Second Chance Friends (26 page)

“I just wanted to say hi. And to tell you I miss you both bunches.”

“Bunches?” Bren repeated. Her pencil scrawled it out of its own accord, but she was drowned out once again by Gary.

“We miss you, too, pumpkin. You take care of yourself down there. Don't forget to put another shrimp on the barbie.”

Kelsey's laughter tinkled through the phone speaker again. Bren had more than once wished she could bottle that laughter, keep it safe, keep it handy. It was a sound of such pure joy. But now it only sounded far away, dulled by distance. A joy that she could only admire but never fully experience again.

“Oh, just a reminder, by the by, that Dean and I won't be coming home for the holidays.”

“Yes, yes, you've told us,” Bren said tiredly. Did her daughter have to keep reminding her of that? Did she really
think that having her first ever Christmas apart from her children would be something Bren would absentmindedly forget?

“Got big Christmas plans?” Gary asked.

“Not really. It's mostly Buddhist here, so not a lot of Christmas celebrating goes on, I don't think. Plus, the place will just be flooded with tourists, from what I hear. We'll probably have a quiet dinner. Maybe some noodles, some fish. Just the two of us.”

“Same here,” Bren said. “Just the two of us. Only without the noodles.”

“Well, enjoy that!” Kelsey cried out, right back to her sunny self. “A romantic Christmas dinner for two, for the first time in, what . . . ?”

“Twenty-four years,” Bren supplied.

“Wow, twenty-four,” Kelsey said. “You are long overdue.”

“I suppose we must be,” Bren said. She didn't have the heart to tell Kelsey about their cafeteria dinner plans, or about the dune buggy or the cheese on toast or the pad and pencil with all the foreign words, or even about her incessant nightly scouring of the Internet for cheap flights halfway around the world.

“That we are,” Gary said, snaking an arm around Bren's shoulders. She resisted the urge to pull away, though she knew she was going to smell like that damned buggy now even if she did.

Their good-byes were, as always, over so quickly that Bren's head was left spinning. She clutched the pad and pencil, gazing at the words as if trying to memorize the
conversation, file it away so she would have it to pull out on her next lonely evening of filling out magazine quizzes and listening to the nightly death report.

Gary drifted away, taking the rag and a glass of iced tea with him. Terse, typical conversation would now return, as the amiable guy with the big smile and the cute turns of phrases was snuffed out like a candle on a birthday cake.

“You eat?”

“Just some cheese toast.”

“Huh.”

“You want me to make you something?”

“Naw, I'll grab a bite later. Working on the buggy.”

A shuffling of footsteps toward the garage again. “You gonna be long?”

Garage door opening, an echoey answer that drifted into inaudible murmurings and then a shut door: “Got to get to bed. Meetings tomorrow . . .”

Bren stared at the pad of paper.
Bunches
was the last word she'd written.

But off to the margin was the sad face that she'd drawn when Kelsey had told them she hadn't planned to come home for the holidays.

Suddenly the cheese toast looked congealed and disgusting, postsurgery fleshy. She could feel the bread perching at the base of her esophagus, coiled, ready to launch as soon as she lay down for bed. She could practically see little orange pustules of grease popping into the pores around her mouth, on her cheeks, her forehead, suffocating them,
making her skin dull and cheeselike itself. The very thought made her tongue curl back in a gag.

She got up and carried the plate to the sink, snatching up the remote control and turning off the TV as she went. The room hummed with silence. The sun had fallen.

She padded to the bedroom, where her black long-haired cat, George, lay waiting for her, curled at the bottom of the bed. He made a
brrr
noise as she slid headfirst into the bed, then moved so the cat's hind end pressed warmly into her side.

It was barely seven o'clock, but Bren Epperson went to bed anyway, thanking God, as she drifted off, for the short days of autumn.

Photo by Lacey Crough

Jennifer Scott
is an award-winning author who made her debut in women's fiction with
The Sister Season
. She also writes critically acclaimed young adult fiction under the name Jennifer Brown. Her debut YA novel,
Hate List
, was selected as an ALA Best Book for Young Adults, a
VOYA
Perfect Ten, and a
School Library Journal
Book of the Year. Jennifer lives in Liberty, Missouri, with her husband and three
children.

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