“What kind of accident? A car accident?” Barbie June is asking when a voice cuts in to distract Landry.
“Thank you.”
She looks up to see that the owner of the luggage a few seats away has returned with his coffee.
Make that two cups of coffee. He gestures, offering one to her.
She pivots her phone away from her mouth to thank him.
“It’s black,” he says, “Do you take cream and sugar?”
“That’s all right, I—”
“Landry? Who are you talking to?”
“No one,” she murmurs into the phone. “I should go. I think we’re about to board.”
“But—”
“I’ll call you when I . . .” About to say land, she amends quickly: “ . . . get home.”
“When will that be?”
“Monday.”
“You’re not coming home until Monday?” Barbie June sounds as though Landry just told her she’d boarded the Queen Mary on a one-way cruise to Europe.
“Sunday night. Late.” Too late to make phone calls.
“Oh, well . . . have a good weekend, sweetie.”
“You too.”
Landry hangs up.
Sure. I’ll have a great weekend—paying my respects to my dead friend.
She shakes her head, pocketing her phone, and the man hands her one of the cups of coffee. “I know you said no, but I figured you were just being polite.”
“I was.” And I was thinking I shouldn’t accept a cup of coffee from a strange man.
“So . . . your mother?”
“Pardon?”
“Whoever you were talking to—that was your mother?”
“Oh—no. My cousin.”
He flashes a grin and she notices his nice white teeth. “I figured it had to be family by the way you were trying to shake her.”
“I wasn’t really—”
“Oh, come on, sure you were.”
“Sure I was,” she finds herself agreeing, returning his grin.
“Yeah. Thought so. Been there, done that, a million times.”
“I guess every family has one of those.”
“Mine has many. And they’re all in Cincinnati. I was thinking even twenty-four hours is a lot of time to spend with them, so . . . if there’s anyone who doesn’t particularly mind this flight delay, it’s—”
“That guy?” she quips, pointing at a college-age kid stretched out on the floor nearby, peacefully asleep.
“Him, too, I guess. Seriously, I wouldn’t mind if we sat here for hours. Oh, by the way, I almost forgot—” He pulls a couple of creamer and sugar packets out of his pocket, along with a plastic stirrer, and offers them to her.
“Thank you. Really.” She peels the plastic lid off the cup. “I got up so early that I really do need this.”
“Same here. And between being tired and what’s waiting for me when we land, if we don’t take off soon—not that I want to—I may have to switch over to something stronger.”
“You know, that’s not a bad idea.” As soon as the words are out of her mouth, she wants to bite them back. Does it sound as if she wants him to buy her a drink now?
No—of course not.
She’s just not good at this . . . solo travel.
Her phone rings. She jumps, almost spilling her coffee.
“Careful there. Here, let me hold that for you.”
He takes the cup, and she pulls out her phone, sees Rob’s cell phone number in the caller ID window.
“That’s my husband,” she says—maybe a little pointedly, and answers the phone. “Rob? Everything okay?”
“Everything is fine.”
“Oh, good.” She presses the phone to her ear with her shoulder as Mr. Coffee hands back the cup, gives a little salute and goes back to his seat.
“Tucker can’t find any of the shirts he needs for work,” Rob tells her, “and I looked everywhere—”
“Hanging up behind the door in the laundry room?”
“—except there.”
“Go check. I’m pretty sure that’s where they are.”
She dumps a sugar packet into her coffee as he goes to look, resisting the urge to tell him that she reminded him where to find the shirts when they were on their way to the airport this morning. And, of course, she told Tucker last night. Twice. But neither of the men in her life can ever seem to find anything around the house.
“Got ’em,” Rob says a few moments later. “Thanks. I’ve got to get him moving or he’s going to be late. Do you know it took me fifteen minutes to get him out of bed?”
Welcome to my world, Rob.
“He’s not really a morning kid,” she points out unnecessarily, stirring her coffee.
“Yeah, no kidding. I’d better go give him his shirt. He’s probably sleeping again.”
“Probably. Love you.”
“You too,” he says—sincerely, if hurriedly.
Mr. Coffee is busy on his laptop when she hangs up. He doesn’t even glance her way.
Relieved, she goes back to her magazine.
It’s much too early to check in when Kay arrives at the hotel on the suburban outskirts of Cincinnati. She drives past it, making note of where to turn later, and then decides to head on down the road to familiarize herself with the place where Meredith’s service is being held.
McGraw’s Funeral Parlor is a squat yellow brick building set back from the two-lane highway. Next door on one side there’s a bowling alley with a neon sign and a gigantic satellite dish that sits right on the property perimeter. On the other side sits a boxy duplex with an aboveground swimming pool in the small yard.
It bothers Kay, for some reason, to think of people swimming and bowling and watching TV in such close proximity to dead bodies and grieving families. She wishes the funeral—Meredith’s funeral—were being held elsewhere.
Meredith’s funeral . . .
Dear God.
She turns around in the empty parking lot and backtracks toward the hotel. For a moment she considers jumping right back onto the interstate and heading home.
No, don’t do that. You’re much too tired to drive, and hungry, too. You’ll feel better if you get something to eat and relax for a bit.
There are a couple of restaurants near the Wal-Mart shopping plaza. It’s too early in the day for Applebee’s or Chili’s, and she bypasses Starbucks as well. She entered one back home a few years ago, wanting a plain old cup of coffee, and was immediately intimidated by the sleek decor, unfamiliar beverages on the overly complicated menu, and the impatient girl at the register, who asked rapid-fire questions that might as well have been in a foreign language: “Tall, grande, or venti? . . . Blond, medium, or Bold Pick? . . . With or without room?”
Shuddering at the thought of repeating that experience—and in an unfamiliar city, besides—she opts instead for a Bob Evans restaurant, a familiar chain she’s visited back home.
The parking lot is full. Inside, she finds herself surrounded by senior citizens, truck drivers, and families with small children.
“What are you doing up so early on a weekend, hon?” asks the friendly waitress, after taking her order.
“Me? Oh, I always get up early.”
“Not me. If I weren’t here, I’d be in bed until noon, believe me.”
Kay smiles at her. She’s the motherly type. Probably a grandma, too. Women like this always make her wistful—not just for what she, herself, is never going to be, but for what her own mother chose not to be. And now, for what she found, and lost, in Meredith.
“Can I bring you cream with that coffee, hon?”
“Yes, please. And real butter with the biscuits, please, instead of that spread, whatever it is.”
�
��You got it.”
Meredith was always blogging about eating natural foods, avoiding chemicals. She taught her so much about nutrition.
Some of the bloggers—like Elena—might argue that it doesn’t matter much at this point. Not for them. As she put it . . .
Either you’ve already fought cancer and won . . . or you’ve lost, and at that point might as well throw caution to the wind.
Meredith’s diplomatic response: To each his own.
Kay finds herself swallowing back the ache in her throat, thinking of her friend. It feels wrong to be here in Cincinnati, about to meet some of the others without Meredith.
She forces the sorrow away and notices a trio of white-haired women in the next booth. Two are smiling, chatting easily between bites of omelets and pancakes. The third is silently picking at a poached egg, wearing a dour expression.
Making eye contact with Kay, she scowls, and Kay quickly averts her eyes, wishing she’d thought to pick up a newspaper or something.
Dining out solo has never been very comfortable for her—though it’s preferable to dining out with Mother, back when she was alive. That didn’t happen very often, but on the few occasions when it did, Mother complained about the service, the prices, the food . . .
She was just like you, Kay silently tells the dour woman, though she doesn’t dare sneak another peek. A miserable human being.
Why would anyone, blessed with the gift of longevity, waste all those years finding fault with everything around her—especially with her own daughter?
But then . . .
Why did I waste all those years trying to make her see past her resentment of me; trying to make her love me?
She had known damn well that it was futile from the time she was a kid. She should have walked out of that house the moment she turned eighteen and never looked back.
She thought of doing that. She did.
But where would she have gone? She had no plan, no college tuition, let alone money to live on campus. She’d always thought she might want to become a writer, but that was an impossible dream.
That’s what her high school English teacher told her.
A frustrated novelist himself, he said, “Don’t waste your time on anything frivolous when you have bills to pay. Get a real job and save your money, and when you’re rich, you can write all you want . . . or win the lottery. Those are your choices.”
On some level, Kay respected his blunt honesty.
On another, she hated him.
But she listened. And she stayed put.
Got a customer service job and worked her way through college at night, majoring in computer science. She was hired at the federal prison in Terre Haute right after she got her degree—hoping for an IT position, but offered one as a guard instead.
Her mother scoffed at that, scoffed at everything.
And still, Kay didn’t leave.
What was I waiting for?
Sometimes she wonders.
Other times she knows: she was waiting for her mother to have a change of heart. To apologize, maybe. To realize that the only person who’d ever been loyal to her and deserving of her love had been right there under her nose all along.
Kay stayed, and she waited, and she nursed her mother through every stage of a brutal terminal illness. But on her deathbed, as Kay moistened those cracked lips with ice chips, they still refused to utter the words she longed to hear.
Mother’s final words were for the man who had walked out on her when she found herself pregnant all those years ago.
It was his name she called with her very last breath; it was his face she saw, though Kay was right there in front of her.
She remembers the eerie sensation of her mother looking through her, as if at something—someone—over her shoulder.
“You’re here!” she said, squeezing Kay’s hand with more strength than she’d had in weeks.
“Yes, Mother, don’t worry . . .”
“You left me! Why did you leave me?”
“I didn’t leave you, Mother! I’ve been right here by your bed!”
“Why?” Tears were rolling down her mother’s cheeks now. “Why? I needed you so, and you left . . .”
“But I didn’t! I didn’t, and I won’t!” Kay was crying, too.
The hospice volunteer who had come to stand beside Kay rested a hand on her shoulder and whispered, “She’s not talking to you, dear. It’s all right.”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s common. I’ve seen this happen many times. At the end . . . sometimes, they see . . . loved ones.”
“She’s hallucinating?”
The woman hesitated, then shrugged and said again, “It’s common.”
Kay nodded, lips pressed together to keep them from trembling. She felt her mother holding her hand, squeezing it. Stared at her mother, who was looking right at her, but not seeing her. Saw her mother’s eyes squint a little.
“You came back for me, Paul! I knew you would . . . yes, I’m ready. I’m ready. What is that light? . . . Oh . . . Oh, yes. Yes, let’s go.”
Those were her last words.
Kay held her hand until it grew cold.
“All right, here we are . . .” The waitress is back with her coffee and orange juice, plus biscuits.
With real butter.
Meredith would approve.
Kay’s phone buzzes in her pocket as she breaks open a biscuit.
She pulls it out and sees that there’s a text from Landry.
Boarding flight to Cincy now. Delayed. Will call when I get to hotel.
Kay quickly texts back, OK, safe flight.
Replacing her phone in her pocket, she feels relieved. That just bought her a little more time before they have to meet. Maybe by the time Landry arrives, she’ll feel ready.
If she doesn’t . . .
There’s no turning back now.
Jaycee steps out of the elevator in the marble lobby of her building wearing a sleeveless black summer dress, large hat, and dark sunglasses, carrying the kind of oversized designer purse the women in this neighborhood use to carry as little as a cell phone and lipstick or as much as a change of clothes, a small dog, laptop, and umbrella.
Mike the doorman is at his post, leaning on the security desk with a newspaper open in front of him. Either it’s not the Post, or he hasn’t yet read his way to page eight, or he really doesn’t know her true identity after all. The apartment isn’t listed in her name—in any of her names. Discretion is the name of the game in a building like this. That’s why she lives here.
Whatever the case, Mike doesn’t bat an eye when he spots Jaycee.
“ ’Morning,” he says, going to open the door for her. “Need a cab?”
“No, thanks.” She steps out onto the sidewalk, noting that the sky is starting to cloud over.
But she leaves the hat and sunglasses on, as always.
“Have a nice day,” Mike calls after her, and she gives a little wave as she walks toward Fifth.
She turns a corner, another corner, and another, leaving her neighborhood behind. Despite the threat of rain, the streets are crowded as always: dog walkers, tourists headed for the Metropolitan museum, young families bound for the park with strollers, trikes, and training wheels. No one gives her a second glance.
Fellow New Yorkers rarely do; too caught up in the daily tribulations of maneuvering through their own daily lives in this challenging city. Naturally, she stays away from tourist haunts where gawkers might be more prevalent; stays away from public places in general. For years she rarely even left her apartment. But that’s become harder and harder to do lately, thanks to Cory.
He insists that he has her best interests in mind, and she supposes that’s true. She can’t stay hidden away forever. It’s why, for the past e
ighteen months or so, she’s been laying the groundwork for—
In her bag, her phone buzzes, vibrates. She ignores it.
Probably Cory. He left half an hour ago, on his way to the gym.
“Just lay low. I’ll check in this afternoon,” he told her.
“No need. I’ll be fine.”
“You,” he said, “are never really fine when it comes to this stuff. And I know you well enough to know that is especially true today.”
She didn’t argue with that. It is true, but even if it wasn’t . . .
It’s just easier, she’s discovered, to let Cory think he knows her better than anyone.
“Better than you know yourself,” he once had the audacity to claim.
Not true at all.
If he really knew her, he’d realized she wasn’t about to lay low, trapped in her high rise for a day, a weekend, or God knows how long until the latest storm blows over.
If he really knew her, he’d expect her to escape.
Yes. When the going gets tough, the tough get going . . . literally. She’s been doing it all her life.
On Lexington Avenue in the Sixties, Jaycee steps to the curb, turns to face oncoming traffic, and raises her arm to hail a cab.
A yellow taxi promptly pulls over.
She opens the door and climbs in.
“Where to?” the cabbie asks as he starts the meter.
“JFK.” She leans back in the seat, clutching her bag on her lap.
Reaching Out
The first time my blog went live, I remember feeling totally alone, envisioning the void beyond my laptop. I was writing extremely personal stuff, things I might never mention to anyone in real life, face-to-face, yet there it was, heading out to . . . where?
Somewhere.
I guess deep down I was hoping someone might find it. But I doubted it, and knowing no one was reading made it easier to keep going. It was very liberating, writing about the day cancer changed my life or how exposed I felt at the hands (literally) of my surgeons or the difficulties keeping my job at the prison a priority.
Then one day it happened: a stranger—a reader—commented on my blog. And then another one did. And another. Each comment that said I was understood, justified, and among friends lifted my load bit by bit until somewhere along the way I got my brain back. It was no longer jam-packed with thoughts of cancer, but slowly, the real things that make up my life filtered back in.
The Perfect Stranger Page 14