What Are Friends For?

by Patricia McLinn

  Cristina rounded on the girl. “You think I don’t know what you’re doing? You think I don’t see that you’ve been sucking up to me, trying to learn all my secrets so you can replace me? I’m not stupid, you know!” she wailed.

  Ashley burst into tears and Jennifer swooped in and took her away.

  At that moment, Zeke appeared at Darcie’s side.

  Zeke regarded Cristina, still ranting at Ashley’s retreating form, with fascinated horror. “Is this a hissy fit?” he asked, without taking his eyes off Cristina.

  “Oh, yeah, this is definitely a hissy fit.”

  Cristina spotted Zeke then and launched herself at him.

  “It isn’t fair….” She bleated. “How could you vote against me?”

  “I didn’t vote against you.”

  “You didn’t?” Hope and calculation jumped back into her expression. “Oh, Zeke, I just knew you felt it, too. I don’t care about this little Lilac Queen title—let Mandy have it—it was only because I thought you were fighting what’s between us. That’s the only reason your voting for me is important—”

  “I’m not fighting, because there’s nothing between us. And you know it, Cristina, so stop this stupid game.”

  Cristina stared back at his glare, like a snake mesmerized by a mongoose.

  “Okay, but—”

  Having that admission, Zeke charged ahead. “And I didn’t vote for or against you. I voted for Mandy. Everybody did. It was unanimous.”

  “But you said—”

  “I said I didn’t vote against you. I didn’t. I don’t have anything against you. Except the way you keep hanging on me.” He disengaged her hand. “And you wear too much makeup. You think the universe revolves around you. You don’t think of other people’s feelings. You’re letting your mind turn to mush. And you only talk about clothes and that crap.”

  By the end Cristina was gaping at him, along with everyone else. She blinked fast three times, as if her eyes stung, and Darcie thought this time it might be real, especially because of the way the tip of her nose was turning red.

  “You horrible, horrible man! How can you say those things to me?”

  “If you’re smart, you’ll listen,” Jennifer said, her arm still wrapped around a sobbing Ashley. “I wish someone had said them to me at your age. It would have saved me a lot of years of grief.”

  An hour later, Jennifer and Darcie sat in Jennifer’s apartment, each with a glass of wine in hand.

  Cristina had flounced off. Ashley had been put to bed and had fallen asleep, exhausted from crying. The rest of the court had been safely dispatched for a party at the mayor’s house. Zeke had disappeared.

  And Darcie and Jennifer had agreed that they would rather walk on nails than go to the party.

  Darcie raised her glass in mocking toast. “Here’s to our grand plan.”

  They clinked glasses.

  “You really don’t think Zeke will consider helping us set up a trust?” Jennifer asked after a sip.

  “I really don’t.”

  “What are we going to do?”

  “The only thing we can do. Forget this silliness of looking to the future and instead look back on tonight and say, ‘Well, that went well!’”

  Jennifer stared at her a moment, then they both started to laugh until they cried.

  The window of the narrow storefront was covered by plywood decorated with a painting of lilacs. A sign proclaimed the space available for lease.

  Zeke cupped his hands to his face and looked through their tunnel, but the window in the door was too dirty, the space beyond it too dim to see anything of the interior.

  He tried the handle. Locked.

  He stepped back, looking at the brick building that must have been built about the time Mischar Zeekowsky had been born on the far side of the world.

  No conscious decision directed Zeke’s footsteps, but he knew where he was going once he started. Down the passageway—narrower than he remembered—between two buildings that opened to the alley—sooner than he expected.

  He eyed the high double-hung window beside the padlocked door. It hadn’t been replaced. A pair of crumbling concrete blocks stood ready to prop open the heavy door. He moved them into position. He felt around the wooden window frame, the paint flaking away. He found the spot on the right side, rapped the edge of his right hand against it sharply and the left side came toward him.

  He grinned as he worked the frame free, carefully removing the entire window, and leaned it against the building.

  In his youth he would have opened the door from the inside and replaced the frame immediately to cut the risk of anyone knowing he was inside. The padlocks made that impossible. But the odds of anyone coming back here at this time of night and seeing the missing window were nil.

  He hoisted himself through the opening—the motion easier but the fit tighter than it used to be—then dropped to the floor inside.

  He felt his way by memory to the door that led to the front of the shop, opening it without going in. The long customer counter remained, but nothing was left of his father’s workbench.

  The open door added a murky strip of light from the front door to the gray wedge from the back window, giving him enough light in this small storage area to find the second door. He opened it, seeing a windowless room lined with shelves and holding an old metal desk.

  His heart thudded hard against his chest in conditioned response. To guard against anyone spotting a light inside the shop, he’d always stepped into the room and closed the door behind him before turning on lights. So there’d been a second of absolute darkness, of not knowing what was ahead, while his heart bammed away at the possibilities.

  He didn’t close himself in the room now, but found the switch.

  No surprise, no electricity. But his eyes were adjusting. The shelves were empty, starting to crumble.

  Nothing of his father here, either. As if Mischar Zeekowsky had never hunched over his workbench for hours stretching into days reaching into years, putting on new heels, replacing soles, repairing damage. Smiling for customers, trying to smooth over language differences with good cheer.

  Had he loved this shop? Or had it been a prison for him?

  To his son, it had been his father’s prison, but his own route to the future. In the tiny, windowless room he’d taken apart a thousand electronic gadgets, experimented, tested his theories, read books and articles.

  It had started when his mother found him reading in bed at 2 a.m. He was nine. Following that, reading was strictly forbidden after he’d been sent to bed. A growing boy needed his sleep, she’d said. But Zeke had needed even more to learn and know. He’d slipped out the next week, reading by flashlight under a tree. With cooler weather, he’d needed shelter—that’s when he’d remembered his father saying how the whole window frame at the back of the shop could come out.

  All those years, surely Zeke had slipped up sometimes by not clearing away every sign of his current project. And the articles his father would happen to produce when Zeke was working on something similar. Yes, Mischar had to have known. But he’d never said anything.

  Zeke turned his back on the windowless room and looked again toward the front of the shop.

  There was something…

  He drew in the air, dusty, abandoned and stale. Yet, just on the edge, came the scent of leather.

  Darcie’s cell phone rang as she reached Old Cemetery in her run. She flipped the phone open, the dial glowing against the light of not-quite sunup. Who would be calling at this hour?

  She was earlier than usual this morning because there’d been no point staying in bed when she could have qualified for the Olympic Toss and Turn after last night.

  “Darcie? Oh, Darcie, I’m sorry if I woke you. It’s Anton.”

  Darcie’s heart lurched, then training set in. “What’s wrong, Mrs. Z?”

  “Is he there? With you? I know he is a grown man, but all night he is gone. When I visit in Virginia, he does that, but I
know he is at his office. Here? I don’t know. His machine is in his room, so he is not working. But if he is with you—”

  “He’s not with me.”

  “I know it is a modern thing to do, and I am not a busy mother. I would be happy if—”

  “Mrs. Z, he isn’t here. I don’t know where he is.”

  “Oh.” The older woman’s tone changed on that single syllable. Darcie would have said to this point Mrs. Z was a little worried and a lot a curious “busy mother.” Now her voice held only worry. “He could be hurt. An accident or that car could be broken.”

  “I’m sure I would have heard if something had happened to him.”

  Clearly mollified, the older woman said, “You find him, Darcie. You bring him home. No matter what he thinks.”

  “Mrs. Z, I can’t arrest a man because he didn’t come home last night.”

  “I worry for him.”

  “I know you do.” And not just this one night.

  “You worry for him, too.”

  “He’s a grown man, Mrs. Z.”

  “Yes, he is.” She added a trace of slyness to that, as if she thought she knew something.

  “Mrs. Z, I’ve gotta go. I’ll let you know if I hear anything. And you call me when he comes in, okay?”

  Rosa Zeekowsky accepted that. After a brief hesitation—it was awfully early—Darcie tried Zeke’s cell. It went over to a message service immediately. It was off, or not working.

  Darcie skipped her loop through the cemetery to reach home faster. In less than an hour she had showered, dressed and driven to the police station to check the few overnight reports.

  Darcie called Mrs. Z, to reassure her Zeke hadn’t been in an accident and wasn’t in the hospital—at least not in Drago—and just in case she had forgotten her promise to let Darcie know when Zeke came in.

  “No, he’s not here,” Mrs. Z said. She sounded calmer. “I remember something, Darcie. His father’s shop. You know it? I think Anton goes there.”

  “But why? It’s been empty for years.”

  “Not of memories.”

  Chapter Ten

  The front door of the deserted shop had been locked. But as Darcie looked for Zeke’s car, she picked up a single set of footprints—long footprints—in the dusty gap between buildings.

  In the alley, she ran the beam of her flashlight over the back of Mischar Zeekowsky’s shoe repair shop and saw the window in its frame leaning against the wall. Point of entry.

  “Zeke?”

  No answer.

  She put the flashlight away, then, using the blocks already in place as a mount, she levered herself into the window opening. Zeke’s extra inches of height would have helped him with this maneuver, but her training helped her complete the move with a minimum of noise.

  Inside, she waited, letting her eyes adjust and listening. She heard nothing. The door to the front of the shop was open. Instinct might have pushed her to check that room out first. But training reminded her that with the front door locked and the back door padlocked, she could be caught in a dead end.

  There was one other door visible in this small area. She focused her flashlight on the floor leading to it, and saw footsteps. Standing to the side, she carefully eased open the door.

  The room was empty. She didn’t enter. Because the footsteps had barely advanced past the threshold. She changed her angle and shifted the flashlight. What could have kept Zeke standing there, looking into a windowless, featureless room?

  She flicked off the flashlight and went to the front room.

  He sat on the floor, with his back against the counter and his legs stretched out nearly across the entire width of the narrow shop.

  “Zeke?”

  “Hi, Darcie.”

  “This is getting to be a habit, Zeke, me finding you when someone’s worried.”

  “No one could have seen a light in here. I don’t have one.”

  “Your mother’s worried you weren’t at home last night.”

  “Ah.” In that syllable, she heard regret that he’d worried his mother, but also what sounded like the echo of a decision. “Darcie, I want to ask you something.”

  She advanced into the room. “Okay.”

  “Have a seat.” He gestured to the space beside him as he looked up, a half smile tilting his mouth. “It might take me a while to come up with the words. You know I’m not good at that.”

  She sat, more than a foot between them, with her knees pulled up. Light from the back area sketched out his face for her, and she supposed light from the window in the front door did the same for him with her face.

  She wondered if the daylight growing outside would have much impact in here, or if they would remain rough outlines devoid of detail to each other.

  Zeke drew in a breath, “Okay, I’ve been sitting here thinking. Thinking about a lot of things you said. A lot of things that have happened. These past few weeks and before, when we were kids.”

  As many times as she’d wished that Zeke would occasionally stop his relentless pursuit of the future, her stomach tightened at the prospect of hearing what conclusions he’d come to about the past—and the present.

  “What I want to know about is your parents not believing in you.”

  “Zeke, why on earth—?”

  “I want to know, Darcie. You can say it’s none of my business, and the only reason I can give you is I want to know.”

  She laughed. It wasn’t pretty, but it eased some of the tension in her throat. And it acknowledged that his reason was going to be enough for her.

  “Mom’s okay. She never really showed that she believed in me, at least not the way I wanted, but…” She didn’t know exactly how to express the feeling that had been building in her lately. “Maybe she didn’t know how, because she didn’t believe in herself. Not then.”

  She became aware of Zeke watching her, shifted to her other hip and stretched out one leg.

  “Your father?”

  “Ah, dear old dad,” she said with an attempt at flippancy. “That was another story.”

  “He didn’t support your academics?”

  She snorted. “Brains in girls were a waste according to Gordon. He would talk about how beautiful mom was, like a perfect porcelain figure, he’d say, and then he’d look at me and say what a shame I hadn’t taken after her.”

  “So, you entered a career that requites brains and strength—porcelain figures need not apply. But before you did that, you entered the Lilac Queen contest.”

  “That again?”

  “Yes, that again,” he said decisively, turning aside her scoffing. “You were a princess, didn’t that tell you that other people saw that you’d be a great representative of Drago?”

  “Other people, not my father. You probably don’t remember, but he was a judge, right up until he died. Everyone in town knew Jennifer was unanimously voted Queen, so everyone knew my father didn’t vote for me. But I’d heard him even before the court was announced telling Mom the other judges were idiots. Can you believe it, Martha? They actually voted for Darcie. He hadn’t voted for me in the preliminaries. I was on the court despite him.”

  She shook her head. “I never would have entered if it were solely a beauty contest, because who can hold a candle to Jennifer? But it did hurt that my own father didn’t think I could represent our town.”

  “Your father was an ass.”

  He said it with such calm certainty that it took Darcie an extra beat to recognize what he’d said, then she laughed. “You know, he really was.”

  She found herself telling him about Gordon’s beloved collections that turned out to be mostly unwise purchases, and about the debts he’d left, and even a little of how she thought she might have had her eyes closed to how much her mother had blossomed since she’d become a widow.

  By the end, she had her shoulder propped against the back of the counter, facing him, her knees drawn up, one nudging his thigh.

  When she was quiet, Anton Zeekowsky astonished her
by saying. “You stayed in Drago to prove you weren’t what your father thought.”

  She looked into his dark, shadowed eyes.

  “I think you’re right, at least partly, Zeke.”

  He licked his lips, and spoke again. “I wasn’t what my father thought I was, either.”

  She waited, her heart hammering with a kind of joy that he would talk to her and anxiety at the pain she heard in his voice.

  “You said this town respected my father, but you were wrong, Darcie. Not everyone respected him.” He looked away then, around the room, as if he could see it as it had been. “I used to help out here. Unloading supplies, doing cleanup, inventory—all that I didn’t mind. But I hated waiting on customers.” His mouth twisted. “That problem I have with people again. My father knew how I felt, so he mostly let me stay in back.

  “But this one Saturday in November when I was a freshman, we were about to close when the bell over the front door rang telling us someone had come. I heard the voices, I knew who they were and I grabbed the garbage like it needed taking out right that instant and headed for the alley. He called my name to come take care of the customers and I ignored him. So he went out front.

  “I heard them, Darcie, I heard them. Drunk and loud and full of themselves. I knew they were giving him a hard time, laughing at him, mocking him. He offered no resistance and I did nothing.

  “I was ashamed. Of myself for being the coward who stayed in the alley. Who didn’t rush in to protect his father. To fight for him. And I was ashamed of him. For not standing up to them. For being the strange man in town who they felt they could do that to.”

  She touched her fingertips to his fisted hand. His hand jerked. Her fingers slid to his leg. She left it there, feeling the tension in him, but also the strength and warmth.

  “When I came in, he was straightening out the counter—they’d shoved everything on the floor. And the cash drawer was open. I could see money was missing. I said we had to call the cops, get them arrested. He just shook his head and said they must have needed the money more than we did.