Grape leaves were very relaxing. As subjects, they didn’t hold much interest for Jean—they were just ordinary three-lobed palmates, with scalloped margins where the veins came to tiny points at the edges. They were wide and sloppy, lazy and limp, like floppy hats or old slippers, and would make, she thought, a terrible ceramic. And yet, despite that, or perhaps because of it, she quite enjoyed them. They were leaves that could just be, without her thinking about how she should incorporate them into her work. They placed no obligations upon her. Unlike her friendships.
It was about nine in the morning; Cheryl wasn’t awake yet, and Fran was working outside the house. She had adopted as her new task the neglected strip of garden that lay beside the driveway, and when Jean had left her she was tearing out weeds with the fervor of an exorcist ridding a damned soul of its demons. So Jean was free to wander the eastern acres of the vineyard, among the Cabernet Franc vines, and let her mind roam without distraction.
There had been times in the past, as Jean was coming to the end of a very complicated and ambitious ceramic, and she had solved all the problems she had encountered, and her vision was all but achieved, that Jean had felt a sort of wistful, yearnful sadness. Pouring yourself into an effort so completely, the way she did, made finishing it bittersweet. Success could feel like a kind of death. And so that moment—when she closed the kiln door on her final attempt, the one she knew was going to work—was always a little dangerous for Jean, and for her project. It was tempting to change something, to add something, to push the project in an odd direction at the last second so as to give it a new kind of life. Once or twice, she had succumbed to the temptation and it had worked out just fine. More often, it had ruined everything.
Something like that perilous melancholy was settling on Jean now.
As she stood in the midst of the tall vines, Josef Binderman appeared in his overalls at the end of the row. He shambled toward her, taking his time. The sun was off to the left and the shadows from the leaves made a pattern of mountains across his face.
“You like it, yes?” he said. “In the sunshine, with the grapes?”
“With the leaves,” said Jean. “Yes I do.”
A little frown of confusion came and went over Josef’s brow. He tapped his nose with a knobby finger and sniffed the air. “Now the grapes are young, you know. But coming close to harvest time, the air is thick with the sweetness.”
“Have you worked here a long time?”
His eyes crinkled as he smiled. “Now I am one of the buildings, like the barn. Many owners have come and go, but I stay. That’s why I say to Mrs. Yoon, don’t worry. I am not going to leave you with nobody.”
Josef lifted a casual hand toward a small bunch of grapes, hidden among the leaves. They were still a milky green, like the Riesling grapes in the western acres, and small, the size of blueberries. He pulled a few of them free, then popped one in his mouth, and Jean heard the crunch as he bit down.
“Isn’t that sour?” she asked.
“Of course,” he said, grinning. “But still it’s good to me. I said to Mrs. Yoon, ‘Right now your life is like these grapes you know. Very sour. But soon it will come the sweet.’” He worked his jaw for a moment and spat out the seeds.
In Jean’s view, certain old people, and Josef seemed to be one, fostered an absurd and rather tragic optimism about the future. Perhaps it was denial, working its evil spell. She adjusted the strap of her shoulder bag and held her hand out for a grape, and after a second of uncertainty the old man dropped one into her palm. “Josef,” she said. “What if Cheryl’s life doesn’t ever become sweet?” She squeezed the hard little grape between her finger and thumb. “What if you knew it would stay as hard and sour as this?” While she waited for Josef to answer, she put the grape between her teeth and bit down. The juice was tarter than lemon, and her face contorted so much that one eye closed. It seemed to sum up Cheryl’s situation nicely.
Josef rubbed his bristly face and gripped his nose as Jean flicked the sour grape into the dust. “Some years, that happens, you know,” he said. “Maybe the weather is not too good, the sun doesn’t come. The grapes don’t get ripe.”
“What do you do then?”
Josef pressed his lips together in a way that looked schoolmarmish to Jean. “Then is a good year for compost.”
Her other friends had been more or less contented. Looking back over what she had accomplished, Jean had to admit that it had been easy to work with contentment. She’d simply had to find a way to bring that essential happiness to a final, poetic peak before trimming off the last unwanted part of life like some ugly porcelain fettling. But Cheryl’s experience was entirely different. She was living a sour-grape life. It didn’t require much sunny-vineyard reflection for Jean to decide that here she needed a different approach.
There were no children in Cheryl’s life; even if it was impossible for Cheryl to articulate much of anything about her situation, that was obvious from the lack of pictures on the wall. There was clearly no longer any husband, either, and no friends near her other than Mr. Binderman, who didn’t really count. For a woman in Cheryl’s situation, needing real understanding and support, a fussy elderly man was as useful as a ringing bird. Jean thought that of all the emotions Cheryl must be trying to wash away with her desperate drinking, loneliness was probably the strongest. Jean had so much to make up for in her past with Cheryl, and the loneliness of her friend loomed very large indeed.
As they walked back toward the barn, with Fran visible in the mid-distance, on her knees, clawing at the earth, Jean’s phone rang. She took it out of her bag expecting to see Welland’s picture, but saw instead that it was Milt. Her face went cold and her hand trembled a little as she brought the phone to her ear.
“Hello, Milt?”
“Jean, where are you?”
She smiled at Josef Binderman and moved slightly away. “How are you doing, Milt? I’m so sorry about what happened at Natalie’s. I’ve been thinking of you just about every hour since then and I—”
“Jean,” Milt interrupted, “I’m not calling about that.” He was using his stern voice, which he reserved for moments when he felt his concerns outweighed those of anyone else. But Jean didn’t mind because it swept her instantly back to a time when the two of them were planning their wedding and Milt would be take-charge about something, like wanting to invite his slouchy cousin Hendrick from Lethbridge or refusing to pay for a proper professional DJ, and he would brook no resistance. It reminded her of an era when neither she nor Milt had even heard of Louise Draper, and Marjorie was so far from death that she was still a forbidding presence in their lives and her opinions of Milt and his career and Jean and her art lay like a shadow upon them. And this was what they had thought of as hardship.
“What, then?” said Jean.
“There are two police officers here wanting to speak to you.”
“Oh.” She wondered whether, for Milt’s sake, she should sound surprised. Would that be less worrying for him, or more? “Well, right now I’m visiting a friend.”
“Who? What friend?”
She hesitated.
“Is it a man?”
“Milt, don’t be ridiculous.”
“Well why won’t you tell me?”
Jean smiled again at Josef Binderman, who was hovering as if he had something to say. “I just don’t think I should have to share everything with you all the time,” she said. “I think I should be allowed that privilege for once. Let’s remember the months and months of you neglecting to tell me some very important things.”
“But the police—”
“Milt,” she said. “Just hold on.” Her phone had beeped and, taking it away from her ear, she saw Welland’s handsome picture. She pressed a button. “Hello, Welland?”
Her brother’s voice boomed into her ear with all his earnestness. “Jean, I wanted to let you know that those city detectives are heading to your house to see you.”
“Thank you, Welland. I already know that.”
“How? I just saw it in the system.”
She looked to the cloudless sky. “Obviously, Welland, that system is not the end-all and be-all. If you want to do police work you should probably do your own finding out of things also.”
“Well, you should get back here or it’s going to look like you’re hiding something. And, oh, by the way, you should tell Natalie the same thing because they want to see her, too. I assume she’s with you because she’s not at work and she’s not answering her door. And guess what, Jeanie? I found that out all on my own.”
“You . . . went to Natalie’s?”
“Yes, I did. Looking for you. First her grooming place, all locked up, and then her house. Stood knocking at her door for twenty minutes in case she was in the shower or something. Nothing. Zippo.”
Zippo. He was trying to sound like Andrew Jr. “Well, Natalie is not with me.”
“Then where is she?”
“Welland,” said Jean, “I have to go. Thank you for being so sweet and worrying about me. I love you, and goodbye.” She punched a button and gave a little wave to Josef Binderman, who was still not going away. “Milt,” she said, “are you still there?”
“Jean Horemarsh?” said a strange voice. “This is Detective Rinneard speaking. Your husband—”
Jean snapped her phone shut. It was probably a silly thing to do but it was the surprise—she couldn’t stop herself. She squeezed the phone in her hand and tried to picture what Detective Rinneard might look like, and the image came to her of a burly man in a dark suit and a fedora. Was that too old-fashioned? There weren’t any detectives on the Kotemee force so she didn’t know what to expect. Maybe these days all of them looked like Serpico. She imagined someone who looked like Serpico grabbing the phone out of Milt’s hand, and her heart started thumping. Maybe he’d hit Milt.
Josef Binderman began to approach and Jean did her best to smile. As she did her phone began to ring again, and when she looked down she saw Milt’s picture, which meant it was not Milt at all. The phone kept ringing and getting louder, so she just dropped the phone into her bag and chose to ignore it. Clamped the top of the bag shut with her hand.
“Josef,” she said over the ringing, “did you want to tell me something?”
And Josef Binderman, looking very perplexed, told Jean his idea.
Cheryl was not nearly as big as Natalie, but she was remarkably leaden. The dead weight of the drunk, Jean thought as she hauled on Cheryl’s clammy arm in her bedroom, and it reminded her so much of trying to move Natalie over the kitchen tiles that she half expected Cheryl’s head to flop backward like a lid.
“You know what we should do?” said Fran. “We should put our shoulders under her armpits and use our legs to lift.”
You wouldn’t have thought Fran would have any insight into moving an unconscious body, but then there was no telling what she’d had to deal with in those hotel rooms. Together they slid Cheryl off the mattress in her underwear until her heels thud-thudded on the carpet, and then they carried her like a snipered soldier out of the bedroom and into the shower. Cheryl was not cheerful about it when she came to, and she flailed a bit, ripping down the shower curtain and giving Jean a nice smack on the forehead. But eventually she seemed to accept that it was two against one.
Josef’s idea had been simple, but really very inspired (it was almost as if Austrian common sense was a higher caliber of common sense). He’d come to his idea, he told Jean, when he’d spotted Cheryl’s truck in the parking lot. He explained how Cheryl had crashed her truck into the “Welcome to Bier Ridge” sign, not once but twice. And after the second time, the regional police had suspended her license and confiscated her keys. And so she had no way to leave. She was trapped at the winery. His idea was for Jean to take Cheryl somewhere, anywhere, and give her a different view out her window.
“A change of scenes can do some wonders,” he said.
Such a simple idea, yet Jean knew that he was right. She’d learned firsthand, after all, just how trying it is not having access to a car. And she could see also how it was the winery that was amplifying Cheryl’s pain. It was an ever-present reminder of her disastrous marriage. It surrounded her with her own failure, like a cage built with bars of mistakes. Somehow this just made sense to Jean, because she had thought herself, a few times, about what life might have been like had she married a different man, or given birth to children, or even moved away from Kotemee. Gone to someplace where she was brand new and alone, a smooth pebble on a wide, wet shore. Someplace without any ties, without any friendships or family, no one who could remind her of how young she’d been once, how gorgeous and alive and full of promise. How eager she’d been to greet every morning. How long ago it had been.
After Jean and Fran had hauled Cheryl out of bed, after they’d scrubbed her and dried her and put her in clothes (Fran had been quite impressive in the way she’d held Cheryl’s wrists and stuffed them down the sleeves of her blouse—“Like forcing stuffing into a chicken,” she’d said), they fed her some coffee and porridge which, the porridge, they thought would be good for her stomach. Then they sat down with her at the dining room table, one woman on either side of Cheryl in case she should bolt or topple, and presented their plan. Jean talked about taking a long drive somewhere. To give her a change. To get her away from the winery, and the memories, and the incessant buzzing of that horrible, horrible bird; wouldn’t that be nice?
As she spoke, Jean could see past Cheryl, through the window. A lovely breeze ruffled the trees that guarded the house, shaking the leaves like the pompoms of cheerleaders, urging her on. But she found that keeping a smile on her face was a little more difficult than she’d expected. Because she was trying to fill Cheryl with a sense of hope that she herself could not really claim. A trip could change Cheryl’s immediate surroundings; it could even lift her mood. But Jean knew that it wouldn’t change any of the awful realities of her life. No drive through the countryside could repeal the sentence of old age. No afternoon on the beach could grant her the companionship and love of friends that gave shape and breath to each remaining day. Cheryl was still a prisoner of the hard truths, no matter where Fran’s SUV might ferry her. And Jean knew that she was now, herself, a fellow captive. This had been her sacrifice for her friends.
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.
Jean opened her mouth, and a second later formed the word, “Hello?”
“Is this Jean Horemarsh?” said a man’s voice.
“Yes?”
“This is Detective Rinneard again. You hung up on me before.”
“I’m sorry,” said Jean. She cleared her throat. “That was a mistake.”
“I would like to speak with you in person, Jean. It’s very important. Can you come to the police station right away? We can meet in your brother’s office.”
“Do you mean Welland’s office? Or Andrew Jr.’s?”
“I mean Chief Horemarsh’s office. I don’t know any Welland.”
Jean straightened in her seat. “I have two brothers,” she said. “Welland Horemarsh is also a police officer. Which obviously Andrew Jr. forgot to tell you.”
“Where are you now, Jean?”
“I’m on the road. About to eat a nice meal.”
Beside Jean the waitress appeared and pulled out a palm-sized pad. When she saw that Jean was on the phone she turned to leave, and as she did, Cheryl lifted her glass and made pinging noises against it with her fingernail. “Actually, make it two,” said Cheryl.
“Are you alone?” said Rinneard.
“No, I’m with friends.”
There was a very deep silence at the other end of the phone.
“Jean, listen to—”
She snapped the phone shut and set it down on the table’s glossy surface.
“Lose the connection?” said Fran. She shook her head sympathetically. “We’re probably not close enough to a city.”
“Why don’t you just turn it off?” said Cheryl.
Jean looked up and smiled at them both. She realized what it meant now that the detective had called from another phone. “I might get a call from Milt,” she said. Her husband’s face had been returned to her.
“Milt?” said Cheryl. “Do you mean Milt Divverton?”
“That’s right.” Jean beamed. “We started dating after you left, and then we got married.”
“But,” Fran leaned in and spoke in a showy whisper, “they’re not together anymore.”
“No, Fran, that’s not true,” said Jean. She patted the phone. “I think Milt and I are working it out.”
Fran flopped back against her vinyl seat in a display of utter relief, like someone who had learned her house had not been crushed by a mudslide. “How wonderful!” she exclaimed. “That is the best news. Because those two,” she directed this at Cheryl, “they are made for each other.”
For a moment, the three women in the booth seemed to glow in the warmth of Jean’s announcement, and Jean exercised forgiveness regarding the presumptuous thing Fran had said.
Shortly, the waitress returned with Cheryl’s second and third glasses of wine, and the women made their orders. Jean didn’t have much of an appetite, and she thought a spinach salad would be more than enough, because salads at steakhouses were always paradoxically large. Fran ordered a strip loin, cooked medium, in peppercorn sauce with a baked potato, and Cheryl chose a simple pasta. Jean thought she probably had a queasy stomach.
The waitress stopped at the serving station and picked up a grisly-looking bone-handled steak knife, which she set proudly beside Fran’s other cutlery.
“I’m surprised you’re only having a salad,” said Fran.
Jean drew her fingertip through the condensation beading against her glass of white wine. “Not very hungry,” she said. Her bright mood had been short-lived; in the last few minutes she had slipped from her lovely Milt thoughts to more of her miserable Cheryl ones. Because her mind had drifted back to the tragic situation, which was that the friend she wanted to help most in the world, the friend to whom she deeply wished to make amends, was the one friend she was going to disappoint yet again. You couldn’t escape thoughts like that. They were like water finding its level, like sad condensation trickling down the side of a glass. It seemed to Jean that the knowledge that she had failed Cheryl was going to be with her forever, like a puddle on the floor of her mind, and that whatever happened once they got back to Kotemee, and whatever happened with Milt, she could never be truly happy again.
And did she feel a tiny bit sorry for herself, as she sat in the orange vinyl booth? Probably. No one knew more vividly than her what a great blessing was the bliss that she had provided for Dorothy and Adele and Natalie, a joy that was pure and sweet and that would never dissolve into anguish and pain, the Marjorie sort of pain, just thinking about which made Jean shudder. And so as she dwelled on the misfortune of Cheryl, still drinking beside her, always drinking, she allowed herself to consider her own plight, which was almost as bad. Maybe worse in a way. Because as sad and disastrous as Cheryl was, she really had no idea how bad it was going to get. But for Jean, the knowledge was luridly clear. And in the face of it she was left to wonder, where was her moment of pure beauty, where was her gift of unalloyed bliss? Who was going to save her from the ravages to come? No one was, that was the answer. She was all alone. She was as alone, and as doomed, as Cheryl. Their fates were entwined. Indeed it seemed to Jean, as she glanced up and caught sight again of the logs burning gold against the blackened surround of the fireplace she could never have, that the only thing that could give her true joy now, a joy worthy of her own Last Poem, would be giving the same to her friend. And because Cheryl was miserable and there was no time to do anything about it, that could never happen.
And that was when Cheryl set down her wineglass, let out a deep breath with her eyes closed, and said the most remarkable thing. “Oh, God,” she said with a sigh. “I’m so happy to be going home.”
“I’m sure you are,” said Fran.
The little hairs on the back of Jean’s neck began to prickle.
“What did you say, Cheryl?”
“I said I’m so happy.” She pushed her hair behind her ear and looked at Jean, and leaned over to wrap her arms around Jean’s shoulders. “Thank you, thank you,” said Cheryl, giving her a sloppy, urgent squeeze. “I don’t know what made you come looking for me, Jean. But I’m so glad you did. I’ve been so miserable, for months. And now I’m not anymore, because you’re here, and . . . I’m going home.”
When Cheryl leaned back again she used her napkin to wipe the tears from her cheeks. “Excuse me,” she said. “I’m a little emotional. Maybe I should just visit the loo.”
Jean was so lost in thought and possibility that she didn’t twig, immediately, that she needed to move to let Cheryl out of the booth. It was Fran giving a little cough that prompted Jean to slide clear. And as she stood, watching her good friend, her rediscovered friend, making her way a little unsteadily to the washroom, Jean racked her brain and looked around, searching.
“Jean?” said Fran.
“Everything’s fine,” she said. Her eyes drifted, still searching, to the place setting in front of Fran, to the glass of cranberry juice with traces of lipstick on the rim, to the side plate and the salad fork and the bone-handled steak knife.
“Fran,” said Jean, grabbing the handles of her bag, “you stay here. I’m just going to check on Cheryl.”
“That’s a good idea.”
Three tables away, their waitress was busy taking orders from a young family with a black-haired infant in a high chair. A manager dressed in a stiff shirt and striped tie stood twenty feet away near the entrance to the kitchen. The serving station was deserted, so no one saw Jean pick up a steak knife as she walked past, and slip it into her purse.
It wasn’t the perfect solution, she knew. But this was likely her only chance. Cheryl had actually said she was happy – for Cheryl, this was surely something of a peak – and the situation called for improvisation.
She pushed open the heavy door of the washroom. A short, dim passageway led to the main area lined with stalls on one side and sinks on the other, where the walls were covered in a mottled gray tile, and a cool, unflattering light fell from bulbs recessed in the ceiling above. A silver-haired woman—about Marjorie’s age, Jean guessed—leaned against the sink counter with her face close to the mirror and applied a dark pink to lips drawn tight over her teeth. Jean scanned the rest of the echoey room, dipping her head slightly to check under the four stalls, and saw Cheryl’s feet at the far end. Jean knew she couldn’t just stand there, the old woman was already glancing at her through the mirror, so she entered the near stall, removed the serrated knife from her purse, and perched on the edge of the seat.
The old woman took an inordinate amount of time at the sink. And she made a lot of hum-humming noises as she finished her lips, noises that she probably couldn’t, herself, even hear. Jean tried not to imagine the disease that had very likely already begun eating its way through the woman’s insides, but it was too easy to picture her face, mere putty over bone, when the final days came, and the inhuman sounds she would make then. All Jean could do was hope for the woman’s sake that whatever took her would be quick, and that her children would be spared the duty of witnessing her agony.
Sitting there, waiting, Jean girded herself. It was going to be different, the thing she planned. It was going to be quite tricky. She wished she’d had time to practice, because it was the sort of thing you didn’t want to get wrong. Closing her eyes, she tried to do what athletes did, which was to visualize success in her mind. Her stance, that was easy—a warm embrace from behind, her cheek pressed against the side of Cheryl’s head. She tried to picture the motion she would use, the way a baseball player might imagine his swing. And her version of the ball going over the fence . . . hurray! . . . that was a vision of happy Cheryl, her eyes going suddenly wide, and the light within them dimming, softly but certainly, even as Jean’s own sight—an instant, a stroke behind—began to fade.
Milt . . . she thought of Milt, even though he wasn’t part of her vision, and her brothers, too, all of them saddened and confused. What could possibly have been going through her mind? Well, never mind. This was one time she didn’t have to explain or justify. Nobody needed to understand but her. Was it too much to ask for a moment of pure elation, and then nothing else?
The old woman’s heels finally sounded a diminishing clip-clip against the tile floor, and the heavy door’s hinges groaned. And when a sudden roar of flushing water came from Cheryl’s stall, Jean slipped quietly out of hers, hurried down the little passageway to the washroom door, and locked it.
When she returned, with the knife’s bone handle in her grip, she found Cheryl already at the far sink. As Jean watched from a few feet away, she washed her hands and then bent to splash water on her face. That was the perfect opportunity, and Jean recognized it as such. She came up behind, squeezing the handle of the knife, her heart jumping in anticipation of what she was going to do, for both of them. To the sound of running water she ran through it all one more time in her mind, a quick replay of triumph—stance, swing, home run, yay!—and waited for her friend to rise.
When Cheryl finally lifted her head she came only partway, letting the water drip from her nose and chin onto the porcelain. And it was a close call for Jean. She tried to calm her breathing because she’d nearly blown it, nearly jumped forward at the first Cheryl twitch. She told herself to wait, wait—swish, crack, over the fence!—she knew Cheryl would look up eventually.
And, eventually, she did.
Cheryl stood and stared into the mirror, and reacted with surprise to her friend looming behind her at the moment Jean swooped in. And everything went according to Jean’s mental rehearsal. She wrapped her free arm around Cheryl’s waist in a tight and loving embrace. She held her close as she pressed her cheek against Cheryl’s damp ear. She looked into the mirror to watch the dying light in her friend’s eyes. And then . . . well . . . then it all went crappy.
Before Jean could lift her knife hand to execute the twinned motion she’d planned—which, zip, zip, was sure to have worked perfectly—she took a last look at Cheryl’s face, and saw just what Cheryl saw. The dark pouches under her eyes, the sallow sag of her cheeks, the general shadow of despair. There was no happiness there, Jean realized. Not one little bit.
“I’m really a mess, aren’t I?” Cheryl said.
“Oh,” said Jean, trying to hide her disappointment. “No, you’re not.”
“Be honest, Jean. I remember you being honest with me before.”
Jean sighed and loosened her embrace. “All right, Cheryl. I admit that you’ve looked better. But I honestly think that’s true of anyone our age.”
Slowly Cheryl dipped her head, and her shoulders began to shake. Jean could hear the rise of her first, choking sobs. And so, before her friend’s pain took irrevocable hold, Jean did what she had to do. She laid her knife hand on Cheryl’s shoulder, turned her, and wrapped her friend in her arms. She held her and let the tears soak into her blouse and tried to absorb the shaking. And she apologized. She said all the things she’d wanted to say, about how wrong she had been to abandon her friend, from that day by the weeping willow, about how childishly she’d behaved, letting petty hurt and jealousy keep her from giving Cheryl all the love and support she deserved, and about how sad she was, how awfully sad, for Cheryl’s terrible loss all those years ago. She said everything to Cheryl. In fact, she said it more than once, because Cheryl’s extreme sobbing was making it hard for her to hear. “What?” she kept saying. “What?” It wasn’t ideal, actually. But Jean just kept on apologizing, as often as she needed to, as loudly as required, even as she dropped her knife to the bottom of the wastepaper bin. And she pledged to herself that she would always be there for Cheryl, for as long as it took, until the day she was deeply, unshakably happy. Even if that meant the two of them almost certainly getting old, which . . . well, looking at Cheryl, it wasn’t even a question.
A moment later, as Cheryl was mopping her eyes with toilet paper, the washroom filled with the sound of frantic banging, and the voice of Fran, crying, “Jean! Jean! Are you in there? Jean!”
Jean went to unlock the door. And when she pulled it open, there was Fran. Or sort of Fran. Her face had been remade, as if by another artist, into an expression of exaggerated horror. In her hand, she held Jean’s phone and, seeing Jean, she seemed not to be able to move.
“Have . . .” A whisper was apparently all the voice Fran could now muster. “Have you done something bad?” The noise of footsteps sounded behind Jean and Fran turned, her eyes fixed wide, to see Cheryl coming forward, wadding toilet paper into a tight, damp ball. She blinked and gaped again at Jean. “Milt called,” she whispered. “I saw his picture so I answered it. I didn’t think you’d mind. He told me I should run for my life.”
“Milt said that?” said Jean.
“Why would Milt say that?” said Cheryl.
“He said . . .” Fran swallowed. “Well, he said that Jean was very dangerous at the moment. Or words to that effect.”
Jean sighed and shook her head, and took the phone out of Fran’s hand.
“Nothing at all is going to happen to you, Fran,” she said. “I’m sorry, but you and I are just not that close.”
Jean paid their bill and the three women left, although no one had eaten a thing. They climbed into Fran’s SUV without a word. Fran in particular strapped herself in very gingerly.
As they made their way out of the parking lot and headed toward the highway, Jean thought about the people she was close to in Kotemee. Milt was first on her mind, of course, and not because she was annoyed that he’d upset Fran. Mostly she wondered whether this whole business would change the way he felt about her, because there were times when Milt was not very understanding and this was probably going to be one of those times. She thought about Welland, too, and worried about how this might affect his career, whether it would give him a bad feeling about police work, just when he was starting to get the hang of it. Andrew Jr. flashed through her mind as well, but she thought he would manage just fine.
As Fran merged onto the highway, Jean looked over her shoulder at Cheryl in the back seat. She still had the wad of toilet paper in her hand, and seemed confused but not distraught, as if she thought she might have misheard what Fran had said, or that she’d had some sort of alcoholic hallucination. At least she didn’t appear to be jumping to any conclusions, which Jean thought was very fair of her.
In the driver’s seat, Fran had the wheel in a firm grip. Her lips were pressed tight together, she directed a fixed glare at the road in front of her, and for once, Jean was pleased to see, she was driving in the fast lane at an appropriate speed. Jean thought the word that might best describe Fran just then would be determined. But she knew Fran well enough now to know there was probably a good deal going on under the surface. Fran had a lot more substance to her than she’d realized, and her mind was always working, and right now Jean figured it was probably swirling with all sorts of conflicting thoughts.
“Fran,” she said, “if you need to listen to Celine Dion all the way home, feel free.”
Fran turned her head slightly. “Really?” she said. “You won’t mind?”
“No,” said Jean. “It’s absolutely fine.” And she opened the glove box to let Fran choose.