“No, thanks. That’s it.” After hovering a moment, Harvey shuffled out, and Kristen pushed her rolling chair back from her desk and came around to a stop in front of the other plate.
I’d already bellied up to the table. “That guy is so in love with you he can hardly see straight.” I stuck my fork into the lightly browned lake trout.
“Huh. Does that explain why he dropped a tray of dinner rolls the other night?”
I stuffed my mouth full. “Oh, man, do you know how good this is?”
“It’s my creation, isn’t it?”
“Yeah, but . . .” I waved my empty fork in the air before I plunged it once again into the entrée. “But you get jaded, eating this kind of stuff every day. It’s only people like me, who only get to eat like this on rare occasions, who can truly appreciate it.”
“It wouldn’t be rare if you’d let me feed you more often.”
“Let’s not go there,” I said.
“You can eat here every day for free. Twice a day. Three times, if we had breakfast.” She put her arms flat on the table and looked at me hard. “I know how much I owe you, don’t think I don’t.”
“You don’t owe me anything,” I said in a low voice.
“Yes, I do.” Kristen banged the table with her fist, making the flatware bounce and the plates rattle. “You’re the only one who believed in me. My parents didn’t, my former fiancé didn’t, and for sure my former evil corporate employer thought I was nuts. Only you believed. Not only that, but you did all the research on—”
I cut her off. “You don’t owe me a thing. You’re my friend. That’s what friends do.”
“There are friends and there are friends.” She sat back. “But since you obviously don’t want the fun of an argument, I’ll say you don’t owe me anything, either. Except for one thing.”
I picked up my fork again. At age twelve, she’d welcomed a downstate stranger into her life and had never once turned her back on me. She was wrong. I owed her far more than I could ever repay. “Okay, one.”
“Tell me what happened with Stan Larabee. Tell me the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, and I’ll never ask you about it again.”
“Never?”
“Well, I’ll try not to ask you about it again.” She smiled the half smile that always made me giggle. “And this isn’t idle curiosity—it’s simple clarification of what the grapevine has already told me.”
“Which is . . . ?”
She flittered her fingers. “Oh, the usual. Stan had been beaten up something horrible, half the bones in his body were broken, one of his kidneys had been removed, and he wrote the name of his killer on the floor in his own blood, but when you were trying to save him, you stepped on the blood and messed up the writing.”
“The grapevine is batting zero.”
Something in my voice must have given away the emotions I was trying to hold in, because Kristen moved to my side and put a hand on my shoulder. “Was it bad?” she asked gently.
“I really don’t . . .”
Don’t want to talk about it, don’t want to think about it, don’t want to see Stan’s limp body again, don’t want it to have happened. What I wanted was Stan to be alive. I just wanted him back.
“Oh, Minnie.” Kristen’s arms went all the way around me, and it was there, in the comfort of my best friend’s embrace, that the tears came.
• • •
“Bawled my eyes out,” I told Eddie. “Cried like a little kid who’d dropped her ice-cream cone in the dirt. And before you ask, yes, that happened to me once. Chocolate soft-serve. It was a harsh lesson. Would you like to hear about it?”
Eddie’s eyes remained closed.
“I didn’t think so.”
We were cozied up in bed, me sitting up with my arms around my legs, Eddie lying like a meat loaf in the middle of the comforter. If he’d brought a tape measure to bed, I don’t think he could have centered himself more accurately.
“I ended up telling her everything,” I told Eddie. “About you stowing away, then you being the one to run over to that farmhouse. She thinks it was fate. I’m not a big believer in that kind of stuff. What do you think?”
Eddie didn’t move.
“Yeah, you’re right. Fate, shmate. Things don’t always happen for a reason; sometimes they just happen.” I smiled. “Zofia would agree with Kristen, I bet. She said it was fate that brought her to Aunt Frances this summer.” I put my chin on my knees. “You know, Aunt Frances took the news about Stan a little weird.”