Kindred Spirits (7 page)

With no real professional experience and a family on the way, Marc ended up working for Beth’s father, Chat, at Brewster Insurance, a job that paid the bills but barely anything more. It was a far cry from the future they’d discussed that day in Broadside Books. It was a daily grind of mind-numbing insurance claims and Rotary Club dinners.

Beth told herself it wasn’t one hundred percent her fault that they’d ended up this way—after all, it takes two to make a baby—but she couldn’t help feeling largely responsible, since they had returned to
her
town to be near
her
parents. And though he never said as much, they suffered through episodes when Marc became dark and moody, when he descended to the basement to write and didn’t emerge for days. That’s when she worried he might do what Carol did and run away.

It was awful to admit, but Carol and Jeff’s divorce had been like a stone dropped into a tranquil pond, sending ripples that rocked the people closest to them. Mary Kay broke up with the guy she’d been dating for four years. Lynne, who’d received a clean bill of health the June before, developed a strange cough that turned out to be malignant tumors in her stomach and liver. And Marc grew more and more distant, spending his weekends writing or going off on long hikes by himself.

Which was why their middle-of-the-night cooking session was such a gift. As they chatted about Amalfi, it was as if time reversed and they were young and energetic again, full of hope and plans back at Broadside Books. Marc opened up about quitting Brewster Insurance once David’s student loans were paid and floated the idea of subleasing their house for a year so they could take off.

Someday soon,
she thought to herself,
I will get you out of here. I owe you that much
.

Marc gathered up the extra lemon shavings and placed them in a mason jar, covering them with 100-proof vodka to make limoncello. “In honor of Amalfi,” he said, setting the jar far back in a cabinet so it could marinate for a month or more. “If we can’t go to Mount Vesuvius, Mount Vesuvius can come to us.”

She loved him at that moment, loved him more fully than when he wrapped her in his arms twenty-some years before and proposed under an August blue moon. They had been mere children then. Innocents. Life had been a playland of few obligations—no unpaid bills, no teenagers keeping them up nights with worry, no friends dying.

Anyone can fall in love in the dewy grace of youth, but it takes true grit to negotiate the crags of middle age and still manage to uncover new levels of passion. What she knew that day as the sun rose and she and Marc finally went to bed, was that riding over the rough spots had been worth the aggravation.

She wondered what would have happened if Carol and Jeff had held on tight and ridden over their rough spots too.

That was days ago and now here she was, refilling the coffeepot in the sink for the guests at Lynne’s funeral reception, when Mary Kay waltzed into the kitchen carrying a full plate. “There you are!” She set down the plate and turned off the water. “OK, Cinderella, put down your broom. I snagged some food before there was nothing left. Sit down and eat.”

She couldn’t stop. There was too much to do. “Just let me make this coffee.”

“There’s plenty of coffee out there. I just checked.” Mary Kay removed the pot from Beth’s hands and stuck it back in the maker. “Besides, we need to wind this down so we can go next door and clean out Lynne’s stuff. Carol’s gotta get back to the city.”

“So soon?” Beth peered into the living room. Carol seemed in no particular hurry. Her head was thrown back, laughing at something Jake Fenster was saying. Bitsy Kramer and Sue Allen from the PTA were with them, laughing too, as if nothing had changed. “I was just thinking of her, hoping that. . .”

Mary Kay took the opportunity of Beth’s open mouth to shove in a bite of artichoke salad. “She wouldn’t turn around and head for the city, right?”

Something like that. Beth chewed. The rice salad was too salty. Next time, she would remember to use plain brown instead of a mix. “It’s just that she left so abruptly last time. And then never returned. Remember how we packed up her stuff and shipped it to New York while Jeff was at work?”

“Like she, too, was dead.” Mary Kay folded salmon on a cracker and added a spoonful of the cream cheese. “Now, be a good girl and open up.”

Beth did as she was told. The salmon was fantastic, freshened by the dill. There was another peal of laughter from the living room. Carol’s trademark giggle. “Now it’s like she never left. I even saw her in a heart-to-heart with Michelle Richardson over in the corner. They had their heads together like nothing had ever happened.”

Mary Kay studied the plate, trying to choose what to feed Beth next. “Did Jeff show?”

Beth wiped her lips. “Not yet. I think he had to take Amanda back to the train station or something.”

Mary Kay rolled her eyes. “After all Lynne did for her? Hmm. I don’t know about that kid, though it was nice to see the three of them together at the funeral. Did you catch how Jeff had his arm around Carol?”

Beth went quiet. “To be honest, I didn’t see much of anything at that funeral. It’s such a blur now, I barely remember standing up and speaking.”

“Well, you did great,” Mary Kay said. “How about one of those chicken wings?” she asked softly. “That balsamic Dijon sauce of yours made such a difference. Is that rosemary?”

“Tarragon.” Beth was back to the sink, washing, trying not to think as she glanced out the window and saw a strange figure coming down the street.

“Come on, hon. Quit with the cleaning up already.”

“No. Look.” She pointed at the sight of Jeff, the collar of his trench coat yanked to his ears to keep out the rain, hustling down the driveway carrying a pair of black high-heeled shoes—Carol’s, from the funeral when she took them off to carry the casket.

Mary Kay joined her. “What’s he doing?” Jeff stopped, reconsidered, and headed back toward the road.

“Looks like he was bringing Carol’s shoes.”

“They should be in a plastic bag. They’ll be destroyed in this weather.”

“Yes, but. . .” That wasn’t the point, Beth thought. “Now he’s heading to his car. Why doesn’t he just come in?”

“Maybe it’s too awkward for him what with everyone in town here. You know, Carol got to run away to New York but Jeff had to stay and answer all the questions. He still can’t go out to dinner with another woman without tongues wagging.”

“I’m glad he didn’t bring a date today. That would have been too much, him with someone else and Carol and Amanda all under the same roof.”

Mary Kay ran a finger under her lower lip. “I know for a fact he’s not seeing anyone. It’d be all over the hospital if he were.”

Which was more than Beth could say for Carol. “Even if Jeff isn’t seeing someone, Carol is.”

“Pfffewh,” Mary Kay snorted. “You mean Scott Deloutte? He’s just a partner at her firm.”

“More than a partner,” Beth said, resuming her dishwashing as Jeff pulled away from the curb in his BMW. “They’ve been seeing a lot of each other outside the office and Carol mentioned that tonight she’s going to his place to, as she put it, unwind and deconstruct.”

“Deconstruct, huh?” Mary Kay put a hand on her hip, trying to make sense of that when Carol bustled in, flushed and bright-eyed.

“Hey,” she said, depositing her saucer and coffee cup in the sink, “shouldn’t we be heading over to Lynne’s? It’s almost three.”

The two women exchanged silent signals to continue the conversation later as Carol pulled on a pair of jeans and undid her skirt, quickly sliding it easily over her slim hips. “All these years of speculating what Lynne hid for us in her drawers and at last we’re gonna find out.” The skirt dropped to the floor. Carol picked it up and stopped, skeptical. “Hold on. You two were just talking about me, weren’t you?”

Beth, who couldn’t lie to save her life, blinked in embarrassment. Mary Kay, who harbored no such hang-ups, trilled, “Don’t be silly. We were talking about martinis.”

“Martinis?” Carol cocked a brow, intrigued.

“I was asking Beth if we should mix up a pitcher before we head over there. You know, for old-time’s sake.”

“And fortification,” Beth added, thinking she could use a boost, the exhaustion from Lynne’s death and arranging the funeral suddenly hitting her like a lead balloon.

They decided on Persephone’s Cosmopolitans, a martini they invented to celebrate Lynne’s remission, the night she first hinted that there might be a secret hidden in her drawer.

W
hat was hidden among Lynne’s private belongings had been the subject of constant speculation since Carol, Beth, and Mary Kay made the promise that they—and they alone—would clean out her stuff after she died.

Not that the women often discussed what would happen “afterward.” It was much easier, they had found, to pretend the cancer would blow away.
Poof!
That one morning Lynne would jump out of bed and be her old feisty self, so vibrant and full of life.

Oh, to see that Lynne again instead of the pale and thin shell she’d become. The women never stopped believing she would kick cancer to the curb and reappear better, brighter, even sassier than before.

Then, the miracle they’d been praying for came true. One glorious day in June as Mary Kay was driving Lynne back to Marshfield after a visit to her oncologist at Yale in New Haven, Lynne called Beth with fantastic news that the vigorous chemotherapy protocol had been worth the torture. All her scans came up clear, including the blood tests. No evidence of tumors anywhere, no protein tracers either. The cancer had simply vanished.

“You’re cured!” Beth screamed into the phone. “You did it!”

“Well,” Lynne said with hesitation,
“cured
isn’t a term that’s used in cancer treatment. More like remission.”

Who cared about vocabulary at a moment like this, Beth thought. “Whatever. Tonight we’re getting together to celebrate. The martinis are on me.”

Later, they gathered at Mary Kay’s house on what turned out to be an unusually warm early summer evening. The roses were in full bloom, saturating the misty air with heady, seductive perfume. Frogs croaked in the distance. Fireflies rose from the tall grass near Kindlewah Lake and a full moon drifted in and out of clouds above.

It would be their last pleasant gathering before the emergency meeting at Mary Kay’s house when Carol left Jeff, before Lynne’s cancer returned with a vengeance.

Carol, Mary Kay, and Beth bobbed in the pool, holding their glasses aloft in a toast to the health of their girl, Lynne, curled up on a chaise longue like a queen.

She saluted them in return with a glass of weak iced chamomile tea, the most potent potable left in her limited repertoire. “I have something to say and I need the three of you to make me a promise.”

“Same time, same place, next year,” Beth declared, refusing to abandon the myth that Lynne was cured permanently.

“I need you to promise that when I go. . .” Lynne paused to make sure Beth didn’t protest. “You will clean out my things. Not Sean, because it’ll be too painful for him. Not his sisters and, please, God, not his mother, because I can’t stand the idea of them rifling through my personal belongings. But you, because you are my closest friends and I trust you to keep my secrets secret.”

Lynne refused to say and, unwilling to upset her, they didn’t press, although that didn’t mean their curiosity was any more quelled. Whenever they got together, the three of them, the topic inevitably came up. What could be so risqué that Lynne needed to keep it out of the hands of her mother-in-law? Sexy lingerie. Sex toys. A sex video. Always, their minds ran to sex, and yet those things were so not Lynne. And if she did have them, who would give a flying fig?