Some plans turned out to be more difficult to achieve than you imagined.
Jean had always known that she was taking a chance just showing up at Cheryl Nunley’s door, but she’d always assumed it would be a normal sort of chance—the chance that Cheryl might be extremely busy with house guests, or the chance that she might be away on vacation, or the chance that she might be having an exceedingly bad day, like the one she seemed to be having when her police picture was taken. There was even the chance that after thirty-seven years Cheryl might have forgotten about Jean altogether and wondered what sort of insane person would drive all that way uninvited to see someone who didn’t even remember her. Because she believed her cause to be loving and even noble, Jean felt those were chances she was willing to live with. She’d just never considered the chance that Cheryl might be a complete walking disaster. In a circumstance like that, practicality called for a bit of a rethink.
For one thing, Jean decided to hold on to her apology to Cheryl for just a bit. Cheryl didn’t seem to be in a state to really appreciate the apology and how heartfelt it was. It was hard for Jean, because she had so much remorse to express. But it seemed best to just get Cheryl to a safe place, such as a couch, and not rush anything.
She tried to look at the positive: at least Cheryl remembered her after all these years, and even fondly so. In fact there’d been times, Cheryl said (as far as Jean could make out), when she’d seriously thought of calling Jean—at Christmas, for example, when she was really in need of a friend because she was so profoundly depressed. Apparently Cheryl was often depressed, and at Christmas it just got that much more crushing.
All that despair had certainly left its mark. She looked so old to Jean, as if the last thirty-seven years had used her up, sucked out the true Cheryl and left the loose exoskeleton of an old crab. She was overweight, and it wasn’t a well-carried weight, hidden by fashion and offset by posture, it was sloppy and slouchy, as if she had completely given up. Her eyes were sunken and tired. She had a puffy drinker’s face and her hair was a haphazard, burr-colored snarl. And her housekeeping! Jean had not yet quite recovered from that first moment when she and Fran had walked in the front door of Cheryl’s house, which had looked so sweet from the outside, and set eyes on the squalor and smelled the stench of piled up dirty dishes and discarded food containers and floors covered in seed husks and feathers and so many bird droppings the banisters seemed to be covered in stucco.
At that moment, as she was taking in the scene, Jean would not have blamed Fran if she’d turned around, jumped into her SUV, and fled into the Celine Dion–fired night. But Fran didn’t go. She gave Jean a look that suggested the two of them certainly had their work cut out for them, and then she just began cleaning up. She washed the dishes, for starters, while Jean did her best to get Cheryl to make some sense. When that proved a waste of time, Jean steered her upstairs and into the least soiled bed. And the next day when they came back, after spending the night at a bed and breakfast, Fran took it one chore at a time, never complaining, never tsk-tsk-ing as Jean feared she might, until, after a full day, the main floor of the house was almost presentable. There was only one condition that Fran imposed on Cheryl as she undertook all this work, and it was one that Jean fully supported: never, ever, not once, not as long as they were there, was that horrible, kettle-sounding bird to be allowed out of its cage.
While Fran worked away in the house, Jean gave herself two jobs. One was to keep an eye on Cheryl, because every time she wandered out of sight she came back more drunk. There was also a good chance she might at any moment dash off into the path of another oncoming car; Cheryl herself admitted that her leap in front of Fran’s SUV had been her fourth attempt in two days. She felt she was close to getting the timing just right.
The other job Jean assigned herself was to try and understand what was happening at the winery, because it was apparently causing Cheryl an awful lot of stress.
It was such a pretty property. The land was rounded, like a plump woman’s thighs, gradually sloping toward the lake in the distance, and over these long, gentle curves stretched rows of tall, fragrant vines dripping with young grapes. Jean strolled for a while between the vines, with miserable, stumbling Cheryl in tow, and she could almost taste the sense of hope and possibility that had drawn her friend here.
The house itself was a large split-level, probably built in the Sixties, painted the pale yellow of young corn and shaded by big trees—three maples and two oaks, all of them bright green and fluffy with leaves—and Jean could just imagine what it was like in the fall when the colors came, in that joyous October gush. Behind the house stood a tin-roofed barn covered in old, worn wood, and this barn was divided into parts: a work area, with two stainless-steel tanks each about the size of a garden shed; a storage room, containing hundreds of cases of bottled wine; and a kind of showroom, with big windows, a long counter, wood paneling, and Mexican tiles on the floor. This last part was the tasting room, or so Jean was told by a sweet, old, European man named Josef Binderman, who worked in the winery and spoke with a charming accent (Austrian, apparently, not German as Jean had thought), and who had a very wise way about him. It was Josef who took Jean on a tour of the facilities, told her about the vines, let her sample the wine juice that was aging in the steel tanks, and then sat her down at one of the big pine tables in the tasting room and filled her in on all the recent trouble.
So Jean had a sip or two of a white wine and a red wine, which were not bad at all, and she learned about Cheryl’s second husband, Tam Yoon, leaving three months before and just about cleaning out their joint bank account. She was told that the employees, all except Josef, had left because Cheryl could no longer pay them (or because Cheryl had once or twice been inappropriate while she was drunk). And Josef explained that, as small as it was, the winery was far too much work for one man, that harvest time was only a few months off, and pretty soon the whole thing was just going to grind to a stop. The grapes would rot on the vines, and Cheryl wouldn’t be able to sell the place for anything close to its value. And selling was Cheryl’s only option; Josef was as clear about that as he was about being Austrian.
Cheryl’s contribution during this meeting was to mutter over and over about Jesus, which surprised Jean because she had not known her friend to be religious. But then she saw that Cheryl was pointing at the light fixture in the ceiling, so she assumed she had misheard.
That night, after dinner, Jean and Fran relaxed on the balcony of their room in the little Dancing Brook Bed and Breakfast, which sat on a rise overlooking an old, arched iron bridge. What the bridge crossed—an exquisite, narrow gorge, with a waterfall that dropped like a silky tress of hair a hundred feet to the Lueswill Creek below, skirting the dark, jagged remains of this gouge in the rock, a majestic scar made by some vast, unknowable power that seemed to have torn away a hunk of the landscape deliberately, even in anger—could not be seen from Fran and Jean’s room. But they could see part of the bridge, which had been painted black, and they took pleasure in that.
Jean poured two glasses of Bier Ridge Riesling from a bottle Josef had given her and handed one to Fran. The two women were sitting in wicker armchairs and dressed in their pajamas and robes, having showered after a long day. Fran had worked particularly hard, Jean knew, which was why she had let her use up most of the hot water.
Fran took a sip of wine and pursed her lips in appreciation. “Oh, that’s very tasty.”
“And it’s very well earned,” said Jean. “My goodness, Fran, what you did with that house in one day. I couldn’t be more grateful.”
“Really?”
“I’d never have managed all that myself.”
Immediately Fran looked away, toward the trees that blocked the view of the gorge and most of the bridge, and Jean could see that she was trying not to smile too obviously. There was nothing superior about the smile, or triumphant. It seemed only that Fran wanted to keep some part of her delight private. She wiped the base of her glass against the edge of her robe and, having composed herself, turned back around.
“Something you probably don’t know about me,” she said. “When I was younger, my family didn’t have much money. So, to help pay for university, I worked on weekends as a hotel maid.”
“That is a surprise.”
Fran gave Jean the full weight of her gaze and nodded gravely. “I had to clean a few things worse than bird poop.” She squeezed her eyes tight for a moment, as if to shut out the memories. “Anyway, I’m just happy to be a help to you. That’s what friends are for.”
Jean heard that and let it pass; she was too relaxed to argue about words, about presumption. She sipped at her wine. And then, strange how the mind worked—a couple of women dressed in bathrobes, the scene toggling a brief memory—she thought of something. “My friend Natalie said that to me recently, that phrase.”
“You mean . . . about friends?” said Fran. She shrugged. “I suppose it’s a common expression. Like, ‘God moves in mysterious ways.’ Something we say to explain something that can’t fully be defined. Because no one ever completely knows what friends are for, but—they’re for things like that.”
“Doing the thankless work,” said Jean. “Out of a sense of duty, and affection.”
“That’s right,” said Fran. “Except, you thanked me.” She saluted Jean with her glass, and took another sip, and seemed to glow.
Somewhere on the other side of the house, the sky burned with the setting sun and, for the pleasure of Jean and Fran on the balcony, faint suspicions of pink washed into view. And hundreds of miles away, in Kotemee, thought Jean, a neighbor was undoubtedly beginning to wonder why Natalie’s Monday and Tuesday copies of the Star-Lookout had not been retrieved from her front step, and her customers would be vexed by the appointments she’d missed. And Welland, if he was any sort of policeman, if he had any hope, would be figuring out where Jean had gone. And in a hospital in the city, Adele might be rising out of her unfortunate coma. And even if none of those things came true, it was still very likely that tomorrow, detectives from the city would be knocking on her and Milt’s door. Finding Milt. Events were sure to move very quickly after that.
Jean said, “I have to decide what’s the best thing to do for Cheryl.”
Fran gave a quiet sigh. “How to help her,” she said.
“Make her happy,” said Jean.
“Because she’s in such terrible pain.”
“Yes, exactly.”
Fran nodded solemnly at this shared understanding of Cheryl, then shook her head in a way that Jean interpreted as only slightly judgmental, which she certainly felt Fran had earned. For a while the two women said nothing, as the sound of the unseen waterway, amplified by the hidden chasm, drifted up to them.