The Drummond Girls

by Mardi Jo Link

Her voice was stern, and I hadn’t heard that tone since I’d worked at Peegeo’s. The other girls were gathered around the kitchen table and Linda was standing up with her hands behind her back.

  “That display of yours tonight? I have no words,” she’d said, her hands clasped behind her back and her face in an angry scowl.

  I didn’t know what to say to that. Maybe the night had gone a little long, but not to the point that she should have been angry with me. She let my anxiety build, but then her face lit up in a grin, and she pulled something out from behind her back. It was shining and heavy and huge. The pool trophy from the shelf on the wall at Chuck’s.

  While I was beating Tennessee, and Andrea was cranking up the volume on the jukebox, making sure I had the perfect soundtrack for victory, Linda had swiped a three-foot-tall marble-and-brass pool trophy from Chuck’s, loaded it into her car, and brought it inside Mariner’s Passage. All without being detected.

  They heated up sloppy joes and scooped out potato salad then, and I wanted so badly to hold on to the glow of the night, but it took everything I had not to go up to my room and brood. I’d felt powerful around that pool table in a way I’d never felt at home, and I didn’t want to let that feeling go.

  It wasn’t just winning some game in some bar against some guy. It was feeling so in control when I did it. The cue stick was an extension of me, and I was the one who decided not only where those balls were supposed to go, but in what order and how fast.

  For a few months, my husband had been in that Traverse City pool league with Bev and me, but then he’d quit. He didn’t like the people, the pool hall inside the bowling alley where the games were played was too smoky, and since the game didn’t require any physical exertion, he’d objected to the activity even being called a sport.

  He was right about all of that. But I didn’t disagree with his complaints, I just saw things differently. I worked especially hard to beat the people I didn’t like, washed the cigarette smell out of my hair as soon as I got home, and for once didn’t get hung up on the literal meaning of a word. Pool was my sport, and I planned to keep right on playing it.

  When everyone else went to bed and only Linda and I were still up, I told her something that I hadn’t told anyone else but Bev. I thought my marriage was probably over. And if I was going to be single again, with three sons to raise, I needed a job with a regular paycheck. Something more stable than the occasional freelance writing and editing assignments I had now.

  “So,” I asked her, “does Peegeo’s need any waitresses?”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN 2005

  A sign on Drummond that seemed to have been erected just for us.

  My only stipulation for returning to work at Peegeo’s had been to ask Linda not to schedule me for Tuesdays. Make me hostess on Friday night, give me the Harley motorcycle club on Saturday afternoons, stick me on the Monday day shift; I didn’t care, money was money. Just keep me off the floor on Tuesdays. That was pool league night, the team Bev and I were on was giving third place a run for its money, and I had to be there; I didn’t want to miss a single week.

  Linda obliged, which was why I was home that January night after pool, and had barely stamped all the snow off my boots, when the hospital called.

  Did I know a Beverly Whoa-ja-hof…? A Beverly Whoa-ja-see…? Did I know someone named Beverly?

  What I remember most from that night was how fragile she looked, lying on that gurney.

  What she remembers most was how kind the people who’d helped her out of her car had been and how when she arrived at the hospital a doctor had told her to take off all her jewelry, and after she was sedated someone stole her favorite necklace.

  “Oh, Bevvy, what happened?” I said, arriving when she was still in the emergency room.

  “You’ll have to get a sub for me next week,” she’d said, gritting her teeth.

  You are amazing, I remember thinking. You just almost died and your biggest worry is pool league?

  She’d been stripped down to her bra, could barely talk, and was trying to arch her back in pain. She couldn’t because a doctor—a woman—was kneeling on top of the gurney, straddling Bev and manhandling her collarbone. It was broken; anyone with two visual organs could see that.

  “Do you have to hurt her like that?” I’d asked.

  Do they teach Condescending Look 101 in medical school, or is that something doctors pick up during their residencies?

  After the X-rays, after the orthopedic consult and the pain pills, I learned what had happened. On the way home from pool league that night, the weather turned bad—snow flurries, the kind that look like they’re coming right at you—and Bev had gotten disoriented. She lived several miles farther from the pool hall than I did, so when I was home, safe and warm, she was still gripping her steering wheel, traveling a dark road that serpentined between several lakes before it finally led to her house. She’d had a hard time seeing the pavement, and before she could slow down, her car had slid on a patch of black ice. She spun off a curve and then hit a tree—head-on and going forty miles an hour. Her air bag deployed, but the seat belt had still snapped her collarbone in two like a hot wire though an icicle.

  Bev couldn’t be sure how long she’d been there, half-conscious, before two people ran to her car, opened the driver’s side door, took her hand, and helped her out. When they’d walked her to the side of the road, she turned around and looked back. She hadn’t had the car long; maybe it was only a scratch. Maybe it could be repaired.

  It couldn’t. Because it was on fire.

  The same station that had sent the ambulance for Mary Lynn was only a few miles from the site of Bev’s accident. By the time the fire truck and the ambulance arrived, Bev was sitting in the couple’s van—they’d been on their way home when they’d found her—and her car had completely burned.

  The experience had to have been terrifying, yet Bev never once said she’d felt afraid. She hurt; she was grateful to the people who’d helped her; and yes, that doctor really could have been more empathetic. Also, she did not know what the attorneys at her office were going to do without her for seven whole weeks. But she’d never once told me she’d been scared.

  I hoped I would have been that brave and magnanimous, but I wasn’t sure she would have been able to say the same if it had been me in that car, me squirming in pain while that bitch of a doctor exacted her torture.

  In the following days, I did what I tried not to do, but often failed at when something terrible and beyond my control happened. I thought about it until I found someone to blame. In this case, that doctor. My complaint letter to the hospital’s CEO didn’t include her name, because I didn’t know it. It did include a description I hoped would be helpful to the FBI if she ever went on the lam: Wiry arms, red Brillo Pad hair, big chin, no pulse.

  During her recovery, Bev couldn’t drive, and over the next few weeks I shepherded her to doctor’s appointments, to pick up prescriptions, to buy groceries, and once, to make a beer run. The insurance company needed all kinds of paperwork filled out; there was another round of X-rays at the hospital’s radiology department and a follow-up appointment with the orthopedist. On these errands I’d drive to her house and go inside so I could help her out to my car. Which was when I first noticed that the door of her kitchen cupboard was covered in sticky notes.

  “Hey,” she said a little defensively. “It’s a lot to keep track of.”

  It was. And so besides that doctor, I was mad at her insurance company for not making the claims process easier to follow. Didn’t they know the people trying to keep all their complicated forms straight had just been injured? That they were traumatized? That some of them couldn’t even use their hand to write?

  I offered to write a complaint letter to the claims adjuster, too, but Bev just laughed at my tirade. Then told me to cut it out, the up-and-down motion of all that laughing was making her shoulder hurt.

  Maybe she wasn’t frightened, but I was.

  Yes, we’d lost M
ary Lynn. And yes, it had been a terrible shock. But this was my best friend. My vivacious, brave, goofy, and irreplaceable best friend. And apparently, she was mortal, too.

  What did that make me? What did that make any of us?

  Bev’s recovery was steady but slow. Even today, she can still press her finger into a small depression where the bone never fully repaired itself. And she still hurt. All the time. I only knew that because I asked her, though, and not because she complained about it.

  Her accident made me take inventory of my own body, its idiosyncrasies, its muscle memory of insults and accidents past. The shoulder joint that had taken the brunt when my five-foot, eight-inch frame flew out of the saddle and into a tree stump during an ill-advised gallop down an unfamiliar trail on an unfamiliar horse. The C-section scar, long healed, that still sometimes throbbed its strange ghost-like pain. The way words now blurred on the page unless I extended my arms and held the book straight out, like some feminine interpretation of Moses on Mount Sinai. Thou shalt not covet thy neighbors’ large-print edition.

  I thought about some of the other girls’ physical discords, too. Linda, Pam, and Jill spent so many hours on their feet I knew their legs and backs often ached. Susan battled insomnia, her quick mind often unwilling to power down after a stressful day at work. Andrea, a wealth of knowledge about holistic health, who ate organic and repeated good affirmations out loud, was at the mercy of her adrenal gland and frequent silent but judgmental self-talk, aka “The Committee.”

  Our once young and impervious bodies and minds had been aging all along, whether I’d noticed it or not. I’d felt a glimmer of that when Mary Lynn died, but it was Bev’s accident that brought the passage of time into sharper focus for me. The seven of us may have acted like we believed there was a magical force Drummond Island exerted, rendering us immune from the effects of aging, but in truth time was a worthy adversary, relentless and cunning. It had finally found us, and the people we loved, too.

  A humid Saturday morning in July and I half woke to the sound of the phone ringing. I opened one eye a crack and looked at my clock’s glowing numbers. A seven, a zero, and a five. Too early for either a telemarketer or any of my friends feeling chatty. My mother and I were both early risers but even she wouldn’t call that early.

  Adrenaline surge—where were my boys? Then I remembered. Arguments. Paperwork. Lawyer. Except for the dogs and me, our home was empty because my sons had spent the night across the road at the house their father was renting now. The phone kept ringing, and once I was partially conscious I was sure it was him. Since we’d split up he’d developed the habit of calling at odd hours and always with some new grievance. I was selfish. I was unforgiving. I was stupid.

  “What?” I snapped into the cordless.

  “Um, Mardi?” A woman’s worried voice. Familiar but I couldn’t immediately place it.

  “Yeah?”

  “It’s Tina? At Peegeo’s?”

  An image appeared in my still sluggish brain. Foul-mouthed prep cook, knife-blade skinny, hard worker, kids in foster care. Linda had hired me at Peego’s again, but it had been temporary, just to get me over the hump. I’d shared some shifts with Tina, but I hadn’t worked there for almost three months.

  Why was she calling me so early on a Saturday?

  Why was she calling me at all?

  “There’s cop cars and an ambulance at Linda’s,” she said, as if I’d asked my questions out loud.

  Tina was as tough as they came, yet she’d sounded frightened. I could almost feel the telephone shaking in her hand. Taped to the wall next to the phone the cooks used to take carryout orders was a list of employees’ telephone numbers. Once you’d been allowed into the Peegeo’s family, you stayed there, and my number must have still been on it.

  “I just… I didn’t know who else to call,” she said.

  “On my way,” I said.

  I grabbed a pair of jeans from the floor and then drove straight for Linda’s. The lake house she lived in with her boyfriend Kenny was less than two miles as the crow flies, but East Bay Township is dotted with lakes, forests, open fields, and illogically winding roads. So by car, the route isn’t direct at all but a squared-off U of five excruciating miles.

  I pulled into her driveway and saw a single police car and an ambulance. The vehicles were parked and idling. No lights, no sirens, which I thought was a good sign.

  But when I got out of my car and headed for Linda’s door, I saw her, and she was just getting into the passenger side of the ambulance.

  “It’s Kenny and it’s bad,” she said, breathing hard, her usually tan and healthy face bleached out and puffy. “Can you follow us to Munson?”

  The whole way to the hospital, I felt completely out of it. Had Kenny had an accident? Or gotten into a fight? He worked in the oil fields as a troubleshooter, an industry that paid well but employed a lot of rough characters, so either was possible. Kenny was rough himself, not to mention big, so if it was a fight I was already feeling sorry for the other guy.

  At the emergency room I walked through a wide atrium, gave Kenny’s name to someone, went where they’d pointed, and found Linda in a dark hallway, sitting at the far end of a line of seats bolted to the wall. Across from her were a series of examination rooms behind heavy doors, all of which were closed.

  Linda had her head in her hands, her hair draping almost to the floor, and she looked up when she heard me approach.

  Usually, you didn’t hug Linda. She’d never told us not to hug her, we just knew. But when she stood up I put my rangy arms around all five feet one inch of her anyway. I felt her chin heavy on my shoulder. She wasn’t crying, not yet, but when she spoke her strong voice chipped apart.

  “He’s gone, Mardi,” she’d said, barely getting the words out. “He had a heart attack and he’s gone.”

  Linda and Kenny’s first date had been nothing fancy. They’d met through a mutual friend and Kenny had invited her over to his house to watch some TV. By the time she’d met him, Linda had survived some difficult and abusive relationships. And so even though she met a lot of single men at Peegeo’s, they all fell short of her expectations.

  But then she’d met Kenny, and by the end of that first evening they were lying side by side, stretched out on his couch, watching a movie. He’d wanted to turn off the overhead light, but they were both so comfortable snuggled there together that he’d mumbled something about not wanting to get off the couch to do it. At the time, she’d thought that was incredibly romantic. This big, tough, muscular man liked her that much, and that soon, he couldn’t bear to be away from her, not even for a few seconds.

  As she was lying there, content and feeling lucky to have finally met her kind of man—edgy and a little tough but caring, too, and yes, even handsome—Kenny reached across her body with his long arm and felt around underneath his couch.

  What is he groping for? she’d wondered.

  And then she began to question her judgment. If it was a condom, she was going to be royally pissed off. Sure, she liked him already, a lot, but she hadn’t given him an indication that was going to happen. At least, not yet.

  Her suspicions were unwarranted. When Kenny pulled his hand back he wasn’t holding a foil-wrapped square but a fishing rod instead. Strung with line and baited with a steel U-bolt. Without another word, he made a dead-eyed cast toward the switch plate on the opposite wall, releasing the line and sending the bolt sailing through the air. The curve of the U hit the switch just right, flicked off the light, and landed harmlessly on the carpet. Then Kenny reeled in the line, returned the pole to its resting place, and wrapped his arm back around Linda’s shoulders.

  Linda reassessed her date again. He was either really romantic or really lazy, but either way, he was definitely resourceful. What kind of mind put that much thought into getting out of such a mundane chore?

  When he saw the expression on her face, it was the first time Linda heard his signature laugh. A deep “Huh, huh, huh.” His was
a playful, one-of-a-kind chuckle that first Linda, and then the rest of us, and soon everyone at Peegeo’s, came to recognize and associate only with him.

  And now that laugh was gone.

  We waited for the emergency room doctor, saying little. When he came out of one of those doors, he provided official confirmation of what my friend already knew. Kenny had died in his sleep, probably instantly, of a time bomb that detonated inside his great and irreplaceable heart. He was forty-six.

  What can you say about a man like that who’d just died? What can you say to the woman who loved him with everything she had in her? What can you say to your friend? There isn’t anything. But you can be present; you can sit with her in those plastic chairs and press your shoulder into hers and put your hand on her knee while she cries.

  Kenny had been all the family Linda had. Her parents were both dead; she didn’t have any children and was estranged from her only sibling, a brother who lived on the other side of the world. Besides the Drummond Girls and Peegeo’s, Linda was alone.

  “What can I do?” I asked her.

  “Just take me somewhere I can think,” she said.

  I was glad, then, that my sons were at their father’s because I took her to my house, and we spent the next few hours on my front porch, me sitting and crying, and her pacing and smoking and crying. Later, she said she needed to call the girls. I offered to do it for her, but she said no. She wanted to do it herself. After each phone call, she’d seemed to feel both better and worse. She told the story over and over, and each time she did I’m sure it became more real. Maybe she even needed to tell it, just to convince herself.

  “Take me back home,” she said when she was through.

  “Oh, Linda, no. Why don’t you just stay here tonight? You can go back in the morning.”

  “Take me home,” she said again in a voice that told me not to argue. “And when we get there, I’m just telling you now, I’m going in alone. You can come over tonight if you want, but I need to be by myself for a while.”