One Good Friend Deserves Another

by Lisa Verge Higgins

“None taken.”

  “All right,” he said. “Next time I’ll do something less dramatic. Like reveal some really big, ugly secret.”

  And Cole’s gaze slid, pointedly, toward her. Kelly froze with the sandwich halfway to her mouth. She saw in Cole’s eyes a friendly urging, a kind but firm insistence.

  I made the leap, his look said. Your turn.

  Goose bumps rose on her skin, and not because of the hospital air-conditioning. Kelly sensed the girls picking up the volumes of nonverbal communication now passing between her and Cole. She squeezed her sandwich. She wasn’t ready for this. She and Trey had just taken one fragile step closer to a deeper communion. Their relationship was like the first soft coating on a new mollusk, needing time to grow solid and sure.

  But battle-hardened Cole pinned her with his red-rimmed gaze, leaving her nowhere to look.

  “Guys,” Kelly heard herself say, “I have some news.”

  She set her sandwich down. On shaky legs, she hauled herself out of the chair. She looked at each of her friends, and before her throat could close up, she yanked the pin from the verbal grenade.

  “For the past three months, I’ve been dating Trey Wainwright.”

  Kelly had been involved in enough of these interventions to know how swiftly the girls worked, but amid the shouts of denial and the fierceness of their fury, she marveled at how lightning-quick they rearranged the furniture. Soon it was she, Kelly Palazzo, sitting in a lonely little chair at the far end of the room with Wendy, Marta, and Dhara by the bed, and Cole in the middle, openly bemused to find himself on the other side of an intervention.

  Wendy’s skin had washed to parchment white. She leaned near the window with all the flowers and balloons, bracing herself on the windowsill while her elbows bent under her weight. Kelly couldn’t quite tell if it was shock or distress, but Wendy seemed utterly incapable of speech.

  Marta, taking her cue from her frozen friend, opened the argument. “Chica, what were you thinking, starting things up with Trey after all these years?”

  “You know how strongly I fell for him.”

  “I know he broke your heart.”

  “No, that’s not true. He didn’t have a chance to.” Kelly gripped the arms of the chair. This was going to be a long, hard afternoon. “You guys stepped in the middle too soon.”

  “He wrote about your hookup on a public forum!”

  “He apologized.”

  “Because Wendy made him!”

  Kelly dared a glance at Wendy, who still leaned precariously against the windowsill. “He stopped hanging out on that forum right after that,” Kelly informed her, “and he dropped those guys cold.”

  She knew this to be true for she’d joined the forum with a fake nickname and sought him out for months after. Blessedly, in vain.

  “So hallelujah, he learned his lesson,” Marta said. “That doesn’t explain why you’d set yourself up for punishment again.”

  “I didn’t set myself up for anything. Trey chased me.”

  “Oh, Dios mío.” Marta crossed her arms. “Kelly, Kelly, that only makes it worse, don’t you see?”

  “How? How could the fact that he sought me out at Wendy’s engagement party and repeatedly apologized possibly be a bad thing?”

  “Because you’re a challenge again. He’s a player. He wanted to see if he could get you back, after all he’d done.” Marta collapsed into the closest chair. “I just can’t believe this. You’re a freakin’ genius, and you know what kind of man he is. No offense, Wendy.”

  Wendy waved off the words blindly.

  “Here are the facts you guys don’t know,” Kelly said, counting them on her fingers. “Trey personally apologized to me at Wendy’s party. I accepted his apology. Then I walked right out on him.”

  “Wait.” Marta balked. “You walked out on him?”

  “When I next saw him, it was months later. He was standing in the rain, hoping to catch me as I left work.”

  She remembered the day she’d stumbled out of her office into a gusty wind and a sudden March downpour. She’d stood in the shelter of the overhang, struggling with her umbrella, only to notice amid the dozens of people pouring out of her building the sudden movement of a man leaning against a signpost. The signpost said NO STANDING ANYTIME. And Trey stood there, his hands deep in his pockets, seemingly oblivious to the fat raindrops soaking the shoulders of his suit as he gave her a slow, hopeful smile.

  It had felt like Christmas in March.

  “Since then, Trey and I have spent a lot of time together. We’ve eaten out. We’ve gone bowling—”

  “Bowling!” Marta canted forward. “Trey went bowling?”

  “We’ve had long, long talks during some long, long mornings.”

  Wendy made a strangled little sound.

  “This is so twisted.” Marta dropped her elbows to her knees. “You know it too. Otherwise you would have told us months ago.”

  “This is why I didn’t.” Kelly gestured to the new configuration of chairs. “I knew I’d end up here. Having those rules banged over my head like they’re as important as the ten freakin’ commandments. Listening to you trying to talk me out of dating the most exciting man who has ever come into my life.”

  A spatter of raindrops against the window sounded loud in the sudden silence. Wendy had her face in her hands, and Marta was biting her lip, while Dhara pulled nervously on her earlobe. They looked like the three monkeys who see, speak, and hear no evil. Only Cole, on the bed among them, looked at her with a somewhat apologetic smile.

  “Listen,” Kelly said. “I know this is a shock to you all.”

  She knew they meant well. She knew they were trying to protect her now, just like before. She remembered shaking with emotion in the Terrace apartment that terrible weekend, with Wendy in her tennis whites speaking truths she didn’t want to hear. Wendy was a voice of authority; Wendy, so blithely self-assured, who carried the same sort of effortless confidence as her brother, as if the world were paved solely for their footsteps. She remembered her heart aching, but feeling grateful that these three women cared so much to speak the truth.

  But she really wasn’t that young girl from Gloucester anymore. And love never followed rules.

  “When you called me off Trey all those years ago, you were right. Trey was a jerk, and I was totally gutted. But I’d always wondered how it might have turned out, had the situation played out differently. Now I have a chance to find out.”

  “Trust me, chica, there are lessons you don’t want to learn.”

  “And one of them is that this isn’t a healthy relationship.” Dhara ran a finger over her brow, as if following the line of a growing headache. “You two are so very different, Kelly. Be honest. Isn’t this less about affection and more about awe?”

  Kelly took sudden interest in the fabric pills on her thrift-store skirt. She remembered a few weekends she spent at Wendy’s home during college. The housekeeper served tea in the parlor every afternoon at four p.m., whether anyone was home or not. There it would appear, on the server, a shining silver pot and all the accoutrements: little silver colanders to sieve out the loose leaves, plump porcelain creamers with real cream, bowls of cubed sugar topped with miniature tongs, and a gold-rimmed plate with slices of lemon cake, still warm from the oven.

  It was an old family tradition.

  “Sometimes,” Kelly murmured, “I don’t think you understand who you are, Wendy. You and Trey Livingston Wainwright.”

  Kelly looked down at her hands. She thought of a day she’d spent with her father by the Isles of Shoals, hauling up the first net with the sun just starting to peek over the horizon. She’d stood on the deck in rubber boots picking out the flounder from the hake and the pollock and tossing the dogfish over the edge back into the sea. Then, amid the squirming silvery pile she caught a glimpse of something orange. It was a lovely fish, the color of a tropical sunset, with two barbels jutting from under its mouth.

  She called her father down from the
wheelhouse and held it up for him. She could see from his expression that he’d never come upon a fish like this before. “An odd one,” he’d said. “Blown up by the hurricane, I ’spect.” He turned it gently in his callused hands. “What a strange, lost little beastie.”

  Like herself. Kelly Palazzo, the once-famous Gloucester baby. Adopted by a local fishing family after being abandoned on the firehouse steps.

  Wendy shook herself out of her paralysis. She took a few stumbling steps to Kelly’s side, as if her legs had fallen asleep and she was having trouble working them. She sank to her knees beside Kelly’s chair. “Kelly, you’ve got it all backward. It’s you who doesn’t appreciate who you are.”

  Kelly shook her head in dismissal. They all knew her story. But she was beginning to think when you actually had a family, it wasn’t possible to understand how, all her life, this abandoned creature had felt very much like that odd fish pulled out of the sea.

  “It’s precisely because of your history that you have this amazing opportunity. You can be whomever you want. You can do whatever you want.” Wendy slipped her hand over hers, squeezing until her knuckles went white. “No one has any preconceived notions of who you are, what you should do, or how you should behave.”

  “Yeah,” Cole added. “And I’ll just remind you that even a biological family can be full of shits.”

  She met Cole’s gaze, his rueful smile, the silent acknowledgment of their similarities, and the gentle reminder to buck up, be strong, listen.

  “This is family business,” Wendy said, clearly unnerved at the turn in the conversation, “so I don’t usually talk about it to anyone. But since you’re so deeply involved, I no longer have a choice.”

  “Wendy, I understand him better than you think.”

  “He’s had four jobs in eight years. Fired from each one. The last one he landed only because of my father’s strong-armed influence. Did you know he has three DUIs, and that’s why he was sent to London?”

  “Yes, I know all that—”

  “Did you know that once in London, he just bugged out of his job? Right after making a series of trades that lost the company millions.” Wendy looked away, her face tight. “It was a legal mess. In slightly different circumstances, it might have been a criminal one. Fortunately, the Wainwrights can afford the wiliest British solicitors.” Wendy ducked her head but not quick enough to hide her rising color. “My father finally tracked him down sailing in the Greek isles with a crowd of Eurotrash. He was sleek, tanned, and evidently unconcerned. Like a toddler who, wrapped up in a new toy, completely forgets the mess he’d left behind.”

  Kelly sat very still, remembering the afternoon he’d shown up at her office, blowing off work for the day. A worry needled her, something she hadn’t wanted to examine too closely.

  “Honestly,” Wendy said, her voice a frustrated sigh, “back in college I think he got in with those sleazy pickup guys because they taught him how to be successful with girls. He’d wanted to be good at something.”

  “Wendy—”

  “Let me finish.” Wendy pressed against the arm of the chair. “I love my brother. I understand him better than anyone—both the good and the bad. Which is why I can tell you with full certainty that you’re putting your heart in the hands of a man-child. He won’t mean to, but Trey will break your heart.”

  “Oh, Wendy. I know he’ll likely break my heart.” She hugged her own arms. “I chose to get involved with him anyway.”

  Wendy rocked back on her heels. She cast an appeal toward Marta, Dhara, and Cole, but the three of them looked too shocked to respond.

  “I’m playing a game of probabilities,” Kelly explained. “The way I see it, all the relationship possibilities for Trey and me—good, bad, or neutral—they’re like a big probability distribution.” She raised her hands as if to embrace an invisible beach ball. “A three-dimensional map, where an electron could be in an S-orbital at any given time.”

  Four pairs of eyes blinked at her.

  “If you had an electron probability cloud,” she said, “and you were to suddenly take a picture, you would catch one possible outcome. You’d probably find that electron somewhere in a doughnut shape around the nucleus—”

  “Kelly, Kelly,” Cole quipped, “do you really think about this kind of stuff?”

  “—but amid that range of probabilities,” she persevered, “there’s always the one or two outliers. A few improbable results. The most probable result is that Trey and I won’t make it, like you’ve been saying. He’ll break my heart.”

  “Oh, Dios.”

  “But you see, there’s that one, far-flung possibility.” She drew in a hopeful breath. “One rare but not statistically impossible outcome. It exists. It could happen. Trey and I could someday, possibly, fall in love.”

  Wendy gripped her head in her hands. “Kelly, the world doesn’t work like this.”

  “Yes. Yes, it does.”

  “Why? Why would you risk your happiness, your future, your heart, on some glimmering impossibility?”

  “Oh, God, Wendy. I’d be the bigger fool if I didn’t try.”

  that weekend

  All these rules are useless,” Wendy insisted. “There isn’t a rule in the world that could have protected me from Josef.”

  Wendy plucked at a noodle with her chopsticks, feeling shaky and cold, even though she’d wrapped herself in a sweater. She’d spent the previous night in Josef’s dorm room, their limbs spilling over the twin bed. She still had a crick in her neck from the discomfort. Between her legs throbbed residual warmth she was trying very hard to ignore.

  “Talk about a predator,” Kelly muttered. “Josef puts Trey to shame.”

  “I still can’t believe it.” Dhara slipped her bare feet onto the chair. “Six months you were with him, and we never had a clue. You know I always liked him.”

  “That’s just the problem.” Wendy tossed the chopsticks onto the paper plate. “He fooled us all.”

  Fooled her, most of all. First, through fascination: unlike any other guy she’d ever met, Josef was an actual artist, an older student from the Czech Republic who would disappear into the theater workshop to weld pieces of scrap iron into spindly, rough-edged sculptures of the human body. She’d come upon him there one day, his brawny arms gleaming as he wielded the blowtorch.

  Then he’d fooled her through flirtation: with his sexy Eastern European accent, he’d asked her on real dates, to picnics by Sunset Lake, to plays on campus, flattering her by showing an interest in her life and her family. Now she flinched, thinking of all those long conversations about her father’s business, about the Wainwright and Livingston line of ancestors and their blueblood bearings. At the time, she’d thought he was charmingly curious. At the time, she thought he was adorably empathic. Now she knew he’d been taking notes.

  In the end, he’d fooled her through fucking. In his artist’s hands, she was as malleable as clay. She’d still be writhing in his bed if she hadn’t seen those files on his computer.

  “I know exactly what went wrong.” Marta strode out of the bathroom, her chin raised, as if daring them to ask her if she’d just peed on the stick. “You didn’t trust your instincts.”

  Wendy looked up at her roommate. Marta talked of instincts as if Wendy had them, when her experience until now had consisted of the comfortable Parker Pryce-Westons of the world. Whatever protective instincts she had against Josef had long been abandoned. To every word of Czech whispered into her ear. To how she felt under the expert guidance of his hands. To his compelling foreignness.

  “Three months ago, you broke up with him,” Marta reminded her, flopping next to her on the couch. “You told me that something about him just wasn’t right.”

  “I didn’t know he was keeping files on every trust-fund girl on campus,” Wendy argued. “I didn’t know he was fucking his way to the richest and quickest route to a green card.”

  “You said he blew hot and cold. One day he was into you, the next moment
he was irritated with you. You never knew where you stood.”

  “He’s an artist.” Wendy tugged at a loose piece of merino wool, rolling it between her fingers. “It comes with the package.”

  “Chica, you’re thinking with your loins, not logic. And believe me, I know what I’m talking about.”

  She met Marta’s eyes. A stranger would say they were wide and brown and steady—but Wendy saw right through to the terror flowing beneath. She took Marta’s cold hand in hers.

  “Here’s another rule,” Marta said, trying hard to hide the hitch in her voice. “Never go back to an old flame, Wendy. It’s like making the same mistake twice.”

  Marta was right. Wendy should have followed her instincts months ago. She should have had the strength of her convictions. She should have shucked Josef like last year’s haute couture.

  But in her heart, she understood the deeper problem. She was fatally, helplessly drawn to the mysterious other. The rule-breaker. The exotic. The man with the courage to peel off his public face and display his true self to the world. The man driven not by money or ambition or commercial success, but by curious inner passions.

  Artists were her weakness.

  They would always break her heart.

  chapter twelve

  Wendy had come to the inescapable conclusion that Kelly Palazzo was the bravest woman she knew.

  Granted, it was a crazy sort of courage. Self-delusional and heedless, and bound straight for heartbreak. Wendy knew her brother better than anybody, and Kelly better than most, and the two of them together was such an explosive combination that in the twenty-four hours since Wendy had sat in that hospital room listening to Kelly confess, she still hadn’t wrapped her mind around the news.

  But Wendy knew this much was true: she herself was no Kelly Palazzo. Unlike Kelly, she’d given up her past. She’d tossed that studded leather choker in the trash. She’d settled herself in a fine, comfortable life, with a fine, comfortable man whose happiness lay in her hands.

  So today, as she stood amid the maze of white tents that formed the display grounds of the Hudson Valley Art Fair, she thought of Kelly and tried to channel a measure of her courage. She would need it, to make this final good-bye.