Practical Jean (26 page)

But as her gaze wandered while she made her case—Cheryl wasn't looking at her anyway—Jean could tell that Fran was quite convinced a trip would do Cheryl some good. She looked as firm and certain as a coconut. There was something sweetly naive about that. So, almost for Fran's sake, Jean kept on, kept talking, selling the plan to Cheryl the way she might sell a ceramic that was slightly cracked.

“So, Cheryl,” she concluded, “what do you say? Let's go on a nice drive. We can go for a couple of days if you like.”

“It'll be fun!” exclaimed Fran.

“All you need to do is tell us where you'd like to go.”

Sitting between them, her face still shiny pink from the washcloth, her hair neatly brushed, and dressed in clothes without any trace of vomit, Cheryl stared forward in silence. She blinked a few times and waved a hand in front of her face, as if she were trying to clear away fog. And when she opened her mouth, she said just about the last thing Jean expected.

“I want to go home.”

Jean glanced over toward Fran and back again. “What do you mean, home?” she said.

“To Kotemee.”

“Well, that's
easy
!” exclaimed Fran.

“No, no,” said Jean. She put two firm hands on Cheryl's arm. “I meant go for a nice day trip somewhere. Isn't there a lake you'd like to swim in, or a museum you'd like to see?”

“I want to go
home
,” shouted Cheryl. She ripped her arm from Jean's grip and would have fallen out of her chair with the momentum if Fran hadn't been there to block her.

“I think she really wants to go home,” said Fran.

“But Cheryl,” said Jean, “it's been thirty-seven years. Do you even know anybody there anymore?”

Cheryl's thick, dopey eyelids blinked at Jean. Her lower lip was quivering.

“I know
you
,” she said.

It took about an hour for Cheryl, with Fran's help, to pack a suitcase. Fran, describing later how it went, alluded to a lot of Cheryl throwing things toward the suitcase from her closet, a lot of Fran doing her best to scrape together a few ensembles from the heaps, and a lot of Cheryl lying down on the heaps that Fran was trying to sort through. She spent a further twenty minutes saying goodbye to her bird, which, in Fran's account, involved Cheryl muttering incomprehensibly and passing slices of peach through the wires of his cage, while the bird whistled like a football referee.

Jean spent that time making arrangements with Josef Binderman, who seemed almost giddy at not having Mrs. Yoon to worry about for a while (though he was rather less thrilled about adopting the bird). He said that while she was gone he would talk to other winery owners in the area and see if he couldn't line up a buyer, and Jean had no doubt that he could. When she said goodbye, Josef reached out for her hand, brought it toward his white-stubbled chin, and kissed it. It was an old-man sort of thing to do, Jean thought. Possibly Austrian. And quite pleasant.

They hadn't been in Fran's SUV for two minutes before Cheryl was asleep in the back seat, and she stayed there, snoring, while Fran and Jean paid for their room at the Dancing Brook Bed and Breakfast, and had a quick look at the gorge. When they got back on the road, Fran reached toward the glove compartment and began to take out a Celine Dion CD.

“Fran,” said Jean, “I know you love Celine. But would it be okay if we took a break from her very impressive voice for a while?”

“Of course,” chirped Fran. She dropped the CD into the glove compartment and snapped the door closed. “Actually, I'm glad you said something. I think we know each other well enough now to be honest about things like that, don't you?”

“Yes,” said Jean. “I do.”

“That's part of being friends, isn't it?”

Saying this, Fran seemed to watch the road even more intently than usual. Jean heard the yearning hum of Fran's tires against the pavement, saw her fists tight around the wheel, and felt her own inner resistance crumbling. “I guess it is,” she said finally. And Fran, eyes on the road, lit the Cadillac's interior with her grin.

A few minutes later, as they merged with the highway traffic and Fran secured her position in the fast lane, Jean's phone began to ring. She reached into her purse as if it were a mousetrap, and pulled it out gingerly. Welland.

“You're at Cheryl Nunley's!” he crowed when she answered. “And no, I didn't get that from the system. I just noodled it out.”

“Very good, Welland. But we're not there anymore. We're on our way home.”

In the driver's seat, Fran gave Jean a cheery thumbs-up.

“But, Jean, I don't think that's such a good idea.” Welland's voice became dark and hushed, and as he spoke a picture came to Jean's mind of her brother crouching down behind his desk, beyond the view of Tucker's Car Wash outside his window, like a small boy hiding from his parents behind the living room couch. “Jean, I'm sorry to tell you, Adele died this morning.”

“Did she?” Jean allowed herself a small smile, even as her vision misted over a little.

“Yes, and there's city detectives all over the place here. There's some at your house, and some over at Natalie's, and there's even two of them in Andrew Jr.'s office.”

“I see.”

“There's all this crazy talk, Jean. You won't believe what they're saying. I don't even want to tell you it's so crazy. But just—maybe don't come home right away. Get a lawyer.”

“Welland,” said Jean, “do you think you should be telling me this? You might get in trouble.”

“I'm scared for you, Jeanie.”

He didn't have to tell her; she could hear the fear in his voice. She told him not to be scared, that everything was going to be okay. She said this not because she thought it was true, but because she was his big sister. She was the matriarch of the family now and it was her responsibility. And it worked; when Welland spoke again, she could tell he was a little calmer.

“I keep thinking about what Mom said. Remember what I told you at the funeral?”

“I remember,” said Jean.

“You're strong, Jeanie. You're a strong woman. That's what she said.”

“I know.”

“I'm not making it up.”

“I know you're not, Welland.”

After she said goodbye, she held the phone in her lap for a while and watched the Buicks and the Toyotas and the Fords passing them on the right, rushing by in the slow lane like chosen people, and it didn't bother her because she had much bigger concerns. She turned and looked back at Cheryl, still asleep on the soft leather of the Cadillac.

She had so little time.

“Is everything all right?” asked Fran.

Jean straightened in her seat again and set the seatbelt like a sash against her chest. She stared out the windshield at the diminishing road and breathed in the Cadillac air. “Fran,” she said, “do you ever think about getting old?”

“If I think about it I get too depressed,” said Fran. “So I try to stay busy. Or I listen to Celine, and she just drives those thoughts right out of my head.”

“I think about it all the time,” said Jean.

“Well, you know what they say about getting old,” Fran chuckled. “It's better than the alternative.” When Jean said nothing, Fran took her eyes off the road just long enough to glance over. “Don't you think?”

She had so little time.

Halfway home, with the afternoon sun hanging just above Jean's passenger-side window, Cheryl sat up, awake.

“I'm hungry.”

When Jean looked back, she felt a surge of relief, because the woman she saw, even with sleep-flattened hair, was so much more like the Cheryl she'd known years before. Her eyes were clearer, she had more true color in her cheeks—not just the grapefruity pink of washcloth abrasion—and she smiled at Jean, for the first time, as if she really knew her.

“Hi, Jean,” she said.

“Hi, Cheryl.”

“Is there any wine in the car?”

Fran said she was overdue for a pull-off, and so the women started looking for signs announcing a town that might have a nice restaurant. Fran also whispered to Jean that she didn't think it was wise for Cheryl to stop drinking all of a sudden, since it was the sort of thing that could lead to erratic behavior, of which Cheryl had already proven herself quite capable. And they were, after all, in a moving vehicle.

“You're very practical, Fran,” said Jean. “My mother would have loved you.”

They were passing a sign for Priormont, population 23,896, and Fran was giving it a thumbs-up, when Jean's phone rang again. She looked at the picture and felt sick, because it was Milt's face. Which meant it probably wasn't Milt, it was Serpico in a fedora. It seemed to Jean as if those detectives had stolen her husband's face from her.

“Aren't you going to answer it?” piped Cheryl from the back seat.

“Not just now,” she said, and slipped the ringing phone into her purse.

Fran curved off the highway at the next ramp, and as they drove toward Priormont in search of a place to eat, Cheryl regaled them with stories from Jean's youth. It was as if she had risen from a sleep of decades and even the smallest event was fresh. She told stories about beloved boys, and broken bra straps, about reading Tillie Vonner's diary, watching Dorothy Perks kiss, and the time Jean got a mouthful of dragonfly when she was bicycling down the Conmore Avenue hill. There was never a moment in Cheryl's account of the past when the two of them were not friends, when they felt betrayed by one another, or abandoned, and when the stories were over and they were pulling into the parking lot of a tidy-looking steakhouse, Jean was more depressed than ever. Because all of her deep affection for Cheryl had come rushing back, and the thirty-seven years of friendship the two of them had lost stretched behind her like a petrified forest, agonizing in its near-beauty, its almost-life. And she wanted more than ever to do for Cheryl what she had done for Dorothy, and for Adele, and for Natalie, which time and circumstance now made impossible. She wanted to give her a moment of pure happiness that sank deep into the muscle and bone of her soul, and then save her from the pain that would surely come spilling in the moment Cheryl remembered that she was a disaster.

From the restaurant's parking lot they made their way up a flagstone path, past the log-look exterior and a wide, plate-glass window through which Jean caught a glimpse of a fireplace. Forever, it seemed, she had wanted a home with a fireplace—the smell of wood smoke coming from chimneys in the fall always sparked in her a great longing – but it had always been denied her, because when she and Milt were house shopping, the sorts of homes that had fireplaces were the sorts they couldn't afford. Milt had told her at the time that one day he would build her a fireplace, and of course that had never happened. Walking into the restaurant it occurred to Jean that she had lived the best years of her adult life without so many of the things she had wished for—her dear friend Cheryl, a fireplace, her mother's spoken respect—and the combined tragedy squeezed and packed the sadness she was feeling even deeper inside her.

At the little sign asking them to wait for service they stood politely. The restaurant was not very busy, because they had arrived before the dinner rush, but even so it took a while for someone to come and seat them. Beside Jean, Cheryl was rubbing her arms as if she were cold, and her breathing was becoming panty, like a dog's. Fran and Jean exchanged a glance that said they both knew what was happening, that it was the withdrawal and they'd better get a glass of wine into Cheryl as fast as they could. So when the waitress finally came, wearing a crisp white shirt and her hair tied back with a black ribbon, and led them to a booth with orange vinyl upholstery, the most important thing was getting in an order for drinks before she was gone. It took a minute then for Jean to notice that they'd been seated with a view of the fireplace she'd seen through the window. When she realized it, her throat became suddenly tight with emotion. Sitting near the fire, with Cheryl next to her in the booth, and Welland's reminder echoing in her head, it seemed to Jean almost as if she were being given a taste of the life that could have been.

“This is quite nice,” said Fran, getting comfortable on the seat opposite Jean. “I think I'm hungry enough to eat a cow.” She paused, and giggled. “Jim and I were in India once, and I said the same thing and got some very sharp looks.”

Cheryl seemed unamused by Fran. She was sitting hunched and more dog-panty than ever, and in her lap she was rubbing the knuckles of her hands as if she had just punched someone. “Where's that waitress?” she said.

“She's coming,” said Jean, “don't worry.” She tried to use her most calming voice, and patted Cheryl's arm, and she could see the slightest easing of the distress in Cheryl's face. The thought passed through Jean's mind that if the two of them had remained close for all those lost years—if she had not abandoned her friend—it might have given Cheryl the support she needed to never become an alcoholic. She felt more protective of Cheryl in that moment than she had for any of her friends, and worse than ever about herself.

Jean's phone rang again as the waitress arrived, and she picked it out of her purse while the drinks were being distributed. Fran took a sip of the cranberry juice she'd ordered.

“You're very popular today,” she said. “I only wish my phone rang half as much.”

Cheryl, who was obviously not happy that her drink was the last to be served, half turned to Jean. “Well?” she snapped.

Jean said nothing. She simply stared at the ringing phone in her hands. There was no picture in the little display, which meant the call was from an unrecognized number. She never got calls from unrecognized numbers, and she was at a loss for what to do.

“Oh, for God's sake,” said Cheryl. She put down her glass, which was already half empty, grabbed Jean's phone and opened it, then she shoved it against Jean's ear. “
Speak
,” she said, and went back to drinking.