Kindred Spirits

by Sarah Strohmeyer

  Chocolate. One of the four food groups. Amanda had sent Lynne several bars of high-quality Callebaut Belgian she’d brought back from her junior year in France that Lynne had frozen, unable to eat even a nibble. Beth could make a flourless chocolate tart and then there were the apples on Lynne’s trees. Definitely needed picking. Pie? Sour Cream Apple Coffee Cake? She’d decide later. Already she had enough to keep her busy through the weekend.

  At home, she set the oven to 350, pushed back her sleeves, and scrubbed her hands thoroughly before cleaning the chickens and slamming them into pans, grinding pepper and sea salt over each, rubbing dried rosemary into the skin and stuffing oranges into their cavities.

  Her heart pounded, sending blood that pulsed in her head, throbbing. She mustn’t stop to reflect on what had happened. She couldn’t.

  Sean backed out of the driveway in his roofer’s truck toward town, so she washed her hands, wiped them on her apron, and dashed into the rain to take his apples. They were Lynne’s apples, anyway. They were for her, Beth thought, her arms aching as she plucked a high one. Cruelly, the branch snapped back, showering her with rainwater that ran into her eyes, stinging, fresh drops mixing with salt tears. For Lynne.

  Crossing the soggy yard on her way back, an apple dropped from her apron and rolled into the burn pile, landing on the corner of a book she’d given Lynne last summer, You, Too, Can Survive Cancer!, half of it charred, its blue edges curled by heat. She nudged a melted amber plastic pill bottle with her toe, a sickening sensation rising in her throat. No. Not now.

  In her kitchen, Beth dried off, put on the teakettle, and got down to business, shaving off the thick red peels of the McIntoshes, coring out their seeds, chopping them into even white bits, mixing butter and sugar, adding flour and cinnamon, and finally the sour cream and apples.

  She thought of how Lynne had saved that tree when its leaves curled and the cankers appeared, how she’d whipped out her massive shears and sawed off the offending limbs disfigured by fire blight. Everyone told her it was too late, that the tree needed to be cut down and burned so it wouldn’t infect the neighborhood. But Lynne had faith. She refused to give up and with the same determination she used to fight the disease within her, she nurtured that tree back to health.

  And now it was alive and Lynne was dead.

  Beth stuck the cake in the oven and got down to cleaning and dicing vegetables for the soup stock, stopping only to wash utensils or her hands, perhaps sip her tea. With the chickens done and cooling, the apple cake on the rack waiting for its crumb topping, she whacked forty cloves of garlic so they popped apart, drizzled them with olive oil, and roasted them for an hour, the first step for Roasted Garlic Soup.

  With an expert eye, she measured warm water and sugar into one of her grandmother’s ceramic bowls and added dry yeast that grew and bubbled. From death to life, she thought, amazed, as always, by the simple miracle of combining yeast, water, and flour to form bread. She slowly added the flour a cupful at a time, stirring. Finally, it became so thick she had to dump it onto the wooden board. She sank her fingers into the flat dough, massaging it, pounding until it turned spongy and sprang back.

  From death to life.

  But she couldn’t bring Lynne back from the dead. There’d be no Lazarus trick for her. Beth kept on turning and folding, pushing the dough. Turn, fold, push, until her arms, already sore from picking apples, cramped in agony. Turn, fold, push. Tears spilled onto the dough’s shiny, smooth surface. She didn’t even bother to wipe them away. There was no point.

  Flannery kin arrived next door in droves, gathering on Lynne’s back porch and smoking in the rain. Lynne couldn’t stand the smell of smoke, but that wasn’t Beth’s business now. It was Sean’s house. Sean and the boys’. She would have to get used to that.

  Marc came home later that night to find only the kitchen lights on. He put down his computer case and surveyed the scene: Beth crumbling brown sugar over the coffee cake, the stew pot with the chicken carcasses and vegetables bubbling on the stove, steaming up the windows, the seductive aroma of garlic in the oven, dishes everywhere piled on counters, on the sink. Beth wiped off her hands and came over to kiss him.

  “For Lynne,” was all she said.

  “I know.” He saw her pain in the heap of apple peels, in the scattered garlic cloves. “I’ll order us a pizza,” he said. “Unless you want to. . .” No. There was no point in asking if she’d like to go out.

  “Can’t stop,” she said, wrapping the apple cake in foil and sticking it in a plastic bag. “Gotta go over to Lynne’s and put this in the freezer.”

  Their house hummed with baking and cooking, day and night leading up to the funeral. One early morning, around two a.m., Marc came downstairs to find Beth furiously zesting lemons, mounds of bright yellow shavings in a bowl. He was about to beg her to come back to bed, but she was so intent on whipping buttermilk into the batter that he reconsidered and made them a pot of coffee. The two of them chatted in the predawn hours about nothing and everything, about Lynne and about their son, David, about the book Marc was reading and where they would go if they could, at that moment, drop everything and just leave.

  Italy, they decided, the classic, romantic Amalfi coast. Dramatic cliffs overlooking deep blue waters. Mount Vesuvius looming in the distance. They could travel by motorcycle, Beth on the back, her arms around Marc, hugging tightly as they wound through medieval villages by day and indulging in seafood, wine, and glorious sunsets by night when lights twinkled from houses set into the rocky hills.

  Travel had always been something they’d fantasized about rather than actually done, going all the way back to their initial encounter in the travel section of Broadside Books in Northampton, Massachusetts, where they literally bumped into each other and then spent the rest of the evening talking until the store closed. Marc, a senior at Amherst, was researching the coast of Portugal, where he planned to hike part of his summer after graduating. Beth, a senior at Smith, was putting off her paper on German Expressionism by lingering over a picture book on the South of France and thinking how much she’d like to be drinking a Bordeaux in Provence rather than interpreting the use of bad lighting in Nosferatu.

  They were an unlikely couple. Marc was adventurous, confident, a cosmopolitan New Yorker accustomed to hundred-dollar haircuts and late-night bar hopping, while Beth was bookish and quiet, a country girl from Connecticut who was happiest alone in her room on her bed, a novel propped against her knees, a cup of tea and plate of cookies nearby.

  Before he met Beth, Marc intended to explore the far reaches of Asia and India while writing sweeping international novels in the vein of Somerset Maugham. Marriage and kids were not in the cards. Even a serious girlfriend was a luxury he couldn’t afford.

  To his surprise, he fell so hard for Beth’s sweet nature and her nurturing spirit that the summer he was supposed to hike the coast of Portugal he spent making love to her in his Northampton apartment. That fall, they eloped and the spring afterward moved to her hometown of Marshfield because Beth was pregnant and they were flat broke.

  With no real professional experience and a family on the way, Marc ended up working for Beth’s father, Chat, at Brewster Insurance, a job that paid the bills but barely anything more. It was a far cry from the future they’d discussed that day in Broadside Books. It was a daily grind of mind-numbing insurance claims and Rotary Club dinners.

  Beth told herself it wasn’t one hundred percent her fault that they’d ended up this way—after all, it takes two to make a baby—but she couldn’t help feeling largely responsible, since they had returned to her town to be near her parents. And though he never said as much, they suffered through episodes when Marc became dark and moody, when he descended to the basement to write and didn’t emerge for days. That’s when she worried he might do what Carol did and run away.

  It was awful to admit, but Carol and Jeff’s divorce had been like a stone dropped into a tranquil pond, sending ripples that rocked the people
closest to them. Mary Kay broke up with the guy she’d been dating for four years. Lynne, who’d received a clean bill of health the June before, developed a strange cough that turned out to be malignant tumors in her stomach and liver. And Marc grew more and more distant, spending his weekends writing or going off on long hikes by himself.

  Which was why their middle-of-the-night cooking session was such a gift. As they chatted about Amalfi, it was as if time reversed and they were young and energetic again, full of hope and plans back at Broadside Books. Marc opened up about quitting Brewster Insurance once David’s student loans were paid and floated the idea of subleasing their house for a year so they could take off.

  Someday soon, she thought to herself, I will get you out of here. I owe you that much.

  Marc gathered up the extra lemon shavings and placed them in a mason jar, covering them with 100-proof vodka to make limoncello. “In honor of Amalfi,” he said, setting the jar far back in a cabinet so it could marinate for a month or more. “If we can’t go to Mount Vesuvius, Mount Vesuvius can come to us.”

  She loved him at that moment, loved him more fully than when he wrapped her in his arms twenty-some years before and proposed under an August blue moon. They had been mere children then. Innocents. Life had been a playland of few obligations—no unpaid bills, no teenagers keeping them up nights with worry, no friends dying.

  Anyone can fall in love in the dewy grace of youth, but it takes true grit to negotiate the crags of middle age and still manage to uncover new levels of passion. What she knew that day as the sun rose and she and Marc finally went to bed, was that riding over the rough spots had been worth the aggravation.

  She wondered what would have happened if Carol and Jeff had held on tight and ridden over their rough spots too.

  That was days ago and now here she was, refilling the coffeepot in the sink for the guests at Lynne’s funeral reception, when Mary Kay waltzed into the kitchen carrying a full plate. “There you are!” She set down the plate and turned off the water. “OK, Cinderella, put down your broom. I snagged some food before there was nothing left. Sit down and eat.”

  She couldn’t stop. There was too much to do. “Just let me make this coffee.”

  “There’s plenty of coffee out there. I just checked.” Mary Kay removed the pot from Beth’s hands and stuck it back in the maker. “Besides, we need to wind this down so we can go next door and clean out Lynne’s stuff. Carol’s gotta get back to the city.”

  “So soon?” Beth peered into the living room. Carol seemed in no particular hurry. Her head was thrown back, laughing at something Jake Fenster was saying. Bitsy Kramer and Sue Allen from the PTA were with them, laughing too, as if nothing had changed. “I was just thinking of her, hoping that. . .”

  Mary Kay took the opportunity of Beth’s open mouth to shove in a bite of artichoke salad. “She wouldn’t turn around and head for the city, right?”

  Something like that. Beth chewed. The rice salad was too salty. Next time, she would remember to use plain brown instead of a mix. “It’s just that she left so abruptly last time. And then never returned. Remember how we packed up her stuff and shipped it to New York while Jeff was at work?”

  “Like she, too, was dead.” Mary Kay folded salmon on a cracker and added a spoonful of the cream cheese. “Now, be a good girl and open up.”

  Beth did as she was told. The salmon was fantastic, freshened by the dill. There was another peal of laughter from the living room. Carol’s trademark giggle. “Now it’s like she never left. I even saw her in a heart-to-heart with Michelle Richardson over in the corner. They had their heads together like nothing had ever happened.”

  Mary Kay studied the plate, trying to choose what to feed Beth next. “Did Jeff show?”

  Beth wiped her lips. “Not yet. I think he had to take Amanda back to the train station or something.”

  Mary Kay rolled her eyes. “After all Lynne did for her? Hmm. I don’t know about that kid, though it was nice to see the three of them together at the funeral. Did you catch how Jeff had his arm around Carol?”

  Beth went quiet. “To be honest, I didn’t see much of anything at that funeral. It’s such a blur now, I barely remember standing up and speaking.”

  “Well, you did great,” Mary Kay said. “How about one of those chicken wings?” she asked softly. “That balsamic Dijon sauce of yours made such a difference. Is that rosemary?”

  “Tarragon.” Beth was back to the sink, washing, trying not to think as she glanced out the window and saw a strange figure coming down the street.

  “Come on, hon. Quit with the cleaning up already.”

  “No. Look.” She pointed at the sight of Jeff, the collar of his trench coat yanked to his ears to keep out the rain, hustling down the driveway carrying a pair of black high-heeled shoes—Carol’s, from the funeral when she took them off to carry the casket.

  Mary Kay joined her. “What’s he doing?” Jeff stopped, reconsidered, and headed back toward the road.

  “Looks like he was bringing Carol’s shoes.”

  “They should be in a plastic bag. They’ll be destroyed in this weather.”

  “Yes, but. . .” That wasn’t the point, Beth thought. “Now he’s heading to his car. Why doesn’t he just come in?”

  “Maybe it’s too awkward for him what with everyone in town here. You know, Carol got to run away to New York but Jeff had to stay and answer all the questions. He still can’t go out to dinner with another woman without tongues wagging.”

  “I’m glad he didn’t bring a date today. That would have been too much, him with someone else and Carol and Amanda all under the same roof.”

  Mary Kay ran a finger under her lower lip. “I know for a fact he’s not seeing anyone. It’d be all over the hospital if he were.”

  Which was more than Beth could say for Carol. “Even if Jeff isn’t seeing someone, Carol is.”

  “Pfffewh,” Mary Kay snorted. “You mean Scott Deloutte? He’s just a partner at her firm.”

  “More than a partner,” Beth said, resuming her dishwashing as Jeff pulled away from the curb in his BMW. “They’ve been seeing a lot of each other outside the office and Carol mentioned that tonight she’s going to his place to, as she put it, unwind and deconstruct.”

  “Deconstruct, huh?” Mary Kay put a hand on her hip, trying to make sense of that when Carol bustled in, flushed and bright-eyed.

  “Hey,” she said, depositing her saucer and coffee cup in the sink, “shouldn’t we be heading over to Lynne’s? It’s almost three.”

  The two women exchanged silent signals to continue the conversation later as Carol pulled on a pair of jeans and undid her skirt, quickly sliding it easily over her slim hips. “All these years of speculating what Lynne hid for us in her drawers and at last we’re gonna find out.” The skirt dropped to the floor. Carol picked it up and stopped, skeptical. “Hold on. You two were just talking about me, weren’t you?”

  Beth, who couldn’t lie to save her life, blinked in embarrassment. Mary Kay, who harbored no such hang-ups, trilled, “Don’t be silly. We were talking about martinis.”

  “Martinis?” Carol cocked a brow, intrigued.

  “I was asking Beth if we should mix up a pitcher before we head over there. You know, for old-time’s sake.”

  “And fortification,” Beth added, thinking she could use a boost, the exhaustion from Lynne’s death and arranging the funeral suddenly hitting her like a lead balloon.

  They decided on Persephone’s Cosmopolitans, a martini they invented to celebrate Lynne’s remission, the night she first hinted that there might be a secret hidden in her drawer.

  The Gift of Spring: Persephone’s Cosmopolitans

  The cosmopolitan—traditionally vodka, triple sec, cranberry juice, and lime—would hardly be considered a martini by the impossibly high standards of most traditionalists. However, it is hard to find a merrier cocktail than a cosmo, which was developed in the wild and fun-loving bars of Provincetown, Mass
achusetts, where the only welcomed mind is an open one. Sweet and pink, in our opinion it desperately needed a tweak from its 1970s style. Therefore we substituted pomegranate juice for cranberry and sprayed each glass with the very faintest misting of rosewater for a particularly delightful taste.

  Hades, god of the underworld, tricked beautiful Persephone into remaining in his deathly hollow by enticing her to eat several pomegranate seeds. But every spring, when she rises from the dark, cold world of death to rejoin her grieving mother, Demeter, thereby ushering in the joyful season of summer, we celebrate by drinking a cosmopolitan dedicated to her spirit.

  For nothing lasts forever. Not even death.

  Chapter Five

  What was hidden among Lynne’s private belongings had been the subject of constant speculation since Carol, Beth, and Mary Kay made the promise that they—and they alone—would clean out her stuff after she died.

  Not that the women often discussed what would happen “afterward.” It was much easier, they had found, to pretend the cancer would blow away. Poof! That one morning Lynne would jump out of bed and be her old feisty self, so vibrant and full of life.

  Oh, to see that Lynne again instead of the pale and thin shell she’d become. The women never stopped believing she would kick cancer to the curb and reappear better, brighter, even sassier than before.

  Then, the miracle they’d been praying for came true. One glorious day in June as Mary Kay was driving Lynne back to Marshfield after a visit to her oncologist at Yale in New Haven, Lynne called Beth with fantastic news that the vigorous chemotherapy protocol had been worth the torture. All her scans came up clear, including the blood tests. No evidence of tumors anywhere, no protein tracers either. The cancer had simply vanished.