The Girls of Tonsil Lake

by Liz Flaherty

  “I’m fine.”

  That’s what we always said, even when the damned sky was falling. “Are you okay?” they asked after Mark died, and I said I was fine even though I knew I’d never be fine again.

  And Suzanne wasn’t fine now. “Talk to me,” I ordered.

  “I really don’t have anything to say.”

  I could hear her swallowing, her glass clinking against the telephone. “Suzanne, what are you doing?”

  “I just”—her voice faded away, then came back strong—“just wanted to say goodbye to someone.”

  Chapter Three

  Andie

  I felt pretty proud of myself this morning. In the first place, I got dressed. Not in sweats but in a pair of khaki shorts and an aqua tee shirt Miranda bought me for my birthday. I’m a size smaller since my illness and not too many clothes fit well, but these did.

  I washed my hair and ran a pick through it while it was still wet so that it lay in waves instead of kinking up. I was getting used to the white, and I kind of looked forward to not having it colored every five weeks.

  I even put on makeup, something Jean and I do well only because Suzanne’s drummed it into us when she gives us our free samples. All of her practice on us is the reason, we tell her, that she does the best makeovers in the Midwest.

  I gave myself a critical look in the mirror. As long as I was wearing a bra, you couldn’t really tell that my boobs didn’t match. The discovery made me ridiculously happy, and I turned away from my reflection quickly. There was coffee in the kitchen calling my name.

  Jake called, as he’s done every few days since I got sick, and we talked while I drank my first cup. He said he’d seen Suzanne the night before.

  “It was fun,” he said. “You should come up here for a weekend sometime, Andie. It would be good for you. Things don’t have to interfere.”

  “Maybe sometime.” I frowned. “But, Jake, have you told Suzanne?”

  The smile left his voice, and I was sorry I’d asked. “No,” he said, “but I will. Nothing’s going to happen there. Trust me, okay?”

  We’d just hung up and I’d poured my second cup when there was a knock at the back door. Expecting Miranda, I hollered, “Come on in,” and set about making a fresh pot.

  My children are as addicted to coffee as I am. Only young Jake says my coffee is too good for him. He’s a cop and considers himself a specialist in sludge.

  But it wasn’t Miranda at the door; it was Paul Lindquist. He was holding a green Mason jar with a ribbon tied around its neck and eight tulips inside it. He had on long denim shorts and a polo shirt in a peculiar faded green that turned his eyes the exact same color.

  He looked, as my kids would say and frequently do, fine. Very fine. Tongue sticking to the roof of my mouth fine.

  I was really glad I’d gotten dressed and put on my makeup and that he couldn’t tell by looking at me that my breasts didn’t match.

  He thrust the flowers at me and pulled something out of his pocket, holding them up in front of me. When he spoke, it was all in a rush as though he’d practiced it on the way to my house.

  “I’ve got two tickets to the Indianapolis Indians game this afternoon. I’d like you to go with me and have dinner afterward. If we leave right now, we can have lunch before the game. You look really beautiful with those flowers up around your face.”

  I’m not going to go into the subject of breast cancer, because I covered it all in that book, but I’ll say right here and now that if you’ve only got one thing to say to one of its victims, “You look really beautiful,” is an excellent choice.

  I said, “Do I need to change?”

  He shook his head, smiling. All of a sudden I could feel myself blushing like a kid on her first date. God, he had great teeth. “Do you want some coffee before we go?” I moved to the table to push aside the salt and pepper shakers and the sugar bowl and set the flowers in the middle of it.

  “No, thanks, but we can take some along.”

  I poured the coffee into two commuter cups the convenience store out on the highway had given away, and snagged my purse off the back of one of the ladder-back chairs. “Okay,” I said, cursing my wobbly voice. “I guess I’m ready.”

  He took the cups from me and set them on the counter, lifted my purse from my shoulder and put it beside them, and said, “There’s something I need to do first, that I’ve been wanting to do for more years than either of us wants to think about.”

  Without further ado, (I’ve always wanted to use that phrase) he took me in his arms, leaned me back against the counter, and kissed me till I was breathless. It didn’t take long, I might add. He gave me time to get my wind back and then kissed me again.

  My tongue wasn’t sticking to the roof of my mouth anymore. Along about the middle of the second kiss, it became otherwise engaged.

  Jake and I have been divorced for over twenty years, and, no, I have not been celibate all that time. Not that it’s anyone’s business. But I have been very careful about things. I never had anyone spend the night at my house while my kids still lived here, I’ve never had unprotected sex, and I’ve never entered into a relationship that had the remotest possibility of having strings attached.

  However, after two kisses and one bouquet of flowers, I was ready to ask Paul Lindquist to have sex with me on the kitchen table—after I set the tulips aside—and then move in with me. Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, I’d been spending too much time with Suzanne, who falls in love at the drop of a zipper.

  “Ready?” Paul asked, releasing me slowly and taking both the commuter cups in one hand.

  I nodded, though I wasn’t at all sure my knees would hold me up if I stopped leaning against the counter. “Where’s my purse?” I asked.

  He looked around, and I saw that his eyes weren’t as clear as they had been. “Uh…”

  I wondered if his knees were weak, too.

  “Oh.” It was on the counter behind me, one corner of it digging into my ribs, so I pushed off and slung it over my shoulder once more. “Let’s go.”

  The trip to Indianapolis had never gone so fast. We spent the time driving and, while we ate lunch at a diner complete with waitresses in pink uniforms, catching up on each other’s lives. We didn’t even have our kids out of high school yet when he drove into the parking lot at Victory Field.

  After the game, we ate dinner at Rosie Peabody’s, the restaurant I used to own, which got us up to the year of Miranda’s college graduation and her wedding and the birth of Paul’s first grandchild. We kissed in the parking lot, and while we were waiting on a red light going out of town, and when he stopped at a filling station so I could go to the bathroom.

  As we neared Lewis Point, we both grew quiet, though he held my hand on the console between the seats. What would I do, I wondered, if he wanted to make love? I’m not ready for that, unless we can do it in the dark with my bra and tee shirt still on.

  There was no doubt I wanted him; the wanting had grown with each kiss. But wanting and having are sometimes two different things.

  There was no hurry, I told myself, but I knew this day had been seventeen years in coming, ever since that night we’d met in the pharmacy. That’s not much of a hurry.

  He took my keys from my hand and unlocked the door and pushed it open, but didn’t offer to go inside. I looked up at him, and he framed my face with his hands.

  “I had a great time,” he said.

  “Me, too.”

  Just as I was stiffening my knees for another kiss, the phone inside the house began to ring. Paul followed me in, closing the door behind him as I picked up the cordless across the room.

  “Andie?” Vin’s voice sounded tense. “You need to go to Suzanne’s right away. Something’s wrong.”

  Jean

  I remember the first time I typed “The End” at the bottom of the last page of a manuscript. I laid my head down on that old electric typewriter David had brought me home from the office and cried.

  Fifteen y
ears later, I typed “The End,” laid my head down on the dining room table, and cried.

  “Oh, Jeannie.” David scooted me out of my chair and sat in it himself, pulling me onto his lap and tucking my head into his shoulder. “Sometimes I wonder if it’s worth how much of yourself you invest in your writing.”

  I lifted my head to take advantage of the tissue he was offering. “Oh, I don’t know,” I said. “I invest a lot of myself in you, too, and you’re worth it. Most of the time.”

  He pushed my hair back from my face and kissed my eyelids. “Am I?” he murmured.

  “Oh, yes.” I snuggled into his arms, thinking I’d just like to stay there and go to sleep, but some kind of internal alarm went off. “Oh, my God. Oh, no. Oh, no. Oh, no.”

  “Whoa.” He raised his eyebrows. “I swear, I’m innocent.”

  “Do you know what day this is?” I said, panicked. “It’s Birthday Saturday and I forgot all about it.” I looked over at the grandfather clock in the corner. “All of our children and grandchildren will be here within the hour. They will expect dinner and a birthday cake and ice cream.” Except for November and December, we did this one Saturday every month, because our extended family included birthdays in all ten of them.

  “Well, that’s fine.” He pushed me off his lap and got to his feet. “If that’s the case, you’d better hit the shower. I’ll hit the grocery store.”

  “What?” I stared at him. “I don’t have time to cook a full meal now.”

  “You’re not going to. I’m going there for the cake and ice cream.” He grinned, his eyes crinkling in a way that had been known to make me want to sit up and beg—not that I ever did, but I wanted to. “I’ll swing by Kentucky Fried Chicken for the dinner.”

  “But we can’t—”

  He interrupted me with a quick, hard kiss. “We can and we will. Now, go take your shower. It would never do to greet your children in your nightshirt.”

  I don’t know how we did it, but by the time the kids began to arrive, I was waiting at the door in my favorite sundress and David was putting the finishing touches on the dining room table.

  The girls looked a little askance at the meal, but Josh and my sons-in-law dug right in. Toby, Carrie’s son, said it was the best dinner Grammy had ever cooked and got a big laugh.

  We were eating cake and ice cream when I mentioned Vin’s invitation to come to Maine. Everyone except Toby and his little sister Megan stopped eating and looked at me.

  “I’m not going,” I said into the silence, “unless it’s for a weekend while Dad’s playing golf in Georgia.”

  “Well,” said Carrie, “I should hope not. I don’t know what Vin was thinking of, asking you such a silly thing.”

  “No kidding,” said Kelly, pushing her cake away from her ice cream with her fork. “As if you’d even consider it.”

  The chicken breast I’d eaten for dinner starting jumping around in my stomach, and for a ludicrous moment I wondered if it had been dead when I swallowed it.

  “What do you mean, girls?” asked David, frowning. “Why shouldn’t she consider it?”

  “Good heavens, Dad, she can’t leave you for a month. The house would fall down,” said Carrie. “And who would watch the kids while Tim and I go to Florida, or Kelly and Brian’s dog when they go to the Bahamas? And what about your own vacation? Aren’t you and Mom going away this year?”

  “Yes,” I said, “we’re going to Hawaii in October.” Some little demon made me add, “I hope that’s all right with you, Carrie.”

  “You know, Josh and I could watch the kids,” said Laurie quietly, “if Mom wanted to go to Maine. And the dog, too.”

  “The kids have never stayed overnight with anyone but Mom and Tim’s mom,” said Carrie, just enough impatience in her voice to make it undeniably rude.

  “That’s awfully nice of you, Laurie,” said Tim unexpectedly, ignoring the glare Carrie turned on him. “Would you mind, though? They can be a handful.”

  “It would be fun,” said Josh, “for Laurie, anyway. I, of course, will have to keep Dad company on the golf course.”

  “Mom’s already said she’s not going,” said Carrie, giving her head a toss that threatened to dislodge the clips holding her hair back from her face.

  I leaned over to rescue Toby’s cake from going off the edge of the table.

  “I think you should go, Jeannie.” David’s voice brought the table once more to silence. Toby’s cake hit the floor with a tiny muffled thump.

  The look David sent around to our children was not a loving one. “She finished another book today, not that any of you asked, and she deserves a break.” He smiled down the length of the table at me. “I think I’ll plan to spend a couple of weekends in Maine next month, see if I can pick up some woman to spend the rest of my life with.”

  He got to his feet and started gathering dishes. “Now, if you’d all like to help me clear this mess up before you go home, your mother’s going to bed. You can all go in and tell her goodnight before you leave.”

  “Oh, no.” I found my voice, though it sounded weak to my own ears. “I can do it, and Josh and Laurie are staying here.”

  “No, we’re not.” Laurie swept my plate from in front of me. “We’re staying at the Lewis Point Inn, and I’m going to have my way with Josh. I’ll tell you all about it, Mom, and you can put it in a book.”

  “Ah, loose women.” Josh wrapped her in a hug and winked at me over her shoulder. “You gotta love ’em.”

  “Come on, Tim. We’re leaving.” Her face flushed and angry, Carrie got to her feet.

  “Carrie.” I stretched a hand toward her.

  “We’ll leave when we’re done helping your father clean up,” Tim said pleasantly, facing down his wife and my eldest child in a way I’d come to admire. “I’m washing. I don’t know where anything goes.” When he walked past my chair, he bent to kiss my cheek. “Congratulations on your new book, Jeannie.”

  “I’ll dry.” Josh sounded resigned. “It’s what I do at home. And if I put things in the wrong places, I’ll just blame Dad.” He kissed me, too, as he walked past. “Love you, Mom.”

  Kelly, Brian, and Laurie all hugged and kissed me on their way into the kitchen. Kelly whispered, “Sorry, Mama. I promise to grow up someday.”

  Carrie wouldn’t look at me. With a sigh, I snagged the grandchildren for a couple of sticky hugs and rose from my chair, feeling every minute of the fifty-one years I’d turned this month. I stood for a moment, wondering if there was something I could say to ease the straight line of my daughter’s back. I met David’s eyes across the room, begging him silently to do something.

  He said, “Goodnight, Mrs. O’Toole. I love you.”

  I went to bed.

  It felt as though I’d just gone to sleep when I opened my eyes to see David, fully dressed, leaning over me. “Honey, get up. We have to go to Suzanne’s.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Suzanne

  “I’d like that,” I told Amanda. “I’ve been thinking a lot about my future with the company. Making plans, writing down ideas. You know.”

  Suddenly it seemed as though she was having trouble meeting my eyes. “Good heavens,” she said, jumping to her feet, “I forgot. I bought you this.”

  “This” was a bottle of rosé from a winery in southern Indiana. I don’t know one wine from another, but it’s a fact that I like sampling the local ones, so I appreciated the effort Amanda or her secretary must have expended to get it for me.

  “Thank you,” I said, touched.

  “I hope you enjoy it.” She sat down again, took the folder from the glass-topped coffee table and put it in her lap. Then she put it back on the table.

  “Damn it, I hate this,” she muttered, “and there’s no good way to say it. Suzanne, corporate is asking you to step down.”

  I thought I’d heard her wrong. You know how sometimes you expect something to be said, and when it’s not, you think yo
u heard it anyway? Well, that’s where I was. I opened my mouth and closed it again. I must have looked like a forny guppy.

  “Step down.” I repeated what I thought she’d said. “Amanda, are you saying I’m fired?”

  “Oh, God, no.” She closed her eyes, and I noticed she’d had them done since I saw her last. She had that surprised look. “They’d like for you to take on more administrative duties, perhaps relocate to Chicago if that’s possible.”

  “Step down.” I said it again. “What exactly do they want, Amanda?”

  “Damn it,” she said again. “I want a drink. You?”

  Without waiting for me to answer, she went to the credenza across the room and splashed whiskey into two squatty glasses, added water and ice, and came back. Her hands were shaking and the ice rattled against the glass. It reminded me of a scene from a television daytime drama.

  “It’s a young woman’s game, Suzanne, and as lovely as you are, you ain’t young anymore. They want you out of the public eye.” She met my gaze over the rim of her glass. The scars at the corners of her eyes stood out in stark relief.

  “But I thought the reason I was on the brochures and spent so much time in the public eye was to cater to the baby boomers who can afford our cosmetics—to show them fifty isn’t all that bad.” I know everyone thinks I’m stupid, and in this case they would be right. I didn’t know what in the hell was going on.

  “Yes,” she said, “and you’ve been great. Outstanding, as a matter of fact. But, the truth is, they want thirty-year-olds to show that fifty isn’t bad.”

  This I could understand. I’d been in this business when I was thirty, too. But I thought we’d come a long way, baby, since then. “What about the new regional director position?” I asked. “I’d be great at that, too.”

  “Yes, you would,” she agreed, and tossed back her drink so fast it made my eyes water. “But you don’t have a degree, do you?”

  “No. I came within a couple of semesters. What does that have to do with it?”

  “It’s company policy. Everyone in the position of regional director on up must have at least a bachelor’s. Doesn’t matter what it’s in, as long as it’s a degree.”