“Got one,” Stephen said, taking a huge gulp of wine. “The girl with the pointy boobs. The one who always starts with the Irish Nachos?”
“Oh!” Joanna, more than a little drunk, had snapped her fingers a few times, trying to drum up the girl’s name. “Ugh. I can’t remember. The one Bryce calls Patty O’Furniture.”
“Yes, that one! She might be secret-fantasy-worthy. She’s got a nice face above those cone boobs.”
Joanna curled one lip. “Not my type,” she said. She’d been saying that about all the girls he brought up, a part of her hoping it could provide a good segue. Maybe wishing he would ask: What do you mean, not your type? Do you have a type of girl? She always did this when they drank too much together. She always felt the truth sitting right there in the back of her throat, begging to come out, and looked for ways for it to conveniently slip. She wanted so badly to tell her best friend. If only one other person in the world could know, maybe the weight on her chest wouldn’t be so heavy. Maybe she wouldn’t walk around feeling so ashamed all the time, and so silly for feeling so ashamed. And so angry that there should be shame involved at all.
Stephen leaned forward to refill her wineglass. “There’s another girl,” he said. “She’s definitely fantasy material.”
“What girl? Don’t say Mani-Pedi Woman. It’s bad enough how Bryce goes on about her. She’s not all that he thinks she is.”
“Nope, not Mani-Pedi Woman.” Stephen sucked a drop of spilled wine off his thumb and sat back, a blot of wine licking over the top edge of the glass and bleeding into his shirt. He didn’t notice. “She is cute, though. Bryce is totally going to get her number next time she comes in.”
“Plain. And she has a ring tan.”
He got wide-eyed. “How did you notice that?”
She shrugged, feeling her face burn. The truth was, Bryce wasn’t wrong. Mani-Pedi Woman was cute. But she was also a cheater. And gay. The ring tan was on her right hand. Of course Joanna noticed.
“So who’s the girl, then?” she asked, sipping her wine, not noticing that the credits were now rolling on the TV.
“She’s not exactly a regular customer,” Stephen said.
“Barfly? You know I don’t pay attention to those. They’re so pathetic with their mow-hee-toes and their lame get-laid lines. Hey, baby,” she mimicked in a drunken voice, “I don’t suppose you could help me with this zipper? It’s stuck.” She made an exaggerated pouty face.
Stephen laughed and bumped her shoulder. “No. None of the barflies.” He shook his head a little too fast, causing him to lean hard into her. “She works there.”
Joanna’s eyes grew wide. “Oh my! You’ve been holding out on a work crush? Who is it? Is it the new bartender? It has to be the bartender. She’s got all those tattoos. I never took you for a tat man.” She jostled his shoulder with hers. “Tell me. Do not leave me hanging here.”
Stephen leaned his head against her shoulder, and then turned and rubbed his nose shyly against her shirt. “You,” he said.
Joanna had laughed out loud, sure it had been a joke. Stephen calling her secret-fantasy-worthy was like calling a sibling secret-fantasy-worthy. “Yes, I am such a dream. A nice face above these pointy boobs.”
Stephen turned his head to gaze at her, his eyes faraway and swimmy, their faces just inches apart. “No, I’m being serious,” he slurred. “You’re the crush.”
“You’re drunk, Stephen Wilkinson,” she said, bumping his shoulder again. “This is going to be hilarious tomorrow.”
“Yeah,” he said. “I am and it will. But that doesn’t change the fact.”
“What fact?” She rolled her eyes too elaborately, talked too loudly, shrugged too high, she knew. But her heart was pounding and she felt a restless fleeing sensation in her legs. She wanted Stephen to turn this into a joke. Please, a joke. As much as she would have liked to have reason to tell him the truth about her, this wasn’t the way.
“This fact,” Stephen said instead, and leaned over and kissed her.
It was nice, as kisses went. Soft and warm, and she would’ve been lying if she said she’d felt nothing at all. Of course she did. She loved Stephen. Being kissed by someone you loved felt good, no matter who you were and what kind of lies you told yourself and the world.
But there was a difference between feeling good and feeling right. This kiss could never be right. She’d pulled away, trying to be gentle about it.
“You’re drunk,” she repeated, much more softly this time, licking her lips. She could taste Stephen’s wine on them.
Stephen gazed at her sleepily, grinning sadly. “And I’m not your type,” he said.
“It’s not that. . . .” She leaned forward and set her wineglass on the coffee table. Suddenly, none of it had felt right. Not the food or the wine or the romantic movies. Suddenly it all felt like she was leading him on. Of course he would become confused. It was all her fault. “I mean, it is that, too. It’s just not . . . I need to tell you something.”
Nervous—she was so nervous. She’d never said the words aloud. She’d never told anyone the truth. And a part of her had convinced herself that she wouldn’t have to, that it was painfully obvious, the stuff of stereotypes. A part of her wished it would never need to be spoken. There was ease in others guessing.
Apparently, she’d been wrong. A guy had fallen for her, regardless of how painfully obvious she thought the truth was.
But Stephen—good old Stephen; God bless Stephen—simply smiled and set his wineglass down. “You don’t need to say anything. It’s no hard feelings.” And he reached up and tweaked the end of her nose lightly, the way he’d always done when he felt playful. He’d stood and swayed. “Woo. Looks like you’re going to have a houseguest tonight. Damn that wine. Pretty sure you slipped bourbon in it so you could have your way with me.”
He headed toward the spare bedroom, the one that had only ever been occupied by him.
“Night,” he called over his shoulder.
“Night,” she’d said, and then had downed the last of her wine, poured another glass, and downed that one, too, trying to wash away the lump in her throat.
• • •
The next morning, she’d made sure she was gone before he awoke, as her only goal was to disappear. She’d declared herself officially in hiding and had gone to the last place she could think he would look for her—that greasy diner off the highway. They served Boston cream pie there, a weakness of hers.
And then the accident had happened, and she had gone into a weird mourning over some guy she didn’t even know.
And now, after a month of hiding, she was exhausted. Mentally, emotionally, physically. She couldn’t sleep; she wasn’t eating well; she was jittery. And it didn’t help that the news was showing that grainy cell phone footage from a month ago. Its graininess was her only saving grace—you couldn’t tell who was who in that video. Apparently, even her best friend and her parents didn’t recognize her. She didn’t have to endure any “hero” conversations or have everyone thinking she was traumatized and “needed to talk.”
But of course she’d recognized herself in that video. She’d watched herself all morning, running out of the diner, her shirt untucked, looking as hungover and miserable as she’d felt that morning. She saw herself run toward the school bus, which had landed on its side. She saw her arms stretch up to climb, saw them reach through the open windows, the broken windows.
Every time she saw the footage, she remembered new things—the cries of the kids inside, the relief she’d felt that all the kids seemed to be able to cry, the adrenaline strength that coursed through her as she handed bruised and bloodied kids to two women who seemed to have materialized out of nowhere and were standing next to the bus.
The feeling of dread when one of those women called them both to a crumpled car, so wadded up she hadn’t even noticed it before the woman had
pointed it out.
The nausea and helplessness of seeing the man behind the wheel of that car.
What had been their names? Route? Roush? A young couple. A cute couple. They’d been heading to an early doctor appointment, she remembered. They’d had big news to confirm.
Joanna aimed the remote at the TV and pressed the power button, snuffing the grainy video into silence.
But it didn’t help. She still felt agitated, like she—finally—needed some human interaction. And maybe some more Boston cream pie. Or maybe just proof that it really had happened, that she really had been there. That it wasn’t some other lost-looking girl in the video footage.
She grabbed her keys and headed down to the parking garage.
• • •
She saw the two women as soon as she pulled up to the diner—an older woman in office attire and a younger one in chinos and a T-shirt. They were standing on the sidewalk, their arms crossed and their elbows nearly touching, staring at the bumps where the bus had carved up the earth on its approach. They seemed to be talking, and while it seemed unlikely that she would run across them here, today—her first time out since the crash—it somehow also made sense that she had done exactly that.
She parked her car and watched, her legs suddenly filled with ice water over the thought of human interaction. She could do this, right? You didn’t just become unable to live among people, did you? These women were not Stephen, not Sutton, not Stan, not her disappointed parents. She didn’t have to hide from them.
The younger one saw her first. She put her hand on the shoulder of the older woman and said something, and the older woman turned as well. Their faces didn’t change. Now she had been spotted—she had to say something.
“Hello,” she said, coming toward them on the walkway. “I didn’t expect . . .” She didn’t know how to finish the sentence.
“Yeah, looks like we all had the same idea today,” the younger one said.
Joanna crossed her arms, curling her fingers through the belt loops of her shorts. “I didn’t really plan to come. It just suddenly seemed like the right thing to do.”
“Same here,” the younger one said. “I should be at my sister’s house right now. She’s going to be furious when I get there. But I couldn’t help it. I felt pulled.”
The older woman shifted her weight. Her phone rang and she looked at her hand quizzically, as if she wasn’t really sure what she was holding. She pressed a button on the side and it went silent. “It’s been haunting me a little,” she said. “Somehow being here makes me feel a tiny bit better. I was just saying I still wonder about Maddie all the time.”
“Maddie?”
“Routh,” the younger woman added. “The woman in the car. We were just talking about the pregnancy, wondering how it’s going.”
“Oh,” she said. Routh. Maddie Routh. That had been it. Maddie and Michael. She remembered now. How could she have ever forgotten? Awkwardly, she extended her hand. “Joanna, by the way.”
The younger woman smiled and took her hand. Joanna felt a jolt of something unexpected. Connectedness, maybe? Had she been hiding for that long? “Melinda.”
They shook, and then she turned her hand to the older woman. At first dazed, she seemed to shrug herself out of it, and then took Joanna’s hand. Again, she felt the electricity of human contact.
“Karen,” she said. “Freeman.” Her phone rang again and she shut it off immediately, without looking, a frustrated crease appearing on her forehead. “I should go.”
“Me, too,” Melinda said. “My sister is going to be livid. It was nice meeting you, Joanna.” She shrugged. “Again, I guess.”
“First time didn’t really count,” Joanna said, and then wondered if she’d sounded too flip. She hated how she second-guessed everything that came out of her mouth. “I mean . . . I’m sure I wasn’t good company. . . . It was just a rough scene. Nice talking to you both.”
The women turned, leaving Joanna alone on the sidewalk. “So you’ll be here tomorrow, huh?” she heard Melinda ask Karen as they walked.
“Every day,” Karen answered. “I don’t know why. It just makes me feel better.”
Joanna stood in the early sun, goose bumps popping up on her shins despite the humidity that was already in the air. She watched as the two women found their cars and said their last good-byes, got inside, and each drove away. She felt very alone, while at the same time she felt surrounded by ghosts. The ghosts of the bus driver and Michael Routh. The ghosts of her past, of her present. The ghosts of her secrets.
A few diner patrons walked in and out, maneuvering around her, but she couldn’t uproot herself from the pathway. She had a sudden desire to belong again. Not to anyone in particular, but to society as a whole. She wanted to go to the farmers’ market on Wednesday mornings and to the movie theater on Friday nights. She wanted to eat at the chain chicken place across the highway and buy screws at Home Depot. She wanted to jog in the park with the retirees and the stay-at-home moms. She wanted to fit in. Of course she had ghosts. She was so hidden she was practically dead. Living people had no haunts following them, did they?
It seemed so absurd to her that grass had grown while she’d been gone from reality. So blatantly defiant. You could hide from life all you wanted; it would still keep going without you. It wouldn’t even notice you were gone. To her, that fact felt sadder than death itself.
She started moving, her feet scuffing in flip-flops along the walk, the goose bumps fading, her armpits becoming damp with sweat.
She wasn’t even surprised to find that her flip-flops took her away from the door and into the grass instead.
She ignored her craving for Boston cream pie and instead found herself walking to the edge of the bumps. She lowered herself to the ground, sitting cross-legged inside a divot.
Coming here every day had made Karen feel better, she’d said.
Joanna closed her eyes and slowly brushed her hands over the new grass, feeling it tickling her palms.
Yes, she could definitely see how it would.
FOUR
As far as Karen could tell, all law firms were high on the snoot scale. But Sidwell, Cain, Smith & Smith, where she’d worked for nearly twenty years, seemed to blow right through the roof of snoot and on into full-on snotty. The floors were polished marble and the chandeliers were copious. Seemed every room you walked into had crystals dripping from the ceiling right above your head. The main receptionist, Evvy, spoke in a whisper and had one of those smiles that turned down at the edges as if she pitied you rather than enjoyed you. The attorneys barked orders at their secretaries—especially the ones they were not so secretly sleeping with—and nowhere was there a single visible photo of a child or a favorite pet. God forbid the errant clipped cartoon. It seemed to Karen as if they were all argyle-clad drones with their sensible shoes and their pencils tucked behind their ears and their dreadful bow ties.
It had been hard for Karen, at first, to accept the culture of Sidwell Cain. She hated that nobody laughed out loud in the employee lounge, and she hated the blind attorney, Mr. Cain, who wore a chip on his shoulder so large it was almost impossible to fit in the same hallway with him. And she hated the commute downtown. Caldwell was a suburb only ten miles or so away from the heart of Kansas City, but some days it felt like a million.
Had it not been for Antoinette, Karen might not have lasted twenty days at Sidwell Cain, much less twenty years.
Antoinette was the other inhabitant of what they’d lovingly dubbed the Hiring Cave, separated from the rest of the firm in a secluded hallway on the bottom floor, sandwiched between the copy room and the employee lounge. There was not a single chandelier to be found in their part of the building; no client would happen upon them on purpose, or even by accident. At first, Karen had felt insulted that Sidwell Cain had thought so little of their HR department. She felt hidden away like a dirty little
secret. But once Antoinette schooled her in the fine art of Getting Away with Stuff the Others Can’t, she began to feel at home in the Hiring Cave. Better—she began to feel comfortable. They regularly shouted conversations between their offices. Sometimes they played music—something that would never have been allowed upstairs. And each of them kept fluffy house slippers tucked beneath their desks for when they were doing paperwork. And on the first Monday of every month, Antoinette and Karen shut their doors for “payroll meetings,” which were actually daylong festivals of lattes, Cheetos, and celebrity gossip, during which they gathered around an old mini tube TV that Antoinette had smuggled in several years ago to catch up on daytime talk shows.
In some ways, the only way Karen could handle the snootiness of Sidwell, Cain, Smith & Smith was by retreating to her separate world downstairs.
“So, what are you going to do?” Antoinette asked as they hurried over to Wong’s Café for lunch a few days after Kendall had awakened Karen with Travis’s bad news. “Ignore, ignore, ignore?”
“I can’t,” Karen said, half out of breath, even though she’d changed into her sneakers for the walk over. Antoinette was child-sized—one of those fireballs of energy in a little package of muscle and enviable waist-length wiry black hair—but she could move on those matchstick legs. Even in heels. “If I ignore her, who knows what she’ll do? Take the baby and hide, probably.”
“You know it’s only a matter of time before she disappears with that baby anyway, right?” Antoinette said. She plunged through the door of Wong’s, which was shoulder-to-shoulder packed, as usual.
“I don’t like to think about that.” Karen stepped inside behind her friend. But of course she knew it was true. Travis wouldn’t keep Kendall around any longer than he’d kept any of the others, and as much as she’d like to believe she’d raised her son better than to let his baby be smuggled off to God-knew-where, she had serious doubts that would be the case. In some ways, she’d been steeling herself for the day Marcus went away since the day he was born, hugging him extra hard, absorbing his scent extra long. “But, yes, I know.”
Second Chance Friends Page 4