Second Chance Friends

by Jennifer Scott

  I’m holding his head, honey, see? We’ll get him some help. Sir? Sir, help is on the way.

  Joanna, knocking the shattered glass away from the rear windshield, trying to climb into the car, just as she’d done at the bus moments before.

  I can maybe reach the seat-belt buckles from back here. Hang on, I’m trying. I’m coming up.

  And Melinda, sinking into a professional calm as she, too, fumbled to press the release button on the seat belt, trying to blot out the shrieking of the young upside-down woman.

  Okay, we’re gonna get you out. Can you lean over? I just need to try to get the seat belt dislodged so I can get you out of there.

  And the image Melinda would never forget, not as long as she lived, no matter how many accident scenes or tragedies she worked. Maddie Routh’s terrified eyes, bulging and shocked, and the way her hands shook around a pregnancy test stick, which she held up for Melinda to see. Maddie’s voice suddenly losing its shriek and instead going low and pleading.

  Please. We’re having a baby. He can’t die.

  But he did.

  He did.

  TWELVE

  Joanna was first into their booth at the Tea Rose. She checked the time on her phone. Everyone was late. Melinda’s job meant she came and went when she could, but tardiness was unlike Karen. When Joanna had talked to her on the phone the night before, she hadn’t said anything about being late. She’d only relayed that Melinda’s husband had left her, that they should all try to meet for coffee in the morning, because Melinda sounded bad.

  “Can I get you something while you wait?” Sheila asked, setting a coffee carafe on the table and turning over Joanna’s cup. She poured the first one, while sliding a tiny creamer pitcher across the table at the same time.

  “How about a grapefruit?” Joanna asked. She was still trying to get used to this eating-healthy nonsense. She really wanted sausage and bacon and the kind of hash browns that were crispy on one side and buttery and soft on the other. But she was trying to eat more healthily for Stephen. Okay, not really for Stephen. Just for the distraction. Telling herself that she wanted to look good for her man somehow kept her mind off Sutton. In theory. It was a theory she was still working out.

  She and Stephen had been official for two weeks now. They’d made love exactly six times. And every time, she found herself unable to blot Sutton out of her mind while with him. She couldn’t climax without thinking about Sutton’s cherry lips, a realization that both terrified and excited her. She’d resorted to faking, and while she knew women faked all the time, it still broke her heart to know that she was faking it with Stephen. He’d be crushed if he knew.

  She loved him. Really loved him. Heart-skip-a-beat, butterflies-in-the-belly love. And, it was weird, but she was attracted to him, too. But she felt strange when he touched her—as if she were doing something wrong. Her body responded to his fingers, but still she dreamed of Sutton, even while she so desperately didn’t want to.

  Everything seemed to have gotten more complicated than before. How was that even possible?

  She’d taken to texting and calling Karen on a daily basis. She felt an older-sister connection to her. She’d told her about Stephen, but she’d fantasized about telling her everything. Instead, they’d ended up talking mostly about Karen’s son, who Joanna guessed Karen thought was plain old no good, but no way would a mother say that out loud.

  As if summoned, Karen came through the door and headed straight for their booth. She looked distracted, maybe even frazzled, her hair flattened on one side and her shirt slightly wrinkled.

  “Hey, sorry I’m late,” she said, scooting into her side of the booth. “I had a phone conference with my boss. Now my son’s lawyer. So awkward.”

  “I just got here anyway,” Joanna said. “Did the guy wake up yet?”

  Karen turned over her coffee cup and filled it in one swift motion. She shook her head. “Not yet. At least not that we’ve heard. Not that we’d be first on their list of people to notify, you know? Maybe there’ll be a miracle today.”

  “Miracle Monday,” Joanna said, smiling. It was something Sutton had said when they’d both found out they’d gotten parts in Guys and Dolls. Joanna hadn’t known Sutton yet at that point, but the tiny brunette had already caught her eye, with her ivory knit beret and her torn denim miniskirt. She’d seemed so professional and perfect. Born for the stage. And sexy as hell. Joanna’s face burned at the thought. Where the hell was that grapefruit?

  “I like the sound of that,” Karen said. She regarded Joanna over her cup. “You’re looking awfully pink cheeked this morning. Someone had a good weekend, I guess.”

  Joanna chuckled. “I must have.” She touched one cheek. “I didn’t realize.”

  Karen sipped her coffee and grinned, her lipstick imprinted on the side of her mug. “It’s a glow. Love will do that to you.”

  Immediately, Joanna’s smile vanished. Love. She hated the word. She didn’t know what it meant anymore.

  “Not that I would know,” Karen added, echoing Joanna’s thoughts.

  “Speaking of, is that guy still bothering you?”

  Karen grimaced. “I wouldn’t really say ‘bothering.’ More like being relentless. And yes. He just happened to be having lunch outside our building every day this week. Who does that in wind like this? It’s cold outside.”

  “But he’s hot on the inside,” Joanna teased. “Just kidding,” she said when she saw Karen’s face. “You’re right. It’s weird. Maybe you should get a restraining order.”

  Karen set down her cup and waved her hand. “He’s harmless. He just wants to get a drink. I’m thinking of giving in, just to make him go away.”

  “I’m pretty sure that the best way to make a guy go away is not to go on a date with him,” Joanna said. “But then again I’m not exactly an expert on guys,” she mumbled.

  Karen squinted at her. “Everything okay?”

  “Yeah. I’m just saying I’ve only had one boyfriend. That hardly makes me an expert. How is Melinda?”

  “Oh.” Karen swiveled in the booth to peer at the door. “She should be here by now. She didn’t sound good this morning.”

  Sheila brought Joanna’s grapefruit. Joanna stared at it for a second, wishing it would magically sprout into a plateful of French toast. This was stupid—as if eating right would make her suddenly stop being so confused. She reached over and grabbed a handful of sugar packets, ripped them all open at once, and dumped them over the top of the fruit. She doubted it would do any good, but anything would be better than eating it plain.

  “I wouldn’t guess she would sound too good. So what happened? Why did Paul leave?”

  Karen shrugged. “She didn’t say. Just that he’s gone, and that she thought she’d hear from him by now, but she hadn’t. Maybe we should check on her.”

  “I don’t think that’ll be necessary.” Joanna pointed out the window, where they saw a disheveled Melinda climb out of her car. Squinting angrily out into the grayish sky, she headed toward them, the wind whipping her hair back away from her forehead, which was creased with annoyance. She was in her uniform, but it was rumpled and untucked.

  “Hey, there,” Karen said as Melinda slid into the booth next to her. “How are you?”

  “Next question,” Melinda grumped. “It’s flipping cold out there.”

  “Winter is here, I’m afraid,” Karen said. She filled Melinda’s coffee cup, and then upended the rest of the carafe into Joanna’s cup. “Can you believe next week is Thanksgiving?”

  Joanna’s stomach cramped up on the bite of grapefruit she’d just swallowed. Yes, she knew Thanksgiving was coming. She had been a mess of nerves about it for days. Stephen had brought it up, how his parents would love to see her, would be so excited to spend the holidays with her. She still hadn’t had more than the very barest of conversations with her own parents since she c
ame out of hiding back in October. The thought of schmoozing up Mr. and Mrs. Heartland America made her skin go cold and clammy. Would her . . . problem . . . be obvious to them? Would they take one look at her and know that her lips had touched Alyria’s? Would they hear her ambivalence in every word she spoke? She could envision his mother, standing at the end of the Thanksgiving table, pointing at her accusingly. This girl is an impostor!

  “I don’t have anything to be thankful for right now,” Melinda said, taking a long gulp of coffee that burned Joanna’s throat just to watch.

  “What happened?” Joanna asked, glad for the distraction. This grapefruit wasn’t working.

  Sheila came to the table with another carafe of coffee. “Breakfast?” she asked, and Melinda shook her head.

  “Coffee’s about all my stomach can handle these days,” she said. “Thanks, Sheila. I don’t know if I can even talk about it this morning. It’s all so surreal. Every morning, I wake up expecting him to be right there, and—”

  “That’s strange,” Sheila interrupted. Joanna glanced at the waitress, who was staring out the window.

  They all turned to follow her gaze.

  Joanna sucked in a breath.

  “Oh,” Karen said.

  “What on earth?” Sheila said.

  “That’s Maddie Routh,” Melinda said. “Isn’t it?”

  Joanna barely recognized her, but yes, it did appear to be Maddie Routh, who was sitting behind the steering wheel of a car she’d just parked half onto the walkway. The car leaned as the front passenger-side tire rested a full four inches above the others.

  “I think so,” she said.

  “What is she doing here? I wonder,” Karen said. She’d reached into her purse and grabbed her phone in her fist, something Joanna had noticed she had a habit of doing anytime she was nervous.

  They watched in silence as Maddie sat in the car, slumped forward so that her forehead rested on the steering wheel. She seemed to be rocking back and forth, and when she sat up again, she wiped her eyes with a balled-up tissue. She rested her head sideways on the driver’s-side window and splayed a hand over the window as if she were reaching out to something. She appeared to be talking to herself. Talking and crying.

  After a few moments, her door popped open, and a leg dropped out, but still she sat there for the longest time, half in and half out of the skewed car.

  “Do you think we should go out there?” Joanna asked.

  Karen shook her head. “She didn’t seem to really want anything to do with us, remember?”

  “But she’s upset,” Joanna said. She pushed her barely touched grapefruit away. “Maybe she needs something.”

  “No, I agree with Karen,” Melinda said. “Let’s wait for her to come in. See if she comes over here. If so, great. If not, we leave her alone.”

  But Joanna didn’t know if she could just leave Maddie Routh alone. She was still haunted by a feeling of not having done enough for her. She’d been so intent on getting the children out—the little boy with the blood on the front of his white shirt. It had come from his nose—no big deal—but he was so frightened. So shattered. She’d barely had time to even register what had happened with Maddie and Michael Routh. One minute she’d been grabbing that boy by the armpits and pulling him through the window, telling him everything was fine, and the next she’d been slicing her own hands and knees climbing through the rear windshield of a smashed red car.

  She hadn’t realized at the time she’d been climbing into a car with a dead man. She hadn’t realized she’d been witnessing a widowing right in that very moment. Would she have still crawled inside the car had she known these things? She wasn’t sure.

  Maddie Routh had been so panic-stricken. She’d been losing the love of her life and she’d known it.

  The night before that crash, the night with Stephen and the wine and the kiss, Joanna had lost her best friend. She’d given up on love. She’d given up on happiness and life and all the things that came with the freedom to love whomever your heart selected.

  In a way, she saw them as the same, Maddie and her. They were both alone, loveless. But at the same time she was jealous of Maddie Routh, because Maddie had felt the love before losing it, and Joanna never had.

  And she knew, though she would not admit it to herself, that she would not feel it with Stephen. Not really. No matter how many grapefruits she ate, or how many times she made love to him while thinking of someone else.

  “Who is Maddie Routh?” Sheila asked.

  “The one whose husband died in that wreck back in September,” Melinda said.

  “Oh.” Sheila set the empty carafe she’d been holding onto the table, totally absorbed in what they were all seeing out at the curb.

  Maddie Routh’s leg pulled back into the car, and the door shut again. But just as soon as it had, it reopened, and this time she pulled her whole body out of the car and stood, the wind pushing her shirt against her belly, which was still not noticeably pregnant, but had a roundness that someone in the know might recognize.

  She stood, her eyes closed against the wind, her mouth still working around words that none of the ladies inside the diner could hear. They all continued to stare, no one breathing a word, as she took an unsteady step forward, and then another, wobbling up the walkway toward the doors.

  “She doesn’t have a jacket on in that wind,” Karen observed.

  “She doesn’t have any shoes on, either,” Sheila said. “Her feet must be freezing.”

  “I think we should do something,” Joanna said, scooting toward the edge of the booth. Though she wasn’t sure what she thought they should do.

  “She’s really not supposed to come in here with no shoes on,” Sheila said.

  But no sooner had she said that than Maddie Routh veered off the walkway, her bare feet disappearing into the crunchy browned grass, dormant for the season. The discolored divots had even blended in with the rest of the dying lawn.

  And that was right where Maddie Routh was headed.

  Step by shaky step, she made her way through the lawn until her toes rested in one of the dips in the ground. She was now right outside the window where they were sitting. Had the glass not been between them, Joanna might have been able to lean over and touch her. Maddie had stopped talking, and only stared at her toes as they wriggled in the grass, the cuffs of her jeans frayed and filthy.

  Joanna couldn’t help herself. She reached out and knocked lightly on the glass. Karen darted a look at her, but Maddie Routh didn’t even seem to hear the sound at all. Instead of responding to Joanna’s knock, she sank to her knees in the center of the biggest divot, running her hands over the tops of the grass blades, just as Joanna had done on her first trip back to the diner after the crash. A serene look cascaded over Maddie Routh’s face—her lids heavy and at half-mast, the angry creases wiped clean from her forehead.

  “I’m going out there,” Joanna said.

  “Maybe we should,” Melinda agreed.

  “Okay,” Karen said.

  They slid out of the booth and past Sheila, who was holding the carafe again and heading toward the kitchen, watching over her shoulder as they filed toward the door.

  Joanna gasped as the wind blew down the front of her shirt as soon as she opened the door. She remembered how hot the Guys and Dolls practices had been at first, all of their makeup melting and gathering in pools in the creases of their faces. She remembered one of the rehearsals, when Sutton had come up behind her and pressed an ice cube to the back of her neck.

  You looked hot, Sutton had said, with a smirk, as Joanna gasped, every inch of her body instantly rising into goose bumps. Sutton had rubbed the cube in circles on Joanna’s neck for a few seconds before tucking it into her mouth and walking away.

  It was easily one of the sexiest moments of Joanna’s life.

  She hated thinking about it
now. Thinking about it led to thinking about where Sutton might be performing now that the outdoor theater season was over. Which would lead to thoughts that maybe she should find out, drop by a rehearsal, see how things were going. Which would lead to thoughts that no amount of grapefruit could wipe out.

  Instead of thinking about those things, she pressed forward into the wind and the noise of the morning rush hour traffic, both of which seemed to have picked up considerably since she’d arrived at the Tea Rose. She absently held the door for Melinda, who held it for Karen, and the three of them gathered along the walkway, facing the divots.

  Maddie Routh was lying down in the biggest one now. Curled up with her arms pressed into her stomach, her cheek erased by the grass that had been shaded by her husband’s blood months before. She wasn’t crying. She wasn’t talking. If anything, she looked as though she might be sleeping.

  Joanna went to her first, crouched down next to her, hugging her own knees. “Maddie?” she asked softly. “Hello?”

  At first, Maddie seemed not to have heard her, but then she slowly opened her eyes and blinked at the overcast sky.

  “Hey,” Joanna said. “Maybe you should come inside. This wind is pretty cold.”

  Maddie only stared, and then closed her eyes again, pressing her cheek harder into the grass. She loosened one of her arms from her belly and stretched it across the grass as if she was hugging it.

  “Maddie?” Melinda had joined Joanna, though she’d remained standing. “Let’s go inside and pour you a cup of coffee.”

  “I don’t drink coffee,” Maddie Routh said dreamily. “Michael drank loads of it. I can’t even stand the smell of it now.” She moved her arm back to her belly. “Can’t stand the smell of most things now. Thanks to this.”

  Joanna eased onto her bottom, her arms still hugging her bent legs. The long skirt that she’d worn that day was too thin for winter. She’d known that it was out of season when she’d put it on, but she’d never guessed she’d be sitting outside in it. She reached out to touch Maddie Routh’s hair, which looked cleaner than it had before, but was still greasy and tangled.