Kindred Spirits

by Sarah Strohmeyer

  Out of the corner of her eye, Carol absently admired Jeff’s suit—an expertly tailored Brooks Brothers double-breasted with a slim silk dot tie. She entertained the possibility of a young girlfriend picking out his stylish accessories, wrapping his half-Windsor knot and brushing off his sleeves.

  After all, she was getting closer to Scott. It was only reasonable that Jeff would have found someone else too. She observed how the muscles in his jaw flexed as he kept his emotions in check during the reading of “Adieu, adieu,” the last line of John Keats’s Fairy Song. She let herself drink in the smell of his Neutrogena aftershave that reminded her of their nightly ritual of lying in bed, her head on his shoulder, as he discussed his patients, unraveling his day.

  What did she feel? Regret? Longing? Anything?

  Carol realized then it didn’t matter what she felt. Not anymore. They had been “torn asunder,” to quote their wedding vows. They were two, no longer one. Spiritually, psychologically, and, most important, legally. So, that was that.

  Lynne’s son Kevin delivered a eulogy and then Beth stood up and delivered an emotional, if rambling, testimony about her friendship with Lynne. She recalled meeting her next-door neighbor while she was shoveling snow off her front walk and how they discovered they were both new mothers with babies about the same age. Those babies—Beth’s son, David, and Lynne’s twins Kevin and Kyle—grew up together and became best friends, just like Beth and Lynne. Every week, she and Lynne went grocery shopping together. They shared clothes and divided and exchanged their perennials and occasionally Beth had to call on Lynne to remove the dreaded garter snake from her periwinkle patch.

  Lynne had become such a part of her life, Beth said, she couldn’t imagine going on without her, though she supposed that, like Lynne’s husband and sons, she would have to adjust.

  “It really is true that life comes with a guarantee of death, I’m afraid.” Beth gripped the podium, her voice shaking with grief and, Carol suspected, an innate fear of public speaking. “I kept hoping if I loved her hard enough that I could keep her with me, but not even love, I’ve learned, can postpone the inevitable. Wherever Lynne is, I know she’s in a better place and I hope you—Sean, Kevin, and Kyle—can find comfort in knowing she is finally out of pain.”

  By the time Beth returned to her pew, Carol had dissolved into tears, weeping over the totality of loss and the gnawing hunger of unremitting heartache.

  The church was silent as local musician Jake Fenster hooked a Spanish guitar around his neck and began strumming a slow song that sounded familiar, although Carol couldn’t quite place it.

  Beth’s husband, Marc, and one of Sean’s brothers pushed Lynne’s coffin down the aisle and everyone rose. Sean followed, along with the boys. Next came Mary Kay and Beth. Carol slipped out of her Blahniks with the four-inch heels, drew a pair of flats from her bag, and joined them.

  Beth gave her a big, hard hug. “Ready to say good-bye to our girl?”

  Carol’s nose went hot. Trusting her Blahniks to Jeff, she joined the other pallbearers taking their positions by Lynne’s casket. Kevin and Kyle stood in the front. Beth and Marc shored up the middle. She was next to Mary Kay, who said, “We’ll get through this.”

  “We have no choice.”

  They lifted and adjusted the coffin’s weight on their shoulders. It was heavy. Too heavy. Carol had to shift her feet to keep it from sliding off. She staggered a bit on the top step and for one brief, panicked second as her knees wobbled, she was sure she was going to drop it and ruin everything until Mary Kay reached out and steadied her with a firm grip.

  “Link arms,” she said. “We can do it if we do it together.”

  Carol entwined her arms with Mary Kay’s and they proceeded down the steps, carrying Lynne toward the black open hearse and her final resting place in the Old Town Cemetery, where she would join DeeDee Patterson and her sisters from the original Ladies Society for the Conservation of Marshfield.

  Not until Jake walked behind them, strumming on his guitar and singing, did Carol peg the tune Lynne had chosen for her final exit.

  “Wish You Were Here” by Pink Floyd. Vintage Lynne.

  It was good to be home.

  Chapter Four

  What is it about funerals that leave people so famished?

  Beth bustled about her dining-room table, refilling the hot mulled cider and checking on the state of the balsamic chicken wings, fast disappearing. She put down the pot and fetched the chicken-wing tray, pleased with how guests were loading their plates and returning for seconds. It had been a tremendous amount of work, setting out such a spread, but with rain streaming outside her windows and cold wind blowing, the menu of soups and warm homemade bread, chicken wings, and hot cider had hit just the right spot.

  Of course, she’d had some help. Mary Kay ordered a raft of authentic smoked salmon from her native Alaska and for that Beth had made her mother’s special cream cheese with capers, red onions, and fresh chopped dill. Carol had brought from New York four dozen bagels that Tiffany sliced and put out, along with several bottles of good wine also from the back of Carol’s town car.

  Beth’s mother, Elsie, provided a plate of cold cuts and crudités. Sean’s sisters had assumed the arduous task of combining the fruit salad—cantaloupe, honeydew, grapes, strawberries, and pineapple—to go with a couple of batches of chocolate-chip cookies baked by Sean’s mother.

  But she had done the rest. With Lynne.

  When Mary Kay came to the library last Thursday morning, Beth had been in her cluttered office, typing up the monthly newsletter announcing their reading list for the “cabin fever” book group series, the most popular of all their library clubs because it took place after Christmas when snow and cross-country skiing were beginning to lose their white charms and folks were itching for companionship. The Help, by Kathryn Stockett, led the list. A big book, but most everyone had read it so they’d be up to speed. She’d been tapping a pencil against her teeth, debating whether to include Saving CeeCee Honeycutt, by Beth Hoffman, or the latest Tracy Chevalier when out of the corner of her eye she saw Mary Kay framing the doorway.

  She was in her purple scrubs, the ones with the dancing teddy bears on the top, and her black curls were held back by a cheery bandana in a matching pattern. But there was something else. Something off.

  Beth hopped up from her desk, the pencil clattering to the floor. “Is everything OK?”

  Feeling light-headed, Mary Kay slid down against the wall of Beth’s office and crumpled into a heap on the floor, her torso bent over her knees.

  “Oh my God!” Beth gasped. “What’s wrong?”

  Mary Kay roused herself, and when she looked up at Beth, her eyes were glassy. “I’m so sorry, Beth. I don’t know how to tell you.”

  What? Beth felt like she might crawl out of her skin if someone didn’t explain right now exactly what was going on. And yet, and yet, through her racing panic she knew. In the back of her mind she sensed what Mary Kay had come to say.

  “Lynne,” Mary Kay began, her chest heaving, her hand gripping Beth’s upper arm, her thumb pressing into her flesh so hard it would have been painful if Beth had bothered to notice. “She gave Tiffany the night off. . ..”

  Don’t. Beth fought the urge to slap her hands over her ears. She didn’t want to hear anything about Lynne. Not like this.

  “Tiff had no idea. Lynne had it all planned out right down to the notes she left.” Mary Kay shook her head back and forth slowly, rolling it against the wall. “Beth. . . she’s gone. She’s gone forever.”

  No, no, no. Beth blinked back something in her eyes, her brain spinning for a logical answer to what obviously was a huge misunderstanding. Mary Kay might be a nurse, but even nurses could be wrong. Of course they could.

  “She hasn’t gone anywhere,” Beth blurted out. “I just saw her.”

  Wait. When had she seen her? She searched her memory for the exact time last night so there’d be no doubt. She’d tried calling Lynne to tell h
er that she was bringing over the Crock-Pot, but the line was busy so. . . so, she’d brought it over anyway and plugged it in. Then she’d tiptoed upstairs and found Lynne asleep not on the hospital bed in the living room, but on her old bed in the master suite.

  That was the problem. Mary Kay must have found the hospital bed empty and assumed Lynne had left.

  “No, she’s just sleeping upstairs. I checked on her last night and. . .”

  Mary Kay tightened her grip. “Listen to me, Beth. You’re not making any sense. I know this is awful to hear. It’s awful to say. Drake and I. . . we found her this morning when we went to her house to check. She was on the back porch.”

  In this weather! It must have been close to freezing last night. What was she doing sleeping on the screened-in porch? “We’ve got to go get her.” Beth tried to jerk away, but Mary Kay held on. “She’ll catch her death of cold.”

  “Beth.” Mary Kay refused to let go. “She overdosed on morphine. She committed suicide.”

  Suicide.

  That did it. Beth just needed to hear the word. Her body quivered, her tongue suddenly as dry as sandpaper. The next thing she knew she’d curled into a ball on Mary Kay’s lap and Mary Kay was holding her like a child, rocking her like a baby.

  Suicide.

  After all those years of surgeries and chemo and fighting to live, Lynne had taken her own life.

  Rationally, Beth knew this shouldn’t have been a shock. Hadn’t Lynne repeatedly vowed that should cancer finally get the best of her, she would get the better of it first? But Beth had prayed Lynne would never actually go through with it, certainly not so soon, when she had enough strength to move around. There’d been no hint of suicide when Lynne called around lunchtime the day before to gush about the blue skies and unseasonably warm weather.

  “Indian summer!” she’d exclaimed. “I feel fantastic. Gonna sit outside and soak up the rays.”

  It was the healthiest she’d sounded since her doctors brought up hospice, all other solutions having been ticked off, one by one. With morbid awareness, Beth realized Lynne had seemed so giddy not because of the blue skies and unseasonably warm weather, but because finally the wrenching decision was over. She had chosen to free herself of the pain. Permanently.

  “I’m so sorry,” she heard Mary Kay murmur. “You two had such a special bond. This is going to be especially hard on you.”

  Beth tried to respond, tried to form words, but couldn’t. Her mouth was too dry and all she really wanted to do, to be honest, was burrow her face in Mary Kay’s shoulder. How would she be able to face a world without her friend, without her daily calls and chats and laughter?

  Who would loan her a few eggs, which Beth never seemed to keep in stock? Who would listen when David was screwing up one of his courses—and give solid advice she could use? Who would remind her it was time to cut back the raspberry canes or call to ask if she’d seen the bluebird nesting in the box Sean set up between their backyards? Who would tell her that everything was going to be OK? Because when Lynne said it, you knew it was true. Everything would be OK.

  From now on, nothing would ever be OK. Beth felt as if she’d lost half of herself.

  Mary Kay released her slightly and palmed away tears on her own cheeks. “This sucks, doesn’t it?”

  Beth laughed slightly because that was one of Lynne’s favorite phrases. “Sucks big-time.” A pit blew open somewhere inside her, directly under her diaphragm, a bottomless black hole as the truth sank in. Mary Kay must have come directly from Lynne’s house.

  “How did you get over here?” she asked, concerned that Mary Kay had been behind the wheel in her state. “Did Drake drive you?”

  “He was still talking to the paramedics when I left.” Mary Kay glanced up at the ceiling as if trying to recall. “I don’t know how I got here. I must have driven, I guess, but I don’t remember. All I remember is that I had to see you face-to-face. The two of us. . . we’re all that’s left of our group, our little society.”

  “And Carol, don’t forget.” Beth crawled out of Mary Kay’s lap and sat on the floor. “I wish she were here now, with us.”

  They sat like that, cross-legged on the floor of Beth’s tiny office, neither of them saying anything. For how long, they had no idea. Beth couldn’t erase the image of Lynne’s last hours, of her taking the morphine and dying on the back porch while she, her supposed best friend, was merely a few feet away, scrubbing the sink or taking out the trash.

  “I should have. . .”

  “Shh.” Mary Kay shook her head. “There are no should-haves. She did what she wanted to do. It was her choice.”

  If Mary Kay hadn’t said that, Beth might never have left that floor, might be there still. This had been Lynne’s choice. Even if Beth disagreed with it, even if this choice robbed them of precious weeks or days they might have had together, in the end, all that mattered was that Lynne got her way at last.

  It was a ring to grasp.

  Beth set her lips firmly, wiped her eyes, and mustered the Yankee resolve that had sustained her grandmother and great-grandmother and generations of women before them. “We need to send her off in style, then, don’t we?”

  Mary Kay grinned. “You got that right, tiger. Nothing is too good for our girl.”

  Beth gripped the wall and brought herself to a standing position, despite her weak knees. “I want the reception to be at my house. No slapdash Flannery thing or something impersonal that’s catered. I want to cook it all. Everything. With my own two hands.”

  “Whatever you say.” Mary Kay got up and plucked several tissues from Beth’s box of Kleenex. “But first, I think we need to call Carol.”

  Beth blew her nose, fortified by the task she’d assigned to herself, to throw Lynne the most elaborate home-cooked spread Marshfield had ever seen. It helped to be doing something. Something that required sweat and hard work. “We can conference-call her from here and then I’m taking the rest of the day off.”

  “Wise idea. Me, too.” Mary Kay removed the crumpled, wet tissues from Beth’s hand and tossed them in the wastebasket. “And then?”

  “Then I’ll go to Costco. There’s so much to buy.”

  “Like Lynne always said, when the going gets tough, the tough go shopping.”

  A reminder that Lynne could always be counted on to lighten the mood. Beth and Mary Kay exchanged smiles, thankful for the small touches that kept her memory alive.

  After they put in the conference call to Carol, Mary Kay drove back to find Drake. Beth turned off her computer and slipped on her canvas coat. Grabbing her purse and flicking off the lights, she exited her office to the front desk, where the assistant librarian, George, pretended to be reading.

  “I’ll be out for the rest of the day,” she said.

  George placed a finger on the page. “Mary Kay told me about Lynne when she got here. I wish there was more I could have done. You know, I’ll really miss her in our book club since she was the only one who didn’t talk nonstop.” They all knew Lynne. The whole library. The whole town.

  Beth’s eyes started hurting again. “We’re planning a huge blowout reception at my house after the funeral. I’m going to Costco.”

  This needed no further explanation.

  “See you Monday. Need anything?”

  Beth considered what would be easiest for him. “We could always use an extra case of Coke.”

  “Will do.”

  The weather had taken a turn for the worse and Beth was glad Lynne hadn’t stuck around for this, the rain and wind batting her car as she headed to Brookfield. It was a road she knew like the back of her hand. Twice a month, she and Lynne would head down to Costco to load up. You had to shop with someone at Costco, otherwise you’d be stuck with huge family packs of beef ribs or mega tubs of seafood salad.

  When the boys were small, she and Lynne would turn it into a daylong excursion, hitting the store on Saturdays when meat was cheapest, letting the little guys run around and pick out cereals and s
nack bars. Meanwhile, they, the two mothers, would lean on their carts and talk, catching up on gossip or working out how to solve some family issue or another.

  When Lynne got so sick she could barely keep down a cup of tea, Beth bought their groceries at the local Stop & Shop. Kevin, Kyle, and David were in college, and the days when she used to accumulate milk in multiple gallons were done. Come to think of it, she hadn’t been to Costco in about a year. She had never been without Lynne.

  She would never be there with Lynne again. Ever.

  Gripping the blue handle of the grocery cart in the cavernous Costco with its steel beams and blaring TVs, this realization left her paralyzed. I am now alone.

  I am with you.

  It wasn’t so much that she heard Lynne say this as it was that Beth felt Lynne say this.

  Beth set her jaw and pushed onward. Lynne would not want her to cry, not when a whole host of Flannerys and most of Marshfield would be showing up on her doorstep, famished. She tried to remember the menu she and Lynne had casually discussed, though she couldn’t quite recall what Lynne had wanted, since she’d tuned out whenever Lynne mentioned her own funeral preparations. Beth preferred to believe Lynne would beat this thing and go on forever. But now she was at a loss.

  Soup, she remembered Lynne saying. Make now and freeze for later.

  Thank God for the deep freezer the group had chipped in and bought Lynne when the cancer returned. They’d set it up in the garage so well-intentioned neighbors could drop by and fill it with casseroles or garden vegetables without having to knock on her door and bother her when she was trying to rest. There would be plenty of storage.

  Beth rolled her cart up and down the aisles and interpreted the sales as divine signs. Lemons were a bargain at ten cents apiece, so she decided to make her famous Lemon Buttermilk Cake. Turnips, carrots, leeks, onions, peppers. All went into making the soup stock. Garlic. Yes! She could make her Roasted Garlic Soup for the vegetarians.