Second Chance Friends (4 page)

The younger one saw her first. She put her hand on the shoulder of the older woman and said something, and the older woman turned as well. Their faces didn't change. Now she had been spotted—she had to say something.

“Hello,” she said, coming toward them on the walkway. “I didn't expect . . .” She didn't know how to finish the sentence.

“Yeah, looks like we all had the same idea today,” the younger one said.

Joanna crossed her arms, curling her fingers through the belt loops of her shorts. “I didn't really plan to come. It just suddenly seemed like the right thing to do.”

“Same here,” the younger one said. “I should be at my sister's house right now. She's going to be furious when I get there. But I couldn't help it. I felt pulled.”

The older woman shifted her weight. Her phone rang and she looked at her hand quizzically, as if she wasn't really sure what she was holding. She pressed a button on the side and it went silent. “It's been haunting me a little,” she said. “Somehow being here makes me feel a tiny bit better. I was just saying I still wonder about Maddie all the time.”

“Maddie?”

“Routh,” the younger woman added. “The woman in the car. We were just talking about the pregnancy, wondering how it's going.”

“Oh,” she said.
Routh.
Maddie Routh. That had been it.
Maddie and Michael. She remembered now. How could she have ever forgotten? Awkwardly, she extended her hand. “Joanna, by the way.”

The younger woman smiled and took her hand. Joanna felt a jolt of something unexpected. Connectedness, maybe? Had she been hiding for that long? “Melinda.”

They shook, and then she turned her hand to the older woman. At first dazed, she seemed to shrug herself out of it, and then took Joanna's hand. Again, she felt the electricity of human contact.

“Karen,” she said. “Freeman.” Her phone rang again and she shut it off immediately, without looking, a frustrated crease appearing on her forehead. “I should go.”

“Me, too,” Melinda said. “My sister is going to be livid. It was nice meeting you, Joanna.” She shrugged. “Again, I guess.”

“First time didn't really count,” Joanna said, and then wondered if she'd sounded too flip. She hated how she second-guessed everything that came out of her mouth. “I mean . . . I'm sure I wasn't good company. . . . It was just a rough scene. Nice talking to you both.”

The women turned, leaving Joanna alone on the sidewalk. “So you'll be here tomorrow, huh?” she heard Melinda ask Karen as they walked.

“Every day,” Karen answered. “I don't know why. It just makes me feel better.”

Joanna stood in the early sun, goose bumps popping up on her shins despite the humidity that was already in the air. She watched as the two women found their cars and
said their last good-byes, got inside, and each drove away. She felt very alone, while at the same time she felt surrounded by ghosts. The ghosts of the bus driver and Michael Routh. The ghosts of her past, of her present. The ghosts of her secrets.

A few diner patrons walked in and out, maneuvering around her, but she couldn't uproot herself from the pathway. She had a sudden desire to belong again. Not to anyone in particular, but to society as a whole. She wanted to go to the farmers' market on Wednesday mornings and to the movie theater on Friday nights. She wanted to eat at the chain chicken place across the highway and buy screws at Home Depot. She wanted to jog in the park with the retirees and the stay-at-home moms. She wanted to fit in. Of course she had ghosts. She was so hidden she was practically dead. Living people had no haunts following them, did they?

It seemed so absurd to her that grass had grown while she'd been gone from reality. So blatantly defiant. You could hide from life all you wanted; it would still keep going without you. It wouldn't even notice you were gone. To her, that fact felt sadder than death itself.

She started moving, her feet scuffing in flip-flops along the walk, the goose bumps fading, her armpits becoming damp with sweat.

She wasn't even surprised to find that her flip-flops took her away from the door and into the grass instead.

She ignored her craving for Boston cream pie and instead found herself walking to the edge of the bumps. She
lowered herself to the ground, sitting cross-legged inside a divot.

Coming here every day had made Karen feel better, she'd said.

Joanna closed her eyes and slowly brushed her hands over the new grass, feeling it tickling her palms.

Yes, she could definitely see how it would.

A
s far as Karen could tell, all law firms were high on the snoot scale. But Sidwell, Cain, Smith & Smith, where she'd worked for nearly twenty years, seemed to blow right through the roof of snoot and on into full-on snotty. The floors were polished marble and the chandeliers were copious. Seemed every room you walked into had crystals dripping from the ceiling right above your head. The main receptionist, Evvy, spoke in a whisper and had one of those smiles that turned down at the edges as if she pitied you rather than enjoyed you. The attorneys barked orders at their secretaries—especially the ones they were not so secretly sleeping with—and nowhere was there a single visible photo of a child or a favorite pet. God forbid the errant clipped cartoon. It seemed to Karen as if they
were all argyle-clad drones with their sensible shoes and their pencils tucked behind their ears and their dreadful bow ties.

It had been hard for Karen, at first, to accept the culture of Sidwell Cain. She hated that nobody laughed out loud in the employee lounge, and she hated the blind attorney, Mr. Cain, who wore a chip on his shoulder so large it was almost impossible to fit in the same hallway with him. And she hated the commute downtown. Caldwell was a suburb only ten miles or so away from the heart of Kansas City, but some days it felt like a million.

Had it not been for Antoinette, Karen might not have lasted twenty days at Sidwell Cain, much less twenty years.

Antoinette was the other inhabitant of what they'd lovingly dubbed the Hiring Cave, separated from the rest of the firm in a secluded hallway on the bottom floor, sandwiched between the copy room and the employee lounge. There was not a single chandelier to be found in their part of the building; no client would happen upon them on purpose, or even by accident. At first, Karen had felt insulted that Sidwell Cain had thought so little of their HR department. She felt hidden away like a dirty little secret. But once Antoinette schooled her in the fine art of Getting Away with Stuff the Others Can't, she began to feel at home in the Hiring Cave. Better—she began to feel comfortable. They regularly shouted conversations between their offices. Sometimes they played music—something that would never have been allowed upstairs. And each of them kept fluffy house slippers tucked beneath their desks for when they
were doing paperwork. And on the first Monday of every month, Antoinette and Karen shut their doors for “payroll meetings,” which were actually daylong festivals of lattes, Cheetos, and celebrity gossip, during which they gathered around an old mini tube TV that Antoinette had smuggled in several years ago to catch up on daytime talk shows.

In some ways, the only way Karen could handle the snootiness of Sidwell, Cain, Smith & Smith was by retreating to her separate world downstairs.

“So, what are you going to do?” Antoinette asked as they hurried over to Wong's Café for lunch a few days after Kendall had awakened Karen with Travis's bad news. “Ignore, ignore, ignore?”

“I can't,” Karen said, half out of breath, even though she'd changed into her sneakers for the walk over. Antoinette was child-sized—one of those fireballs of energy in a little package of muscle and enviable waist-length wiry black hair—but she could move on those matchstick legs. Even in heels. “If I ignore her, who knows what she'll do? Take the baby and hide, probably.”

“You know it's only a matter of time before she disappears with that baby anyway, right?” Antoinette said. She plunged through the door of Wong's, which was shoulder-to-shoulder packed, as usual.

“I don't like to think about that.” Karen stepped inside behind her friend. But of course she knew it was true. Travis wouldn't keep Kendall around any longer than he'd kept any of the others, and as much as she'd like to believe she'd
raised her son better than to let his baby be smuggled off to God-knew-where, she had serious doubts that would be the case. In some ways, she'd been steeling herself for the day Marcus went away since the day he was born, hugging him extra hard, absorbing his scent extra long. “But, yes, I know.”

“Sorry, I don't want to be depressing, but it is what it is. You going to talk to Mr. Sidwell about getting Travis out?” She turned to the counter. “Pork lo mein,” she shouted over the din of the crowd. “And don't put any of those disgusting baby corns in it.” She turned and made a face at Karen. “Those things are unnatural. You want to split an order of spring rolls?”

Karen shook her head. “I'm not all that hungry. Just some soup, Mr. Wong,” she called out. “A small.” She turned back to Antoinette, who was loading soy sauces and napkins into her purse. “I don't think so. What am I supposed to do? Hi, Mr. Sidwell, I know you don't know me—I'm one of the drones you hide in the basement—but I'm wondering if you could get my son off on a possible murder charge? At a discount?”

At the words “murder charge,” Karen touched her fingertips to her temples. She hadn't heard from Kendall in several days, so she had no idea whether the mystery man on the other side of the bar fight was still alive. Surely if he'd died, Kendall would have blown up her phone with calls and texts. Unless the girl had already moved on, and not bothered to tell Karen about it. She wouldn't put it past her.

“So you're going to let him cool out in the clink this time?” Antoinette asked, reaching over the counter to snag
her order. “I think that's the right thing to do. He's never going to learn if you keep bailing him out, you know.”

“I know,” Karen said miserably. Mr. Wong placed her soup on the counter and she grabbed it, then passed her credit card to the impossibly young-looking girl who always ran the register. Her arm was jostled by a man distracted with his cell phone, but she felt too numb to care. “Let's change the subject.”

“Excuse us,” Antoinette snarled, shoving past the man, never too numb to give it back to what she considered the overly rude, me-first business crowd.

Karen followed Antoinette toward the door. Mr. Wong's was so crowded now, the line held the door open, and they had to shimmy sideways through it. Once on the sidewalk, Antoinette stopped short, Karen nearly smashing her soup cup against Antoinette's back.

“Okay, new subject,” Antoinette whispered, tugging on Karen's sleeve with two fingers and gazing pointedly at the middle of the line. “Guess who's back?”

Karen followed her friend's gaze, and when she saw the subject of the stare, she sighed. “Come on,” she mumbled, aiming her face to the sidewalk and walking quickly ahead.

But Antoinette lagged behind. “Oh, hey,” she said, sounding mortifyingly fake to Karen's ears. “Long line today, huh?”

Karen stopped, resigned, and glanced up. There he was, looking right into her eyes, just as she knew he would be. She swept as much of a smile as she could across her face. “Hi,” she said.

“Hi, there,” he answered in that voice of his that somehow managed to be soft-spoken and confident all at the same time. Like his ideas were so good, he didn't need to be loud about them.

His name was Marty Squire. Mid-fifties, built like a thirty-year-old, with meticulously combed salt-and-pepper hair and light blue eyes that went so deep, Karen couldn't hold his gaze for more than moments at a time before feeling like she needed a life vest. He worked at an accounting firm on the fourth floor of their building, but he dressed like a lawyer, in navy suits with power ties and shoes so shiny they were like he was walking in little black pools.

Karen knew all of this through Antoinette, who Karen had always suspected had missed a lucrative calling in private investigation. Antoinette always knew everything about everyone and never apologized for snooping. And if you asked her something that she didn't know the answer to, you could guarantee that within the day she'd have it sniffed out.

“Eating at the desk today?” Marty asked, motioning to the foam soup bowl Karen held.

She looked down, blushed. She hated it when she blushed around him. It was like she was a teenager again—
oh, no, a boy talked to me!
—but the last thing she wanted was for Marty to mistake her for interested. “Oh. Yeah.” She lifted up the bowl as evidence.

“It's crowded as balls in there,” Antoinette said, and Karen blushed again, on her friend's behalf. If only she had half the ease in conversation that Antoinette did . . . and if
only Antoinette could be a tiny bit more reserved. “If you're planning to eat in there, you better strap on some hockey gear. You're going to have to fight for a table.”

The line inched forward, thankfully causing Marty to have to take a few steps, leading him away from them. “Nope. At the desk for me today, too,” he said. “I've got a hot date with a calculator and a very messed-up audit.”

“Good times,” Antoinette said. “I cannot be trusted with anything that might take a calculator to figure. Thank God I have Karen here—”

“Well, have fun with that,” Karen said. She grabbed Antoinette's arm and started pulling her down the sidewalk back toward Sidwell, Cain, Smith & Smith.

“Okay, maybe we'll get a chance to eat together tomorrow,” she heard Marty say, but she didn't slow her stride.

“If I can talk the workhorse here into it,” Antoinette called over her shoulder. “If it weren't for me, she'd never leave her desk.”

“Not true,” Karen said under her breath, but she didn't slow down, and didn't let go, until they had rounded the corner.

Antoinette giggled. “You are so adorable when you're in lust.”

“I'm not in lust.”

“Oh, really? Is that why you're sprinting down the sidewalk with soup in your hand? Did you take a sudden interest in marathon running?”

Karen hadn't really thought she'd been jogging, but now that Antoinette mentioned it, she was panting a little.
And Antoinette was having to skip a few steps to keep up with her. “I've got work to do,” she said.

“Uh-huh. Well, he, my friend, is in lust, whether you are or not.”

“Oh, please. Does your mind go nowhere else?”

“From your lips to Sal's ears,” Antoinette said. “He thinks he's the most neglected husband in all of history. If my mind went there, he'd probably go to mass and light a candle.” She slowed, and Karen was forced to slow alongside her. “Come on, Karen. What's so bad about Marty? I think he's kind of cute.”

“I haven't noticed.” They'd reached the Sidwell Cain building, and immediately her gut had turned sour again. What would she tell Kendall when (if?) the girl ever called back, wondering what the attorneys would do for Travis?

“I call bull on that one,” Antoinette said, her heels clacking on the shiny marble vestibule floor. “He's adorable. You'd have to be dead not to notice. And you'd have to be dead not to notice that he's into you.”

“I am dead.” She punched the down button on the elevator. “In the romance department, that is.”

The truth was, she hadn't ever been alive. After she'd found out she was pregnant with Travis, the boy she'd been messing with—Doug—had run for the hills, never to be seen or heard from again. Not that she wanted his loser, pot-smoking carcass hanging around her baby, anyway. It hadn't been love between Doug and her, and it hadn't been love—or even anything close to it—for her and anyone since. She loved Travis, and he was enough. And after he'd
moved out, she was just too tired for it. And out of practice. And scared to take lessons.

The elevator doors opened and Karen and Antoinette stepped in. They were alone, Karen noticed with a pang of regret.

“Well, that's just sad,” Antoinette continued. “You have a lot to offer. You're cute, you're self-sufficient, you're funny, you have a great ass. . . .”

“And I have a son in jail,” Karen reminded her. “Don't forget to add that to my selling points.”

“That's not your fault.”

“Isn't it?”

The elevator settled to the basement level with a thump. “Marty just wants to have lunch. What's wrong with lunch?”

Fortunately, the doors opened, and Karen sprang through them, taking her soup to her office, where she closed the door and sat before her computer, pulling up another search for “fight manslaughter legal options.” After a few minutes of searching, she opened the soup, but it looked cold and congealed, as unappetizing as bile. She re-covered it and threw it away.

She leaned back in her chair, closing her eyes and sighing. She tried not to think about what it meant that Kendall wasn't calling. She tried not to think about how Travis was doing in jail—if he was getting tormented or stonehearted or if he was suffering withdrawal from drugs. She tried not to think about Doug, which she rarely ever did, and how he'd gotten off so easily when he'd walked out on her life. What if he was a rich surgeon now? Or happily married
with an entire brood of doctors to call his own? What if one of Doug's other kids was a warden in the jail where Travis was currently sitting?

“God, don't think, Karen,” she whispered to herself. “Just don't think at all.”

But she couldn't help it. Her mind turned to Marty, standing there watching her back as she hightailed it away from Mr. Wong's, practically dragging Antoinette by her hair. Did he feel hurt by her rudeness? She didn't want him, but she didn't want him to be offended, either.

Antoinette didn't get it. It wasn't
just lunch
. It would never be
just lunch
. It was so many other things. It was sharing. Sharing a meal, sharing information, sharing a heart, sharing a life. And Karen had never been too keen on sharing. Not with anyone. Not with her aloof brother or her cold mother or her absent father or Doug the Runner. She was settled. She was set. She'd managed to escape even a single date for all these years, and she didn't intend to change that now.

She didn't have time, or the mind, to share.