Friendship Makes the Heart Grow Fonder (9781455517763)

by Verge Higgins, Lisa

  That lecturer, once he’d hustled his people into the antechamber, had barely taken a breath between sentences as he discussed all aspects of the church and the mural in a rich, rolling Italian. Judy had first discovered in Neive that the Italian language was very much like French. She understood a good portion of what he was saying just by parsing out rhythms and recognizing word roots.

  She leaned toward Monique to make a remark about the latest restoration but the words died on her tongue. Monique faced the painting, but though her body was present her brooding mind was elsewhere.

  Judy wished she could come up with some wise-woman strategy to make her friend feel better. Her stock of emotion-management tricks were useless in the face of Monique’s newly unfiltered grief. Judy just couldn’t put herself in Monique’s shoes. Imagining Bob gone was impossible, like trying to imagine a world without light.

  En route to this church they’d done a swift drive-by through the Milanese cemetery, waving at the lovely marble monuments while Judy tried to figure out from the map where Eva Peron and Giuseppe Verdi had once been buried. Monique hadn’t seemed interested in that. She was captured by the mourning angels and aboveground monuments and the weeping trees. She told them that the cemetery reminded her of one particular Louisiana bayou plot that held the bulk of Lenny’s ancestors, full of elaborate crypts grown over with swamp plants and dripping Spanish moss.

  Wise Lenny, if not so very subtle, Judy thought. What Lenny couldn’t know was that Monique had buried him beneath a tombstone with a stone angel, close to a willow tree, exactly because the spot reminded Monie of the Reed crypt. Recognizing the parallels, Judy had watched her friend closely, saw the way she looked around the cemetery, saw strong Monie, her dear friend, finally accept her terrible loss.

  A bell rang, startling them all. Fifteen minutes was all they were allowed in the refectory. The guards strode in and herded them toward the door. The rate at which the tour guide spoke accelerated as he and his group, as well as she, Monique, and a stumbling, reluctant Becky were urged toward the exit. Judy lingered as long as she could, looking at the figures at that table and the feast spread out before them, and the man in the middle who knew he was going to die the very next day.

  “Speaking of last suppers,” Judy said, as they tumbled blinking into the little stone-paved plaza outside the brick church. “I’ve been looking into where we should eat tonight.”

  Becky clutched her stomach. “I’m still digesting last night’s white truffle risotto.”

  “Shut up, skinny. There’s a famous place called Ibiza, but it’s loud and full of fashion celebrities.”

  Becky shook her head. “Sounds like a headache.”

  “I agree. That’s why I’m thinking we should go to La Latteria. It’s tiny, and it used to be a creamery. It’s a little off the path, and we can’t make reservations, but it’s run by real locals who cook real Milanese food.”

  Judy and Becky glanced at Monique, waiting for her to make a decision. “I’m sorry,” Monique said. “What did you ask?”

  “Dinner. At a little local place called La Latteria.”

  “Okay.” She gave herself a little shake. “We’ll go after we’ve returned the Porsche to the rental place and checked into our hotel.”

  Judy was relieved to find the Porsche exactly where they’d parked it, squeezed between a battered Citroën and a tiny Fiat. She tumbled into the backseat and Monique settled into the driver’s seat again. But once settled with her seat belt snapped Monique didn’t turn the car on. She paused with her hands on the wheel, staring through the bug-splattered windshield toward the Milanese traffic.

  Monique said, “Do you know what got me most about that mural?”

  “Oh, where to begin?” Becky melted in artistic ecstasy against the seat. “We were in the presence of an ancient masterpiece. The flawless composition, the use of symbolism, even the distribution of bread and wine on the table was—”

  “The expressions on their faces,” Monique interrupted. “Each one of them showed a different emotion in a different way. I knew this mural would be amazing, but I wonder if Lenny knew that it would be so…”

  Monique struggled to find the right word and Judy sensed that there was more to her hesitation than a lapse in vocabulary. Standing in front of The Last Supper today Monique’s mission—however bittersweet—was finally at an end.

  Judy leaned forward between the seats and placed a hand on Monique’s shoulder. “Lenny knew what he was taking you to see, Monie. He wanted you to see a well-loved man among his friends, saying one last good-bye.”

  *

  “Oh, baby, I am going to miss you the most.”

  Judy ran her fingers over the sweet curves of the Porsche, leaving trails in the fine dust that coated the hood. She and Becky stood sentinel by the sports car, parked in an illegal zone outside the Eurocar rental terminal at the train station. Monique had gone inside to hand in the keys and finish all the paperwork. Their luggage—much added-to since they’d given up the strict itinerary in Interlaken—now stood bulging on the sidewalk, shopping bags slung on the retractable handles and threatening to tip them over.

  “You’re a sad case.” Becky, with her face raised to the Milanese sunlight, gave Judy a squinted eye. “Even a blind woman can see how much you’re lusting after that car.”

  “It’s bellissimo.”

  “So shallow. I must warn Bob.”

  “This is a fine-tuned instrument of absolute freedom.”

  “Oh, lord.”

  “This is my Italian lover, and I can’t bear to let him go.”

  Judy traced the length of the car with one finger, from the signature bulge of the headlights, over the rising slope of the windshield, past the strong mesh of the ragtop, down the opposite slope to the rear brake lights. She traced it not caring about the soot that dug under her fingernail or the mark it left in the patina of dust. She wished she could carve her initials in the metal casing. Judy ♥ Porsche. Then she’d feel like she left something of herself behind with it, maybe the part of herself that Becky was scorning—the crazy, lighthearted, utterly uninhibited woman who’d been born the moment she’d slung her leg over the seat of an Austrian biker’s motorcycle.

  She wanted to bring this woman back home, but the thought made the tendons at the back of her knees go liquid. She could rationalize the feeling away as due to the long hours spent scrunched in a backseat designed for tiny purebred dogs, but that would be an abject lie. She was terrified of what this creature would do once she returned home. She didn’t want to morph into one of those postmenopausal women who sought adventure in young lovers or six-cylinder engines. She didn’t want to be one of those desperate middle-agers dieting to emaciation and having their faces remodeled in a mockery of youth. Youth was gone. She didn’t really want it back.

  But the woman she was bringing home to Bob was a fierce newborn thing, emerging from the space between what she’d left behind and what she’d desperately hoped to find: A fresh stage of life, a new and fulfilling purpose. That purpose—whatever the hell it would be—still eluded her. Until she found it this woman returning from Europe with a sense of adventure and lack of impulse control might so easily become a fool.

  Monique came up beside her, a sudden shadow. “We’re all set. We can catch a train here at the station to bring us back to the hotel.”

  No one made any move toward the station. They all stood admiring the dusty little car as the working people of Milan milled around them. They stood there, staring, and Judy could feel the perfect alignment of their thoughts.

  Monique mumbled, “Tell me it’s just a car.”

  “It’s just a car,” Becky said, giving it a little pat on the hood, like a mother burping a child. “Just a silly car.”

  Judy blurted, “We have to do this every year.”

  Becky laughed. “Rent a Porsche?”

  “No, I mean this trip. Maybe not for two weeks. Maybe not with the Porsche. But some time away from our regular l
ives—we must do it again.”

  “Judy.” Becky sighed. “I have two young kids, a husband on work furlough, and a stepdaughter in college.”

  Judy wanted to urge her to take the money Monique had given her—the money Judy had refused to take to share the cost of the Porsche—and put it away for next year’s adventure. But then she remembered the cost of braces, tutoring, soccer fees, and hockey equipment, and she kept her mouth shut.

  But Monique would be an empty-nester next year with Kiera off to college. Monique would be gainfully employed with accumulated vacation time closing in on three full months. Monique would wander foreign roads with her, where folks spoke German and French and Italian and all the food was cooked by others.

  “I’m sorry, Judy,” Monique said, answering the unasked question. “My heart could not bear another trip like this, not for a while anyway.”

  An attendant in a shirt sporting the rental company logo jogged his way past them to the Porsche. The familiar keys rattled in his hand. The young man—purebred Italian in the scruffy-jawed, finely shouldered, sexy-eyed mode—gave all of them an amused look as he pulled the door open and slipped into the driver’s seat.

  Judy thought of the memories as the attendant turned over the ignition. She thought of the hours and hours on the road listening to bad European pop, the bags of paprika chips and overpriced bottles of mineral water they’d shared. She remembered the discussions they’d had about their stubborn, fascinating, brilliant teenagers, about life and men and sex, in the way of women of a certain maturity who respected frankness and wisdom above all. All cocooned in a womb of soft leather while the vehicle hummed around them.

  “All right, ladies,” Monique said. “Say good-bye.”

  Becky mewed a soft good-bye, but the word stuck in Judy’s throat. She could not raise it to her tongue. She’d been too long in foreign countries. Good-bye was not the right word. It was too casual, like ciao. It was too general of feeling, like auf Wiedersehen. Good-byes like that could mean you’d be reunited tomorrow, or at the next class, or the next year. Good-bye could mean I’ll see you later, or I’ll never see you again. The French at least had some distinction. They could say à bientôt, I’ll see you later; tout a l’heure, I’ll see you soon; à la prochaine, until next time. In English good-bye was used so broadly that it turned all farewells into a casual, meaningless flick of the hand.

  The speakers of Romance tongues—French, Spanish, Italian—they understood final partings. They knew there were beginnings, and then there were ends.

  Adieu, adios, addio.

  Judy raised her hand as the Porsche pulled out of the parking area, revving as the attendant screeched into the street.

  She could not say good-bye.

  So she blew the car a kiss.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  The sweeping marble staircase in the Milano Centrale train station seemed a little over the top for grandiosity, even for the Italians. But Becky couldn’t help but admire the national dedication to art as she perused the mosaics of winged trains, the bas-relief of a horse-fish, and a standing sculpture of a cherubic boy. She craned her neck to gape at the high ceiling, the magnitude as impressive as any church she’d visited throughout Europe.

  But as she reached the center of the main hall, Becky stopped short. Monique muttered something unintelligible and continued to walk ahead of her, but Becky stayed fixed, staring down the corridor that opened on one side of the building. There a soaring iron-and-glass canopy covered a train platform, allowing sunshine to pour in through black crosshatch supports.

  Judy clattered up beside her, as one wheel of her luggage had gone wonky. “Looks a little like Gare Saint-Lazare in Paris. Or at least how Monet painted it.”

  “It’s the ironwork.”

  Becky’s fingers itched for a pencil. This dawn-of-the-twentieth-century type of architecture was not something that usually inspired her, but now she found herself wondering how many pages were left in her sketchbook. Her eye followed the pattern of the wrought iron, her gaze enveloped the scale of the room—vast and full of murmur and whisper and whistle and the screech of metal. The opening of the platform at the far end was a glare of Italian sunshine where the train tracks disappeared into a blast of white light.

  “Judy,” Becky murmured, “where’d Monique go?”

  “She’s trying to figure out where the Metro is. Apparently these upper floors don’t service all the local stations.”

  With a thunk, Becky dropped her backpack to the marble floor. “While we’re waiting, I’m going to get a quick sketch.”

  “Go for it. Our time is our own now that Monique has crossed the last thing off her list.” Judy wearily perched herself on the edge of her standing luggage, sinking her elbows onto her knees and her chin onto her hands. “I’d like to spend the next hour or so soaking in a really hot bubble bath—but that’s a pipe dream. Even if they have tubs, European hotels still haven’t grasped the definition of hot.”

  Becky closed her fingers around the spiral top and yanked the sketchbook out of her pack. Poking around she found a pencil with a bit of a point, and then settling down cross-legged she flipped the sketchbook to an empty page. With quick strokes she sketched the perspective, then set to work on the crosshatching, trying to take in the full scale, squinting a bit to try to focus more carefully on the metal detail, realizing as she did that somehow—during the weeks since she’d received the RP diagnosis and became more aware of her weak peripheral vision—she’d unconsciously adapted to that weakness by bobbing and weaving her head in order to take in the most detail with the center ring of good vision she still had.

  As she settled in on the ironwork detail of the canopy, the memory of a certain evening with Marco drifted through her mind. It was the early days then, long before marriage, long before money troubles and Gina troubles dampened the fires. They’d spent the weekend in a sexual haze, giddily besotted, lolling in the loft of her sixth-floor walk-up, an apartment she shared with another art student. In one moment of postcoital bliss he joked that her low-ceilinged, two-room apartment was very La Bohème, with its slanted rooftop glass. It had once been a skylight, he’d surmised, before some enterprising owner had lowered the high ceiling of the fifth floor in order to produce the sixth-floor apartment for either maidservants or starving artists like herself.

  She’d placed her bed under that skylight. The dawn served as her alarm clock, convenient for the job she’d taken after she’d left the restaurant, baking chocolate croissants and boysenberry scones at a little bakery nearby. With his hands tracing lines in the air Marco had gestured through her window to an office building under construction a few streets away. Lazing in her bed with her head on his broad shoulders, she’d run her fingers across the muscles of his chest as his magical hands made graceful swirls in the air, describing the balance of forces on the lattice-like steelwork.

  Now she glanced at the graphite crosshatching she’d sketched and knew why she’d felt the uncontrollable urge to reproduce it on paper.

  Marco would love this place.

  Her pencil point trembled above the paper. Fear was a seeping cold that came up through the marble floor and bled through her skin to the marrow of her bones. She’d tried very hard not to think about the fact that in twenty-four hours she’d be on her way home. Back to the not-so-imaginary moat that surrounded her crooked little castle, so broad and deep and dangerously unsurpassable that it may as well be full of alligators.

  “Okay,” Monique said, her footsteps sharp and sure as she approached in full I’ll-take-charge mode. “Remember when we said it was weird that the trains were on the second floor?”

  Judy jerked out of what must have been a doze. “Yeah?”

  “Well, it is weird.” Monique brandished a map of some sort, frowning as she shook it smooth. “Any train we caught up here would take us to Zurich or Vienna or Budapest.”

  “Zurich would be good.” Becky leaned over the paper and concentrated on finishing the pa
ttern. “I’d take Vienna.”

  “Look, Monie, we’ve made a vagabond of her.”

  “Well, vagabonds walk,” Monique muttered, “and the city Metro is underground, and from what I can tell from this map, we’ve got a hell of a maze to navigate.”

  “Pack it up, Beck.” Judy pressed her hands on her lower back and stretched. “There’s a shower and a featherbed calling.”

  “They’ve got featherbeds in Budapest.” Becky ducked further over her sketchbook. “Young, strong porters too.”

  “Tempting.” Judy’s face crumpled in concentration. “Very tempting.”

  “Stop, both of you. If I don’t show up at Newark Airport the day after tomorrow, Kiera will jump on a plane and drag me back by a fistful of braids.”

  Becky reluctantly flipped the pad shut and shoved it and the pencil back into her backpack. She straightened up and glanced dreamily at the bullet-nose train just pulling out of the station as Judy readjusted the weight of the shopping bags hanging off the handle of her rolling baggage. With a sigh Becky fell into line behind Monique.

  They wound their way through the sea of other travelers, dipping and lacing through the crowds so thick at the stairs. Monique walked ahead of her and Judy behind, a tandem configuration that had sometime during the vacation become their default. Down they went, bumping their suitcases over the stairs, bags crinkling as they jostled. Becky glanced up occasionally to catch sight of the swinging Smurf keychain hanging off the back of Monique’s pack and then down again so she could make sure there was no crack in the marble floors that could catch the edge of her sneaker, no placard outside a boutique whose slender brace would trip her up, no errant bag or piece of luggage or dropped umbrella across the path. As they descended into the Metro, where the lack of light in the tunnels washed her sight to gray, she lifted her arm to trail her fingers against the cold wall tiles, feeling the bump of the edges, the rough grout, and the occasional lump whose provenance she preferred not to consider.