Friendship Makes the Heart Grow Fonder (22 page)

But four years ago, in that little room with Lenny dying in that bed, she hadn’t been the nurse who always sees grief up close.
She’d just been Monique, the wife of a burly Louisianan who’d charmed her into his wonderful life. And she’d learned that
this is what grieving people did long after they’d buried their loved ones: They pretended they were okay. They went through
the motions of living as if their hearts didn’t lie dead in their chests. In secret they spoke to the ones they loved as if
they were still living and breathing.

But no one wanted to hear the truth. So she’d hid it from everyone—her daughter, her neighbors, her mother, her coworkers,
her best friends. What the world wanted to hear was that she’d started “moving forward,” or that she was at least working
hard to “come out of it,” that she was definitely “moving on.” So she’d hidden from the world her urge to bite the back of
her hand to keep in the words she couldn’t bear to speak.

Now the truth pierced her like a needle. “You were right, Beck, about all that stuff you said on the cliff.  I talk to Lenny
now because I couldn’t really talk to him while he was dying.”

Monique remembered each time she’d pushed the chair away from the hospital bed in their den in order to fetch Lenny some pureed
lentil soup or set the water to boil for chamomile tea or to check on Kiera. She remembered making a grim joke when he brought
up the subject of funeral arrangements, chuckling as she waved the whole subject away. How many times had she done that? How
many times had she walked briskly out on a weakening Lenny, who asked her to hold on a minute while raising his hand from
the sheets?

“You know he’s still talking to you, Monie,” Becky said.

“No.” Her breath came in short fearful sips. She knew the truth now, sitting on this Italian hillside. “He’s stopped talking
to me altogether.”

“Well that’s a relief,” Judy said. “Otherwise we’d have to call in a priest.”

Monique shook her head. Judy just didn’t understand. Lenny would never again come and sit on the mattress behind her, or materialize
out of the corner of her eye to lounge in his chair in the kitchen, reading a newspaper with her rhinestone reading glasses
perched on the end of his nose. She knew this deep down. The wisp of presence she’d sensed in this beautiful place was like
the scent of incense lingering in a church long after the parishioners had gone.

“What I meant,” Becky explained, leaning into her, “is that Lenny is still talking to you through the bucket list.”

Damn the day she’d ever pulled that bucket list out of the drawer. “You guys are calling me out on talking to my dead husband,
and yet here you are treating that list like it’s a mystic code to be broken.”

“It’s not much of a code,” Becky said. “We’ve talked about this. The first half is what you gave up, and the second half is
what he wants you to do. If you just thought about it for a moment, you'd see it too. You already figured out for yourself
what he was trying to tell you with the gambling.”

“He wants me to throw my money to the wind,” Monique said. “Is that a lesson I’m supposed to embrace in my late forties with
a kid about to go to college?”

“He specified the exact amount,” Judy said. “The man gave you a
budget
.”

Monique frowned.

“There’s also a truffle festival on that list.” Judy crossed her legs at the ankles and massaged her swollen knee. “And we
all know how much you love truffles.”

Monique shook her head sharply. “You’re forgetting the details. The Alba festival is a wine and truffle festival. Mama likes
the red.”

“There are plenty of wine festivals this time of year,” Judy argued, “but he’s urging you to go to a festival for a fungus
that you just don’t eat.”

“It’s warm in Italy.” Monique held up her palms as if to pool the sunlight in her hands. “Lenny loved the warm weather. He
smothered himself in sweaters come October in New Jersey.”

Sweaters that still filled his closet. A closet that she opened on rare occasions, slipping inside and closing it behind her,
to breathe deeply of what little scent was left in the woolen fibers.

“If he just wanted someplace warm,” Judy countered, “I could have recommended a couple of fine Greek isles.”

“It’s sort of the same with the motorcycles,” Becky said in a tense little voice. “Lenny wanted you to try something new,
something you once wanted to do.”

“Beck, he called motorcycle owners ‘organ donors.’”

Judy snorted. “He knew you wouldn’t do anything so crazy as to risk your life—even driving a hundred miles an hour on a German
autobahn.”

“He didn’t supply the Porsche.”

“The car wasn’t the point. The point was to make you, Miss-I-never-drive-without-a-seat-belt-on, take a risk and do something
crazy.”

Monique raised a brow. “Like hooking up with Austrian bikers and drinking absinthe?”

Judy pointed a finger toward the sky. “You don’t think he’s up there, laughing his ass off about that?”

Monique paused. She squeezed her eyes shut. “I can’t do this.”

“Do what?”

“Speculate.”

“It isn’t speculating.”

“It is. You and Becky are just making this up, reading Tarot cards, consulting oracles, putting words in Lenny’s mouth.”

“Like ‘
laissez les bon temps rouler
,’
for example?” Judy asked. “Think about it. This trip to Italy and the visit to Oktoberfest—they’re both festivals. What better
way to urge you to take some time off to eat well, drink heartily, and enjoy what the world has to offer?”

Monique’s jaw began to hurt. “Let’s change the subject.”

“Not yet,” Judy said. ”Our last stop is tomorrow in Milan. Remind me again what the final two items on the list are.”

Monique played with the sleeves of her hoodie, her mind leapfrogging in its attempts to shut this whole conversation down.
“We’re visiting the marble monuments at the Cimitero Monumentale di Milano.”

Judy murmured, “Ah.”

Monique resisted the urge to glare. “So, wise oracle, what do you think Lenny meant by sending me to some Milanese cemetery?
It wouldn’t be something as simple as admiring the tombs carved by Leonardo da Vinci, would it?”

Becky leaned over, sharing a glance with Judy. “It is rather Dickensian.”

Judy shrugged. “Nobody said Lenny was subtle. And sometimes a person needs three ghosts to face the truth.”  

Monique looked from one to the other. “Are you two really saying I’m supposed to act like Scrooge and finally face my own
mortality?”

“No,” Becky said. “You’re supposed to face
his
.”

Becky held Monique’s gaze. In the silence Monique noticed that Becky’s focus was off just a bit. Maybe it had always been
like this. Maybe Monique was just noticing because her mind had gone still and her perception razor-sharp. Becky was looking
at her like newborns did, intense on the fuzzy brink between light and dark.

Monique supposed she’d been straddling that fuzzy edge too, for way too long. She’d grown comfortable in a hazy in-between
place where Lenny still lived in her mind, a place where she could visit whenever she needed him. She wondered how Lenny knew
that she would behave like this. She wondered why Lenny thought—just by sending her to some cemetery far away from the one
she’d buried him in—that she would then just let him go.

In the silence Judy dug around in her belly pack and then rustled open a stained and tattered piece of paper. “Yeah, that’s
it for the list,” Judy said. “First it’s the cemetery in Milan, and then we’re off to see
The Last Supper.
”

Monique fixed her gaze on the staircases of red roofs. She didn’t have to think too hard about the meaning of that final item.
It glared at her now, a one-hundred-watt incandescent bulb, but she sure as hell didn’t catch the significance of it while
she’d been taking care of him. She’d been so absorbed making sure he had enough morphine to stave off the pain but not so
much to cause his skin to itch or his worst imaginings to rise. So worried about Kiera and how the twelve-year-old was handling
the slow wasting away of her father in the den. So worried about tracking the comings and goings of the hospice nurse and
the home health aide, so worried about keeping the house together and monitoring what was going on in the hospital where she
worked reduced hours.

Maybe all that time he was just trying to urge her to treat every meal with him like a last supper. Maybe he was just trying
to say a proper, and final, good-bye.

Monique gazed over the far vineyards, the rows abutting at oblique angles. She heard the scrape of a shopkeeper’s broom on
the stones around the other side of the building. She heard wind rustle the leaves of the tree canted at an angle off the
mountain. She heard Judy rifling around again in her belly pack and the sound of a knife slicing through something soft.

Judy raised between two fingers a sliver of a white truffle so thinly shaved that it was almost translucent.

Monique narrowed her eyes. “You’re kidding me, right?”

“Dead serious.”

“Unless that’s a magic mushroom it isn’t going to make me just accept everything you guys are saying.”

“It’ll be a step in the right direction.”

“I hate you, you know.”

Judy smiled softly. “I hate you too.”

Then Monique opened her mouth wide. Judy laid the truffle on her tongue like a communion wafer. Monique forced down the rise
of bile as the taste burst in her mouth—oddly fragrant and musky but not entirely disgusting. She closed her lips over it
and attempted to chew. Becky’s arms came around behind her, and Judy leaned forward and hugged her so she was surrounded,
encircled, engulfed.

Then, while the oddly fragrant taste lingered in her mouth, Monique remembered that there was one more item on Lenny’s list.
One more task, beyond the trip to Milan, far more daring than taking a small bite of a warty little truffle. It had been scrawled
on the bottom of the original list in a script so spidery it was nearly illegible. Lenny had added it in the last week he
was alive, when the cancer had sapped all but the faintest spark of vitality. She’d read it later, tugging the list out from
under his limp hands. She’d assumed he hadn’t really meant it. In that last week his attention span had shortened along with
his ability to maintain the logic of a conversation.

This last task was too crazy to believe.

She was sure of this: It was the morphine that had prompted him to add number thirteen.

J
udy walked into the refectory of the church of Santa Maria delle Grazie with twenty-four other tourists who’d just been ushered
in through a pair of climate-controlled doors to view the famous Leonardo da Vinci mural,
The Last Supper
. They approached the fresco, painted on the end wall, with a communal air of awe. The mural itself was thirty feet long and
about fifteen feet tall, far bigger than Judy had ever expected, and the size had an impact that no photograph in any art
history book could match.

Becky whispered, “My art teacher would talk about this fresco and his eyes would roll to the back of his head.”

Judy murmured, “Clearly he needed to get out more often.”

Becky ignored Judy’s comment, all hungry eyes. “It’s just been through so much. Da Vinci painted it on dry plaster and then
sealed it in an odd way. It’s been deteriorating since the fifteenth century. They cut a door out of the wall and chopped
off Jesus’s feet. And in World War II the refectory was bombed.”

“Wow. How long has it been since you took Art History?”

“My professor would ramble on about all the references to the number three. The Apostles are grouped in threes. There are
three windows in the background.”

“Good things come in threes.”

“I wish there were more light in here.” Becky expelled a frustrated sigh. “I’ve never seen a real da Vinci up close.”

“They bricked up the windows to try to stave off the deterioration.”

“Good for you, Judy,” Becky said with a smile. “You read the placards.”

Judy let the comment lie. She knew about these boarded-up windows not from the placards in the little antechamber, but from
listening to the guide nearby lecturing in a low voice to a group of fifteen or so tourists. She’d noticed the professorial-looking
man as he’d stepped off a bus outside the church. He was dressed tweedy and he hustled his elderly Italian troops to hurry
along to make their scheduled tour time. She understood his haste. She, Becky, and Monique had parked the Porsche in the street
to make the tour time that Monique had scheduled back in the States. Only twenty-five people were allowed in the refectory
at any given time. Monique had read that casual last-minute arrivals were frequently disappointed, even in the deadest winter
of tourist season. This was one part of the itinerary they hadn’t dared to amend.

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 lives—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.