thought we’d go out to dinner. Letty wants Emily to go, of course, and then I’ll take the girls to the mall. I picked up a gift certificate for her from both of us.”

“Thanks, I wasn’t sure what to do. What about dinner?”

“We’d like you to come.”

“Yeah?”

“Of course.”

“Okay. All right, that’s great. I’ll see you tomorrow, then?”

“I’ll see you tomorrow, Benny.”

I had a date with my husband.

Seth had been staying at the abandoned house in her neighborhood ever since the week after the party. The cops had towed his car because the tags were out of date, and even if he had the money to get it, he didn’t think they’d let him take it, since he wasn’t sixteen yet and didn’t have insurance, so Scott was picking him up in the mornings.

They’d all skipped out at lunch a couple of times to go over to the house, but Scott never left her and Seth alone, so they didn’t get to talk much.

Seth showed them how he slid a pane of glass out of the jalousie door in the carport. Then all he had to do was slip his hand in to unlock the door. He was showering in the mornings in the locker room at school when the swim team went in.

She didn’t know what to do to help him, and she didn’t even know why he couldn’t go home. Whenever she started to ask him about it, he just got mad. Not at her, but just in general, and so she left him alone, and they mostly saw each other in the lunchroom and in the hall between classes.

At lunch on Tuesday she left the table when Seth went to get a soda and found Emily on the other side of the lunchroom, sitting with a couple of kids they’d gone to middle school with. Hardly anyone said hello to her, and even Emily looked like she didn’t really want to talk. She sat down anyway.

“Are you still going to dinner with us tomorrow?”

Emily shrugged. “Why don’t you take Seth?” she asked, looking at her like she was challenging her or something. Everyone at the table was staring at them.

“Come on, Em,” she said, talking real soft so not everyone in the place could hear. “We always have our birthdays together.”

Emily looked down at her plate.

“Fine,” she said.

“We’ll pick you up at six?”

“Yeah, okay. I didn’t get you anything.” She looked back up at her, like she was mad again all of a sudden.

“That’s okay,” Letty said. “Mom is giving me a gift certificate for the mall, so maybe we can go after. I’ll share it with you.”

Emily didn’t say anything for a second, like she was thinking about it. “Okay,” she finally said, and then she looked up over Letty’s shoulder.

Seth put his hands on Letty’s upper arms and squeezed, and she stood up right away.

“I’ll see you later,” she said, and Emily nodded, not saying anything to Seth, though to be fair, he didn’t exactly say anything to her or anyone else at the table.

There were fifteen minutes left of lunch, and they went out to the courtyard, slipping around the back to sit on the low wall by the parking lot. There used to be bushes and flowers and stuff in the planters, but now there were mostly cigarette butts and trash.

“So, I have to go up to my cousin’s place in Venice,” he said. “I thought maybe you’d go with me.”

“What? When?”

“Well, I figured you’d want me here for your birthday, even though I’m not invited to
dinner
, so I guess Thursday.”

“What about school?”

He shrugged. “I don’t have any tests or anything. It’s just for the day.”

“Seth? Can I ask you something, and just tell me, okay, don’t get mad?”

He looked over her head for a minute and didn’t answer, but then he finally looked at her and said, “Yeah, all right.”

“Why can’t you go home?”

He sighed, and she just wanted to hug him, to tell him everything would be okay, but if she did that he wouldn’t answer, so she just looked at him, and he finally told her.

“My dad, he let this other guy move in, like a roommate you know? He took my room, and we don’t get along so good, so I don’t want to go back there anyway.”

“He let him have your room?” she asked in disbelief.

“I was going to get out of there soon anyway,” he said.

“But you can’t keep staying at that house,” she said. “What if you get caught?”

“Where else am I supposed to go? I won’t get caught. Now, are you going to Venice with me or not?”

He leaned forward and kissed her, and she knew that she would go.

On her birthday her mom made pancakes for breakfast and was really nice when she dropped her off. When Aunt Cora picked her up that afternoon, her and Seth’s plans were all worked out. She was wearing the necklace he got her for her birthday, and she could tell Aunt Cora noticed it right away, but she didn’t say anything.

She’d taken her flying again the day before—an early birthday present, she’d said—and it was just as incredible as she had remembered it. She thought that maybe she could be a pilot when she got older, and she and Seth could have one of those houses in central Florida like John Travolta had, where you could keep your plane right by your house, like it was a car.

“Can we go by my house?” she asked. “Dad won’t be home for hours, and I need more clothes.”

She went straight to her parents’ room first, leaving Aunt Cora to find something to drink in the fridge. She looked everywhere, under the bed, in the dresser, and finally found her purse and cell phone on top of his gun safe in the closet.

Aunt Cora came in just as she left the closet and stood, leaning in the doorway with a soda in her hand, looking around the bedroom. She didn’t even seem at all suspicious of why Letty was in her parents’ room.

“I’ll grab some clothes,” she said as she rushed past her.

Aunt Cora was still in her parents’ room when she came back, staring at the framed articles and pictures on the Miracle Wall. She was standing really still, looking at the
People
cover, and she didn’t even hear Letty come in. But she must have made some kind of noise, because Aunt Cora jumped a little and looked like she’d been caught doing something she wasn’t supposed to.