Random Acts of Kindness (16 page)

Chicago, Illinois

J
enna shifted Lucky’s weight on her lap, trying to avoid his tongue as the pup snuggled close to her. She scratched him behind the ears as she scrolled down the little screen, nervously rereading the e-mail on her phone amid the white-noise burble of coffee shop conversation.

“Just send it, Jenna.” Nicole rolled a large paper cup of coffee between her palms as she slouched behind dark glasses. “Enough fiddling, it’s perfect as written.”

“The last time Paulina got an e-mail from one of Claire’s friends she hopped on a plane to Kansas and hunted us down in a pool hall.” Jenna raised her screen. “This might make her call out the National Guard.”

“It’s a risk I’m willing to take. As it is, I’ve been answering Paulina’s texts practically every day. I know more than I ever wanted to know about the signs of lymphedema.” Nicole shook her head. “Maybe if her sisters see Claire relaxed and enjoying herself, then they may relax a little, too.”

Jenna winced as she tapped the Send button, eyeing the bar until the phone beeped that the e-mail and its attached photos had gone through.

Just then Claire appeared from around the coffee line to slip a corrugated flat of four hot coffees next to its twin on their table. Claire’s T-shirt bore a picture of a round, jolly Buddha with the words
I Have the Body of a God
.

“Second batch.” Claire sucked a sticky drip of coffee off her thumb. “One more batch of coffees and we’re off.”

Jenna watched Claire head back to the counter to wait for the rest of her order, still feeling a bit off-kilter. She’d only been gone for a few days, but she sensed she’d missed some change in the air, a shift in the relationship between her two friends that left her feeling one step behind. This morning, Nicole had sat them all down in the luxury room’s seating area with a pen and a paper, intent on making plans for the rest of the trip—but Claire had blown those plans to pieces. Claire had something she wanted to do. Nicole, with a secret smile, had pushed the pad of paper aside and reached for her purse. That’s how the three of them ended up in this fair-trade organic coffee shop purchasing twelve hot coffees to go.

Now Claire called out to them from the front of the shop where she waited, balancing the third tray of coffees. Slipping her phone in her purse and Lucky to the floor, Jenna picked up a tray and strode away from the dark-roast aroma into the heart of Chicago.

They passed a bakery and a bodega and a check-cashing store while Claire strode fiercely ahead. Straining against the leash, Lucky froze and nearly had a seizure as they passed underneath an elevated track and a train clattered overhead. A breeze ruffled off the Chicago River, pushing papers and leaves across the sidewalk like skittering insects. Jenna finally swept him up into the hollow of her waist. The poor little pup quivered against her, unnerved by the traffic and the milling crowds.

The first victim of Claire’s generosity lay dozing on the stairs of an old stone church. Claire climbed up the steps and leaned over to say something to the man who barely moved in the cocoon of his blankets. Jenna wrinkled her nose. She could smell the ripeness of him even from a good distance. Claire didn’t make any sign of noticing. She talked to him as she tugged a coffee out of her carrier. She put the coffee down close enough for him to reach but in a place unlikely for him to tip over.

Jenna watched her old friend turn and descend the stone stairs, and she was reminded of a time Claire had bounced down the stairs of the Baptist church in the cannery section of Pine Lake after delivering three boxes of shoes out of the trunk of Jenna’s car. Jenna hadn’t always paid attention to exactly
what
Claire was involving her in—which of the many coat and clothing and toy drives her friend took it upon herself to coordinate—because she had just been so gratified to be invited to the planning meetings, put in charge of the logistics, and given responsibility in a committee of smarter and more enthusiastic students. It never struck her until now, with a flat of hot coffee in her hand, that all along she’d been following the trail of a comet.

Nicole must have remembered something, too, for she suddenly leaned into Jenna. “Claire would have made a fabulous nun.”

Jenna paused, confused. “She
was
a nun.”

“I mean a Catholic nun. Working with the homeless. Just like this. Honestly, if she were willing to shave her head and eyebrows and put on a white sari, then I can’t imagine she’d object to the black habit.”

“There’s that little issue that she’s not Roman Catholic.” Jenna tried to remember what church the Petrenkos attended. Not the Episcopal church, like her own family. “Also, she already rejected the contemplative life in Thailand. I think she’s too much of a rebel for a convent.”

“My aunt is an Ursuline nun in Quebec. She’s been arrested three times for civil disobedience.”

Thinking about Nicole’s puckish sense of humor last night, Jenna was no longer surprised Nicole had a rebel aunt. It was funny what you learned about people after fighting with them for blankets.

Then the small muscles of Jenna’s neck tightened. Last night at the Cubs game, she’d been very grateful of Nicole’s hesitation to prod her for more details of her visit with Nate in Seattle. She hadn’t been ready to spill the whole tale while drunken Cubs fans jolted up around her and cursed the blindness of the third-base umpire. The subsequent excitement with the police had absorbed them, and this morning Nicole had been adamant about sending photos and an e-mail to Claire’s sisters.

Now they walked in companionable silence under the bright light of a Chicago August. Lucky raised his snout and licked her face once again. Jenna took the look in his bulging brown eyes for encouragement.

“While Claire is playing coffee fairy,” Jenna said, “I thought maybe I could ask you for some professional advice about—”

Her question was interrupted by the sound of Nicole’s sandals scuffing against the pavement. Jenna glanced at Nic only to find her friend staring at Claire offering another homeless man a cup of coffee. One glance and Jenna knew this man wasn’t quite right. He shuffled in nervous circles in front of a bus stop avoiding Claire’s eye. He wore a stained T-shirt and a pair of pants that slid low enough on his hips to show the ragged gray band of his underwear. He’d intentionally cut the front of his sneakers open. The toes of his shoes curled up like smiling mouths. His dirty socks flopped out like thick tongues.

“I read a statistic once,” Nicole said, “that sixty-six percent of the homeless suffered from some sort of mental illness.”

Jenna looked at the man more closely as Claire stood, calm, proffering the coffee with a steady hand. A patchy beard softened the line of his chin. One of last summer’s interns at the hedge fund had sported that kind of beard. That young man had been a college student trying so hard in his ill-fitting suits to look like a future Master of the Universe.
This
young man was thin also, but in a different way. His ribs pressed against the worn weave of his T-shirt as he shifted his weight and eyeballed the cup of coffee. The man raised an arm and waved it through the air as if he were erasing something from a chalkboard with his forearm.

Nicole visibly relaxed after Claire placed the coffee at the man’s feet and moved on. She said, “About that professional advice, Jenna.”

“It’s about Zoe.”

“I figured as much.” Nicole dropped her gaze to stare into the four coffees, as if they held the secrets of life. “If you’re looking for professional advice about how to deal with a troubled teenager, you might want to go to someone with an actual degree. But if you want advice from a friend, I’m all ears.”

Jenna bobbed her head as Claire returned for a moment and relieved her of her coffee burden. Nicole’s distinction seemed a thin one. Jenna figured that beyond Nicole’s work as a life coach, her eighteen months of personal experience dealing with Noah had to earn her the equivalent of a PhD.

“Last night,” Jenna began, shifting Lucky to her better arm as Claire led them down a side street, “I didn’t tell you everything about what happened in Seattle.”

“I figured there was a lot more to the story.”

“All along, I had assumed that Zoe didn’t know about anything,” she said. “But it turns out Zoe already knows about Nate and Sissy’s relationship.”

Coffee gurgled through the plastic tops as Nicole momentarily fumbled her grip. “Really? How?”

“Zoe came home from school one day to find her father bending a naked Sissy over the couch.”

That wasn’t really the truth. She didn’t know the truth. Nate had gone tight-lipped about the nitty-gritty details of what he and Sissy had been doing when Zoe burst through the front door to find them together. Since then, Jenna’s mind had filled in the blanks about a hundred different disturbing ways. Still, the words left a bitter taste in the back of her throat. Jenna tried to swallow it away as she followed the bounce of Claire’s braid.

Then Jenna realized that she was walking alone. Nicole had stopped paces behind her, dead in her tracks.

“When,” Nicole breathed when she caught up, “did this happen?”

“I’m not sure.” She had tried to put herself in Zoe’s shoes. She’d wondered how she would have reacted, at the age of thirteen, if she’d come home to find her own quiet, book-loving father making the beast with two backs with, say, old Mrs. Handley down the road. The image always turned absurd. Maybe it just wasn’t within her mental or emotional capacity to imagine that kind of mind-blowing betrayal. Then she remembered how she felt when Nate pushed that petition across the kitchen table. She had packed her bags and run far, far away.

Zoe had had no place to run.

A familiar shudder vibrated through Lucky. Jenna slipped him down near a spindly tree just as he let loose.

Nicole stood in front of her, all wide brown eyes. “You’re telling me that Zoe has known about this for a while.”

“I think it happened nine months ago.”

Nicole covered her mouth with a shaky hand.

“I’m guessing because my bastard of a husband went mute when I asked. I suspect it was in early December. I remember that Zoe wouldn’t come downstairs to decorate the Christmas tree. All her young life, she’d marked that first Saturday in December in red ink on the family calendar; it was one of her favorite days of the year. But she wouldn’t come down, and Nate was wound up tight. He told me some boy had broken up with Zoe. I hadn’t even known she had a boyfriend. Nate said it had only been a few weeks, a lifetime for a twelve-year-old. He wouldn’t let me go up and see her. He kept saying she needed privacy. Fool that I was, I just accepted it.” Guilt like a sucking sinkhole. “I accepted too many things.”

She’d always ceded to Nate’s judgment in issues of parenting. He was home with the baby all day. So if he insisted on letting a fourteen-month-old cry herself to sleep, it wasn’t Jenna’s place to countermand him at one in the morning while Zoe wailed. Nate was the one who’d have to deal with a cranky toddler the next day. Yes, she’d thought it harsh when he refused to let Zoe wear the sparkly red shoes to school every day, or gave her a time-out for not making her bed. But it was Nate at home who’d have to deal with the fallout of those disciplinary choices, so Jenna had deferred to his judgment, time and again.

She’d been determined not to be one of
those
working moms. The ones who come home to doubt and criticize and, out of guilt for not baking cookies, micromanage every move her husband made. So over the years, she’d watched Zoe grow up to be a lovely, confident, loving creature, even-t
empere
d until about nine months ago. She could only assume that it was Nate’s discipline that helped shape Zoe this way.

Jen buried her face in the back of Lucky’s neck as she heard Claire’s jogging steps. Claire arrived on a wave of cucumber-mango scent, the aroma of the hotel shampoo she’d used that morning.

“Hey, Nic, I’ll take that flat. After we give these away, let’s go find another coffee shop.”

Then Claire was gone, her footsteps echoing as she headed farther down the side street.

Her hands free, Nicole slapped them both on Jenna’s shoulders. “You’re not the fool here, Jenna.”

“Oh, I definitely am.”

“Think about this. Zoe knew about Nate and that woman a long time ago, and yet Zoe never said a word.”

Jenna squeezed her eyes shut. She’d spent days trying not to think about the consequences of that truth.

Nicole said, “That means Nate forced Zoe to keep it secret.”

She shook her head. She couldn’t believe Nate would do that. Not the man she’d once come home to find stirring a pot at the stove while his hair stood up sporting twenty-three crooked plastic barrettes.