“Driving back to New York. You?”
“Here already. Hey, Joy,” she calls out, assuming my daughter is in the passenger’s seat.
“She’s back in Bay Bluff,” I say, but I don’t want to think about Joy either. “When did you leave?”
“Wednesday night.” Her voice wavers. “There was no point staying.”
My first thought is that she’s talking about our tattered friendship. Then I recall the other piece, which I’ve been too mired in self-pity to see. Ofcourse,it would be absurd to think she’s been in Bay Bluff with her mother all this time. “Lina?”
“Lina.”
I remember the woman’s hard stare last Saturday, when she was looking for her husband in my face. That was bad enough. Recalling the scene at the cemetery, I can’t begin to imagine what Chrissie must have felt when Lina hissed at her—her own daughter, whom she hadn’t seen in years. “She’s tough.”
“You have no idea,” Chrissie drawls. Neither of us laughs, but the mood softens a bit.
Taking warmth from that, I watch Exit 84 come and go.I’m sorry,my dovish self wants to say,sorry that you had to confront her because of me.Only, I wasn’t the one who caused their rift. It happened before Chrissie and I ever met. She didn’t talk about her mother often, I realize, but thinking back on the times she did, I recall little things she told me the woman had said. They weren’t pretty.
“How can a mother be like that?” I ask. “It’s not like she has four other daughters.”
“If she did,” says Chrissie, “I’d be off the hook. Since I’m the only one, she expects me to be her clone. My daring to deviate is a cardinal offense. She wrote me out of her life.”
She had said this of her mother before, but having now seen the woman in the flesh, not to mention in my family’s employ, I am particularly aggrieved. “Because your husband isHispanic?”
“Because he isn’t Italian or Catholic or from Rhode Island. Because I choose to live in New York. Because she assumes I’m crazy rich and not insisting she live with me, which is ridiculous given her distaste for my husband, my child, and New York, but that’s how looney she is.”
If anyone can deal with looneys, it’s Chrissie. “You couldn’t talk her down on Wednesday?”
“Hell, no. She’s as bullheaded as ever. She says—get this—thatI publicly humiliated her. Like anyone recognized me before she approached?”
“I’m sorry, Chrissie. Is she any better to Danny?” He left home, too, which is an interesting fact in this new light.
“Danny is male. The rules are different. Whatever he decides to do is considered upward mobility. I’m the one who’s supposed to preserve the heritage. I’m the one who’s supposed to take care of my mother the way she took care of hers. She considers me a traitor for not doing it.”
Not even Jack being put on his mother’s back burner seems as bad as Chrissie being shoved into the fire. I’m thinking about the miracle of her having such a happy marriage and raising such a normal child in spite of all that, when a car veers in front of me from the left lane and takes the Exit 83 off-ramp.
I’m in New London now, thirty-seven minutes gone from Bay Bluff.
“Do you?” Chrissie asks. “Think me a traitor?”
Her meekness returns me to the discussion—and yes, I did think her a traitor at first. Now that things have calmed down and I’ve put Lina’s face to Chrissie’s heartache, I see her side of the Bay Bluff issue. She regrets not being forthright seven years ago. I know that. She certainly regrets the way things played out this week. Can I seriously hold a grudge? We’re all flawed, aren’t we—all brilliant in hindsight.
We love the things we love for what they are,Robert Frost wrote, and I do love Chrissie Perez. Hell, at some subconscious level I must be accepting her for what she is, if here I am, rushing to call her when I need a friend.
She adds a mournful, “I really wanted us to be sisters.”
I have to smile at that. Everything she said about clicking with me is mutual. Maybe there’s a Bay Bluff gene swimming in our blood? “It would have been nice.”
The line is silent for a spell, but it’s a comfortable break.
Then comes a quiet, “Do you know for sure we’re not?” It’s her last ditch effort to make it so.
I’m forty minutes from Bay Bluff, approaching Exit 82 and Waterford, and, just like that, I’m close enough to Chrissie again to say, “I do. It’s Paul.”
She gasps—and, just like that, is as indignant as my BFF Chrissie could be when she feels I’d been wronged. “Where’s hebeen?”
I make a sympathetic sound, half laugh, half grunt. “Same place you were, believing silence was the best way to go.”
“Ouch,” she whispers.
