The Best of Us

by Sarah Pekkanen

  Ten minutes later, she was turning in to Tina’s driveway. She walked through the kitchen door, using the key on her chain.

  “Coffee delivery!” she sang out. “And apple juice for my sweet goddaughter.”

  “We’re in here.” Tina’s voice came from the living room. Allie rounded the corner and saw Tina on the couch with Jessica sprawled in her lap. They were both pale and listless; it was hard to say who looked worse.

  “Oh, my God, you even remembered the cinnamon sprinkle on the foam,” Tina said, closing her eyes as she took her first sip of latte. “I love you.”

  “You’re talking to the coffee, right?” Allie said, fitting a straw into the little hole in the top of a juice box and handing it to Jessica.

  “Of course,” Tina said. “But you’re not half-bad, either.”

  Allie gave Jessica’s fine brown hair a quick stroke. “I have to get something out of the car. Be right back.”

  She brought in the groceries and filled Tina’s refrigerator and freezer, then opened the dishwasher door.

  “What’s going on in there?” Tina called. “I hope you’re not throwing a wild party. Or if you are, that you call me when it’s time for the Jell-O shooters.”

  Allie laughed and finished rinsing and loading the glasses and plates. She wiped down the counters before going back into the living room.

  “I’m not working today,” she said, picking up Tina’s feet so she could sit on the end of the couch, then dropping her friend’s feet into her lap. “So I figure that gives me plenty of time to talk you into coming to Jamaica.”

  “What, and leave all this?” Tina tried to smile, but it didn’t reach her eyes.

  “Here’s your muffin.” Allie handed it to her along with a napkin. “Did Gio get home late again last night?”

  “Eight,” Tina said. “It’s this blasted shopping center. Two of the plumbers didn’t show yesterday, and they’re already behind schedule . . . I shouldn’t complain; it’s not that late. It’s just the whole homework-dinner-bathtime routine is so hard to do alone.”

  She tilted back her head and closed her eyes, but not before Allie caught the sheen of tears in them.

  “I know,” Allie said. She and Tina could do this; they could flow from jokes to confessions to painful subjects during the course of a single conversation. It was one of the things Allie most valued about their friendship. “It was hard for me with just two kids. I remember once when Eva was around one and I had her in the tub, and then I heard something crash in the kitchen. I ran down and Sasha was standing there with glass all around her. She’d tried to pull a big pitcher of lemonade out of the refrigerator, and of course she’d dropped it. So I picked her up and carried her to the living room and checked to make sure she wasn’t bleeding. She wasn’t, but, oh, my God, if that pitcher had landed on her head . . . And then it hit me: I couldn’t hear anything upstairs. I ran so fast up those steps, I swear my feet didn’t touch them. But Eva was just sitting there, filling up her little plastic cups and pouring them out.”

  “That kind of thing happens to me all the time,” Tina said. She lifted her head and looked at Allie again. Her big brown eyes had lines of red running through the whites, like road maps documenting her exhaustion. “Ricocheting from crisis to crisis. Worrying there will be a time when I won’t get there fast enough. Just one time.”

  “Come to Jamaica,” Allie said.

  “I can’t,” Tina said. “The kids.” She bent her head and kissed the top of Jessica’s head, as if in apology, then gave Allie a wry smile. “Unless I bring them along, but somehow I don’t think Pauline had that in mind. I have a feeling we’d be asked to leave the first time someone threw up in the hot tub. Or definitely the second.”

  “My mom and dad are going to watch all the kids,” Allie said. She’d set it up with her folks the previous week and had been dying to tell Tina. “They can stay at my house with my kids, and my parents will sleep there.”

  Tina’s eyes grew wide, even as she protested. “No,” she said. “That’s too much for them.”

  “My girls are so excited,” Allie continued. “They’re going to help with the little ones—they’re like babysitters in training. I told them we’d pay them twenty bucks each. You know your kids love them. And my mom loves you. She really wants to do this.”

  “I love your mom, too, but it’s too much,” Tina said again, but Allie kept talking over her.

  “Tina, come on. My mom taught second grade for thirty-two years. And she’s still got more energy than both of us combined. She’d be insulted if she heard you say that!”

  Allie looked at her friend and remembered, as she so often did, the time when she’d played tennis with her father on a Saturday afternoon a decade earlier. Walking to his car after the game, he’d complained of a feeling of tightness in his left arm. He’d blamed it on a muscle pull and said he was going home to lie down. But something in his face had sent an icy tingle down Allie’s spine. Instead of driving home, she’d called Tina, who was just coming off a shift at the hospital where she worked as an ER nurse. Tina had asked quick, crisp questions—Did her dad seem confused? Did he have any other symptoms?—and when Allie had responded yes, come to think of it, he’d walked right past his car, and his face was pale, not at all flushed, like you’d expect after an hour of exercise in the heat, Tina hadn’t hesitated.

  “I’m turning around and heading to your parents’ house. I’ll meet you there,” she’d said. “It might not be anything, but it’s not worth taking a chance.”

  “Okay,” Allie had said, putting her car in drive. “I’m leaving now.”

  “Allie? Call 911 first.”

  “Really? Do you think—” Allie had begun, but Tina had cut her off: “Do it right now.”

  Her father had made it home and was lying on the couch, suffering a massive heart attack, by the time the paramedics arrived. Allie’s mother was out running errands. He was alone, and almost certainly would have died had it not been for Tina’s intervention.

  Now Allie reached over and rested her hand on top of her best friend’s. She and her mom had talked about it, and this was a gift they wanted to give to Tina. “There’s this terrific seventeen-year-old who sits for us sometimes—Lia. Remember I’ve mentioned her? She’s going to come over every afternoon for a couple hours to give my mom a hand. We can put the kids in day camp, too. It’s one week. They’ll be fine.”

  “I can’t—” Tina began, but this time she cut herself off. Allie could see tears filling her eyes again.

  “You need to,” Allie said. “Please. Just come.”

  “More Dora,” Jessica said, nestling against Tina’s body. Her eyelids were drooping. “More apple juice.”

  Allie reached over, grabbed the second apple juice box off the coffee table, and handed it to Jessica as Tina mouthed, “Thank you.”

  “We’ll let them watch lots of movies,” Allie said. “And order pizza. We can cook some stuff and leave it in the freezer beforehand so my mom won’t even have to worry about meals. Doesn’t that sound good, Jess?”

  “More Dora,” Jessica repeated, her voice almost robotic-sounding.

  “And they say TV doesn’t kill brain cells,” Tina joked. Allie could see something come into her friend’s eyes, something she hadn’t seen in a while. A brightness.

  “I may love you just as much as I love coffee,” Tina said. “And that’s saying something. Do you think when Pauline says we can get everything we want at the villa, that includes liposuction?”

  “Oh, sure,” Allie said. “We’ll squeeze it in before the champagne and caviar and after the deep-tissue massages.”

  Tina tilted her head back against the cushion, and a huge smile spread across her face. Allie held her breath.

  “I’m in,” Tina finally said.

  * * *

  “This house has amazing bones,” Savannah McGrivey said, being careful to keep her voice enthusiastic but not cross the line into gushing. No one trusted a gushing re
al estate agent.

  She led the way through the living room and into the dining room. “The crown molding is original, and so is the wainscoting.”

  She stepped back and let the fortyish, prosperous-looking couple take in the space in silence. They’d pulled up in a BMW convertible twenty minutes into her open house, after she’d lit an orange-blossom-scented candle and put bouquets of blue and yellow wildflowers in the powder room and decluttered and scrubbed the kitchen counters. You’d think the owners would’ve listened to her suggestions to move out some of the furniture to make the rooms seem bigger, to replace the paisley wallpaper in the dining room with a fresh coat of neutral paint, to tear up the worn runner on the stairs. Savannah had even e-mailed them the name of a reasonably priced contractor, but they’d acted almost offended.

  Isn’t our house good enough? the husband had asked as Savannah considered the dated family photos in ugly gold frames lining the wall above the staircase banister. She’d turned to him with a smile, mentally accepting the fact that the portraits of their bucktoothed, turtleneck-wearing kids would stay.

  “Of course it is,” she’d said.

  She hadn’t been lying. But couldn’t they see that good enough wouldn’t cut it—that a little extra effort could mean the difference between a sale and a future spent languishing on the market?

  She had an innate sense of how far she could push clients, and she knew it was time to let it go. But she began to question her decision as she saw her potential buyers notice the peeling edges of the wallpaper, the wife’s manicured fingernail tracing a seam like it was a scar.

  “What year was it built?” the husband asked. His potbelly strained against his blue golf shirt, and he rubbed it like he was trying to conjure good luck from a Buddha. He was probably hungry. Damn. She should’ve gone with freshly baked cookies instead of a scented candle.

  “Nineteen eighty-five,” Savannah said. Smile, she reminded herself, making sure to include the wife in her gaze. When Savannah had first opened the door, the wife had looked her up and down, then reached for her husband’s arm. Wives tended to react that way to Savannah.

  “Needs a little work,” the husband—Don? Dan? Did it matter?—said. “If you tore down this wall, opened up the kitchen . . . maybe bumped it out in back.”

  His wife yawned. She’d said they had young twin daughters; no way would they want to take on the hassle of a renovation along with a move. It all boiled down to maintenance, Savannah had learned. Forget houses with character and potential and quirky charm—people were too busy these days to act on a romantic fantasy of buying a fixer-upper. They wanted something pretty and pleasing, with no major flaws.

  “Honey, we’ve got that other place to look at,” the wife said.

  “Would you like to leave your e-mail address so I can keep you apprised of new homes that come on the market?” Savannah offered.

  “That’s okay,” the wife said, and ten seconds later, they were gone.

  Savannah closed the door behind them and leaned back against it, rolling her head in circles to get the kinks out of her neck as she kicked off her three-inch heels. She’d woken up too early this morning, again. She’d known it the instant she saw the weak gray light seeping in around the edges of the window blinds, and the anxiety that gripped her had immediately chased away the possibility of falling back asleep.

  For the first thirty-five years of her life, she’d been a world-class sleeper. Nine, ten—even eleven a.m. on the weekends was her routine. On the rare occasions when she did wake early, she’d roll over and spoon against her husband, Gary’s back, soaking in his warmth, until she dozed again.

  But for the past two months, their queen-size bed had seemed too big, and the sheets were always cold against her skin.

  At some point Savannah would come face-to-face with her husband again to sign divorce papers. Gary had indicated he wouldn’t balk at a fair division of their assets, which surprised her, given how few scruples he’d shown recently. But apparently the selective memory that had caused him to forget the fact that he wore a wedding ring had kicked back in, because he hadn’t objected when Savannah’s lawyer demanded compensation for the years Savannah had spent supporting Gary. She’d been so proud when he could officially add the initials “M.D.” after his name, feeling as though it was their shared triumph. How ironic that an anesthesiologist had caused her the most pain she’d ever felt in her entire life.

  But at least she’d be able to keep their pretty home, with its wide front porch and soaking bathtub and kitchen skylights on an eighth-acre of land in Charlotte, North Carolina. Gary would pay monthly alimony that would cover half the mortgage payment plus a thousand for expenses, just as he’d been doing ever since he’d cleared out his closet, packed up the expensive electronics, and taken the barbells he almost never used. She thought of those thousand-dollar checks as her screw-you money. She never spent them on car repairs or the electricity bill. Instead, she treated herself to massages and yoga classes, lacy push-up bras and pedicures, and an injection of Botox for the frown lines that had deepened since she stumbled across those messages on Gary’s BlackBerry.

  So she tore through his money, watching her hair become glossier, her clothes nicer, her body fitter. It didn’t help as much as she’d thought it would. Still, Savannah knew she’d never looked better. She’d always been striking, with her hourglass shape and long, wavy hair with streaks of red and gold, and the sort of full lips most women had to purchase from plastic surgeons. But she’d lost ten pounds after the separation—adultery accomplishing what the Atkins diet and regular kickboxing sessions couldn’t—and now her stomach was almost completely flat, and her already strong jawline seemed more pronounced.

  Savannah walked into the living room and flopped down on a couch—upholstered in a client-repelling old-lady floral, of course—and pulled her laptop out of her shoulder bag. She’d kill time until the doorbell rang again by buying flannel sheets online, then she needed to book an eyebrow and bikini-line waxing.

  She also had to make a decision about Dwight’s invitation. Dwight, she thought, as a smile played on her lips. He was such an adorable geek. She was pretty sure he’d had a crush on her in college, since he’d been pathetically eager to help her through her math classes, but she’d never minded the attention. What was the harm in teasing him a little, in leaning over the table to let him glimpse her cleavage, in gently raking her fingernails through his hair as he turned bright red and tried to keep his mind on his stuttered explanations of variables and exponents? She was just giving him a little ammunition for his nocturnal fantasies; it was a form of charity, like dropping a few dollars into the church collection basket.

  They’d all known Dwight would become a millionaire—that was as clear as the fact that Tina and Gio would get married right out of college, and that Allie would find the perfect husband, produce two perfect kids, and stay as perfectly adorable as she’d been her freshman year. Savannah wondered if the others had seen her own future as clearly as she’d predicted theirs. Was it obvious that Gary was a user, that he’d unimaginatively dump Savannah for a young, blond nurse, trading up as so many of her real estate clients did?

  Savannah had never truly cheated on Gary, but not for the lack of opportunity. She’d flirted with plenty of guys, though, and even kissed a few. But it never went any further than a few hot moments in the darkened basement at a party while everyone else chatted upstairs, or a lingering glance with a stranger at a bar that led to a quick tryst in the hallway outside the bathroom . . . What was the harm in a few kisses, a quick pressing up against an intoxicatingly new man? Flirting made her feel sexy, and when she came home, lifting the covers and whispering, “Wake up, honey,” while she ran a finger under the waistband of Gary’s pajama bottoms, she knew he was the one benefiting from it.

  If Gary wanted to have a bit of fun with The Nurse, Savannah would’ve been furious, but she would’ve understood on some level. Guys were like farmers; they felt the need t
o spread around their seed. She would’ve made Gary sleep on the couch for a few weeks. But then she would have put on his favorite garter belt and black, silky stockings, and strolled into the den to invite him back into their bed. Her message would have been clear: This was what he’d miss if he strayed again.

  But Gary hadn’t apologized when she confronted him. He didn’t beg for her forgiveness, or send roses. Instead, he moved in with The Nurse—who wasn’t even that pretty! But she was young; Savannah would give her that. Try to hold on to him for another ten years, though, sweetheart, she thought as she felt her eyes narrow. In another decade, Gary would be richer and more established and he’d still look good. He was tall and lean, and his hair was just starting to turn silver around the temples, which suited him. But The Nurse wouldn’t fare so well; she had the sort of thin, pale skin that would wrinkle quickly and severely, and her pear-shaped figure—which no doubt had been the catalyst for their relationship, since Gary was an ass man—would eventually lose its battle against gravity.

  Savannah wondered if The Nurse wanted kids. Savannah most definitely didn’t; it didn’t even feel like a choice. It was more of a . . . certainty, like the fact that she had blue eyes and was highly allergic to shrimp. Gary hadn’t wanted kids, either—at least, the Gary she’d once known hadn’t. He was a stranger now, this man who hummed every time he shaved, who pretended he didn’t read her People magazines in the bathroom, who had naturally broad shoulders that she used to love resting her head against.

  Savannah forced away the memories and began to search the Internet for new sheets. She was considering a chocolate brown set trimmed in hot pink satin when an e-mail popped into her in-box. Allie.

  Have you gotten any special deliveries recently?

  Savannah typed back: Yes, my new vibrator arrived this week. How did you know?

  She grinned as she hit Send. Allie was such a good girl; Savannah could almost hear her squeal.

  Ha ha!

  The messenger came yesterday, Savannah typed. Unbelievable!