Random Acts of Kindness (3 page)

Nicole plunged her head back into the dishwasher, wiping clean some deeper part of the inside so neither Claire nor Jenna would see her face when she stated the next bold-faced lie. “I’m on sabbatical now. In August my clients are basking on beaches and too busy to worry about things like how to potty-train their three-year-old or motivate their teenagers to clean their rooms. So, do you have a route planned?”

“Jenna’s driving,” Claire said. “I’ve never been much for maps. And I’ve always believed that plans and travel frequently work best when they aren’t made together.”

Nicole tried to hit the mental brakes, but she couldn’t stop her mind from vaulting ahead of her better sense. In her kitchen sat a woman who’d just emerged from a brush with death and another who’d somehow untangled herself from a knot of domestic and professional obligations. If Nicole were a real therapist—which she
wasn’t
—she’d say this was a classic avoidance scenario, spurned by some stressful life change. If she were to give them advice—which she
wouldn’t
—she’d suggest they make plans, set an agenda, make reservations, decide on a final destination.

Two lost sheep.

“Ah, Nic,” Claire said, “I can tell from your silence that you’re sitting there thinking the two of us must have gone totally crazy.”

“I don’t have enough letters after my name to make that kind of diagnosis.” She squinted up at Claire. “But I do remember that the last time you took off on a long trip, you ended up doing a stint as a Buddhist nun.”

“This time I’m not subject to the lure of holy temples. My only job is to keep costs down as Jenna and I discover the lower forty-eight.”

Nicole remembered that Claire had once bragged she’d lived on three dollars a day while backpacking in Thailand, mostly by charming herself into the homes of many a native family for the sake of a free bed.

A free bed.

Ahhh. The quest for a free bed would certainly explain this surprise visit.

“The truth is,” Claire said, “I really do have a goal. Back in high school I left something unfinished, something I always wanted to check off but never did. So Jenna and I are planning to head back to Pine Lake.”

“Pine Lake?” Nicole knocked her head on the top of the dishwasher as she fell back on her hip. “
Our
Pine Lake? Three thousand miles away in upper New York State?”

Claire drawled, “Is there any other Pine Lake?”

Suddenly, Nicole was no longer sitting on the hard kitchen tiles. She was transported to a beach chair lakeside. The wind riffled the grass. Katydids chirped in the trees. She envisioned the sun turning the surface of the water late-a
fternoo
n gold. Her toes curled as she remembered the feel of sand sliding underneath her sandals. Her shoulders suddenly ached, a sunburn ache, crying out for an evening breeze under star-blasted skies.

Claire’s voice was tinged with concern. “Hey, are you all right?”

“I haven’t been home—there—in so long.” Nicole rubbed her head where she’d knocked it. “You took me by surprise.”

“I see that. What do you think, Jenna?” Claire nudged a startled Jenna with an elbow. “Is there enough room in the car for a life coach who appears to be in desperate need of a vacation?”

Nicole stood up and placed the screwdriver on the counter. Rather, she tried to place it down. Instead it clattered out of her fingers, the noise jarring.

“If only I had three weeks to spare.” Nicole stepped around the dishwasher parts and headed toward the hallway. “Why don’t I just make up the guest room for you two? I would love if you both stayed the night.”

Claire called out her name, but Nicole took the stairs pretending she didn’t hear. Nicole flung open the hall closet and hid behind the door to stare blindly at the folded linens. She was a fool to even consider the possibility. She had too much to do here at home, plus two other children and a husband who needed her.

And she didn’t deserve to be jaunting off on a three-week road trip as free as a bird.

Not while her son wasn’t.

Reno, Nevada

S
tanding on the second-floor walkway of the Silver Dollar Motel, Jenna drank horrendous motel coffee while watching trucks kick up dust on the busy road. Last night, the Reno skyline had been a blaze of neon bling, bright and enticing from a distance. Now those buildings were dull and wreathed with a blue haze, ugly in the harsh light of morning.

She turned to return to her room to pack the last of her stuff and noticed someone waving at her from the motel parking lot.  She stilled as a dark-haired woman shaded her eyes to squint in Jenna’s direction.

No. Can’t be.

Jenna blinked to loosen the grit from her vision. She blinked again, hoping this was just a mirage born of heat and air pollution. That couldn’t be Nicole standing in the blazing Nevada sun. Yesterday, Jenna and Claire had driven away from Nicole’s home, leaving the former star athlete back in California. But no, there Nicole was, crossing the cracked asphalt toward the motel stairs.

Jenna lifted her arm in greeting and tried to hide her dismay. She didn’t really like Nicole. Her aversion to this woman was stupid, and she knew it. It was a musty remnant of high school. Nicole’s only crime was being born well-mannered, efficient, confident, and gregarious. While Jenna had plotted for a week how best to approach her English teacher for the embarrassing necessity of asking for a college recommendation—then spent four days hovering at the end of class trying to balance the risk of being late for Calculus with the opportunity for a private moment—Nicole had just popped her head around the door and chirped,
Hey, Mrs. Peters, you think you could write me a rec?

Now Jenna watched the former star softball player bounce up the stairs to the second floor of the motel and then stride past the row of chipped maroon doors as if she were loping across the outfield to the pitcher’s mound with a hundred people cheering.

Jenna’s daughter, Zoe, walked like that, too, her sails billowed by easy confidence as she navigated through the mean-girl storms of middle school.

“Hey, you.” Nicole approached, digging into her wicker purse. “I bet you’ve been missing this.”

Jenna felt a sinking darkness as Nicole pulled a familiar smartphone out of her purse.

Nicole gave it a little tilt. “I misplaced mine once, and I felt like an amputee for days. I found this buzzing under the guest room bed.”

Deep
under the bed, Jenna knew, because she’d kicked it there herself and then went down on her hands and knees to make sure it slid far. Now she glanced at the screen and saw a single bar of power and a bunch of missed calls. It must have been vibrating madly on the hardwood floor for Nicole to have found it so quickly.

“Jenna?” Nicole dipped down to catch her eye. “Didn’t Claire tell you I was coming?”

“No. No, she didn’t.” She slipped the phone in her back pocket and wondered why Claire had kept mum. “Please tell me you didn’t drive all the way up here just to deliver this to me.”

“I did.” Nicole shrugged. “Reno is not so far away.”

Delirious relief seeped through her. Yesterday, Jenna had assured Claire that she would have been
thrilled
to bring Nicole along on the cross-country trip. It had been an easy enough thing to say after Nicole had turned the offer down flat. But the last thing Jenna wanted to do was share a car for three thousand miles with the Girl Most Likely to Succeed.

“I couldn’t help but notice that your husband called a few times.” Nicole’s smile was curious. “How sweet that he’s checking up on you.”

“I’ll call him later.”

She looked away from Nicole. Jenna was convinced that therapists received special ocular implants along with their licenses, mini-MRIs that beamed through flesh and bone, right to the gray matter where patients hid all their thoughts and secrets, motivations and lies.

“So.” Nicole leaned back to glance into the open motel room. “Where’s Claire?”

Jenna gestured to the far corner of the front parking lot where her Chevy was wedged between the concrete base of the motel sign and a muddy Ford pickup truck. From her vantage point on the second floor, Jenna could just glimpse Claire sitting on the hood of the Chevy, her legs crossed, her face lifted to the sky, completely oblivious to the flickering neon sign of the Silver Dollar Motel just above her or the sketchy group of men just by the road, watching trucks rumble down the drag while sucking on cigarettes.

Jenna said, “She does this every once in a while. Sits for hours. Sometimes in the car while I’m driving.”

“Meditating?”

“Lucky will even crawl onto her lap.”

“I’ll say hello when she’s done, then.” Nicole sank into one of the two slatted chairs and dropped her purse beside her. “This will give us a chance to chat.”

Jenna slipped a hip onto the metal railing, hoping Nicole didn’t see her knuckles go white. She wondered if Nicole wanted to “chat” as in fill the air between them with empty discussions about the weather or “chat” as in open up a vein and bleed her feelings over the second-floor railing.

“This trip you’re making with Claire is really wonderful,” Nicole said, tugging on the creases of her tan capris. “It was your idea, yes?”

Pass the razor, then. “She’s leading the charge. I just showed up on her porch and offered whatever help I could.”

“Help?”

“You’ve read the blog, right? I thought Claire would still be housebound. I thought I’d be fetching her meds and taking care of the chickens. But she had other things in mind. Did you know she has a blind possum living under her porch?”

“Honestly, I’m not a bit surprised. Who’s taking care of that blind possum now?”

“She left a note for her sisters. She said they’re up her ass 24/7.”

Nicole choked on a laugh. Jenna felt her face go hot. She didn’t swear by nature, but she rarely had the good sense to filter other people’s comments, either.

“I remember her sisters from Pine Lake.” Nicole stretched out her legs and squinted into the middle distance. “They showed up for every one of Claire’s fund-raisers. All four of them wearing batik blouses and long auburn braids, looking like the sister wives of some polygamous cult.”

Jenna remembered them, too, running out of one another’s rooms in Claire’s crowded house, borrowing one another’s clothes as they chatted about hair care and bra sizes and menstrual cycles, the atmosphere so much livelier than her own quiet house with its bubbles of personal space and deep silences.

Nicole said, “I remember Claire calling them the chick brigade. Though since Melana died, there are only three of them now.” Nicole fingered the cross at her throat. “I’m curious, Jenna. How did an offer to help a sick friend turn into a road trip?”

Jenna glanced away to scan the trucks zooming by the diner across the street. “She told me what she really wanted to do is get the hell out of Roseburg, Oregon. I said okay.” Jenna shrugged. “I had this crazy idea that maybe that’s what friends do.”

Nicole’s silence stretched out between them, a yawning gap in the conversation and a shimmering moment of tension. Unnerved, Jenna shifted her weight on the railing. On the trip to Reno, Claire had reminded Jenna that Nicole had a degree in psychology from the University of Chicago. With a pedigree like that, Jenna figured there was no reason to go through the agony of spelling everything out. It wasn’t like Jenna had changed so much since she’d been a gangly, socially awkward mouse in high school. All her life she’d struggled with relationships. She was finally trying to do something about it.

Zoe’s angry words rang in her mind.

You’re so stupid, Mom. You’re so blind.

“So,” Nicole said, “I assume your daughter must be out of the house for the rest of the summer?”

“Zoe’s at Camp Paskagamak until the end of the month.”

“Camp Paskagamak.” Nicole made a two-fingered salute and recited the camp’s motto: “‘Self-Reliance, Self-Esteem, Self-Respect.’ Do they still expressly forbid communication with the parents?”

“Except by snail mail.”

“Wow. I haven’t thought about those musty cabins in years. That place gave me a permanent phobia of spiders. I guess being home with Nate in an empty nest must have been a little unnerving, huh?”

Jenna regurgitated the easy lie. “He’s working on an installation. Usually he’s mild-mannered Dr. Jekyll, but when he’s in this phase of the process, he morphs into Mr. Hyde. He doesn’t want me around.”

At least that last part wasn’t a lie.

Nicole mumbled, “Artistic temperament.”

“Uh-huh.”

“It can be a nightmare to live with, I know. So your daughter is away, your husband in the heat of artistic creation, but how did you manage to get three weeks off from work? Your boss must be very generous.”

“My boss is a jerk.” Jenna winced at her own reaction. She took a moment to debate what to say and then decided there was no harm in the truth. “He’s the type who’ll scream at me red-faced over the numbers I just crunched ‘incorrectly,’ only to realize an hour later that it wasn’t my report in his hand.”

Nicole made an empathic grunt. “And then he won’t apologize.”

“Absolutely.”

“And yet, he let you take off for three weeks.”

Oh, Nicole was good, Jenna thought, she was really slick, slipping little needles of questions between easy banter. Jenna breathed against the ache in her chest, wishing she and Claire could just get back on Interstate 80 and head east. She breathed in and wondered how much longer Claire was going to meditate amid the rumble of trucks and the burned-roast smell of coffee rising from the diner across the street. Jenna breathed in and wondered why she was bothering to keep so many secrets.

“Jenna?” Nicole’s voice was hesitant. “I don’t mean to pry…but is there something going on with your job?”

Jenna turned her face away from Nicole’s X-ray eyes. All during the ride to Reno, Claire kept harping on the fact that Nicole looked stressed and unlike herself. But back in San Mateo, Jenna hadn’t gotten that impression at all. She’d seen a slim, fit woman stretched across a kitchen floor wielding a magnetic screwdriver like a conductor’s baton. She’d seen a woman as calm as a hurricane’s eye while her children swarmed around her setting the table and her strikingly handsome husband made dinner and brought them each a glass of wine with a charming wink.

The last thing Jenna wanted from a woman with such a perfect life was pity at the imperfection of her own.

“My boss sold the hedge fund.” Jenna leaned back against the railing and crossed her arms. “He cashed out so he can go build houses in Peru with his fifth wife. Teenagers like to do those things, I’m told.”

“Oh, Jenna—”

“I’ve got fifteen solid years of employment. I specialize in the semiconductor industry. I’ll get another job.” Although the thought of writing a new résumé and making cold calls to colleagues made her blood congeal. She searched for another subject, any subject. “Did Claire tell you we’re heading toward Salt Lake City this afternoon?”

Nicole hesitated just long enough for Jenna to know that Nicole had noticed the swift change in topic. “On the phone Claire mentioned something about visiting Jin Ng.”

“
Dr.
Jin Ng. She works at a cancer center. Claire said she helped her out early in the diagnosis.”

“And any free bed,” Nicole said, waving a hand at the cracked asphalt parking lot and the haze of highway dust, “has to be better than the Silver Dollar Motel.”

“Oh, honey, if you’re wrinkling your nose at this you’d never last three days in Wat Ram Poeng.”

Claire sauntered down the hallway, hauling Lucky under her arm. At her approach, Jenna felt a physical rush of relief that she would no longer be the center of Nicole’s undivided attention.

Nicole grinned as Claire approached. “That’s not on my bucket list, babe.”

“As a life coach it should be. A little time spent in a Buddhist temple would be spiritually transforming.”

“My clients aren’t looking for spiritual transformation. They’re looking to keep their teenagers away from Internet porn.”

Claire, her eyes crinkling gently at the corners, handed Lucky to Jenna. “You have your phone back?”

Jenna patted her pocket in response and let Lucky down to sniff around.

“That’s good,” Claire said. “We need your phone if we’re going all the way across the country. Mine’s so old I swear it’s powered by mice running on treadmills.”

Claire settled into the other chair, her T-shirt billowing out and then ballooning back in. Under three pink ribbons it said,
Yes, they’re fake! My real ones tried to kill me.

“So,” Claire asked, her gaze settling on Nicole, “couldn’t resist trying your luck in the lovely casinos of Reno?”

“You know why I’m here, you manipulative witch. You put the bug in Lars’s ear.”

“Good man, your Lars. He got any brothers?”

“He told me I’m banging off the walls in my house. I told him I was
fixing
them. He told me that if I kept spackling plaster and soaping up double-hung window sliders, I’d completely unman him.”

Claire raised her brows. “I met the man. I don’t think that’s possible.”

Jenna bent over to give Lucky a scratch, for no other reason than to hide the fact that she hadn’t a clue what was going on. She was as lost in this conversation as she had been the other day in Nicole’s kitchen. It crossed her mind that maybe this was what it was like to really
know
someone—to be able to talk past each other and yet still understand, instead of swimming in incomprehension.

“Lars actually packed my bags,” Nicole confessed. “But he’s not the only reason why I’m here.”

Claire’s eyes danced. “I put the hook in good, didn’t I?”

“You told me that you left something unfinished in Pine Lake, something that you had to do.”

“Now, Nic, it’s not like Jen and I are going to knock off any convenience stores or anything.”

“Jenna?”

Jenna started and glanced up to find Nicole tilting her head back, looking at her with those clear brown eyes.

Nicole prodded, “Do you know what this mysterious goal of Claire’s is?”

Jenna hesitated. Claire had mentioned going to Pine Lake only yesterday. Jenna had gone along with it, because she didn’t really care what she did for the next three weeks, as long as it took her farther and farther away from Seattle.