Friendship Bread (9 page)

Debbie hands him his receipt and a handful of coins. “Oh, I don’t know. I rotate around to all of the restaurants. I like to see how things are going. Anyway, it’s not like I have a whole lot else to do.”

“Really?” He’s genuinely surprised. She’s smarter than anybody he knows, and nice-looking in a quiet, understated sort of way. “I can’t believe that!” He’s not hitting on her, just telling the truth.

Debbie reddens, a shy smile on her lips. Then her expression
changes as she squints at something just beyond him. “I think you spilled something on your seat,” she says. “Would you like some extra napkins?”

Clinton turns to see that the Ziploc bag has tipped over and the starter has oozed onto his seat. “Dammit!” He grabs the bag and gets a handful of goop.

Debbie quickly passes him several napkins. Clinton tries to mop up the mess while holding the plastic bag, which he still hasn’t managed to seal. “What is that?” Debbie asks, trying not to laugh.

“Something Juniper got at school,” he says, disgusted. His car has cloth upholstery. Now he’ll have to pay to have it steam cleaned. Great.

“It’s Amish Friendship Bread!” comes a cry from the backseat. Juniper is waving a piece of paper. “We squish the bag every day and then we get to make cake next week!”

“That sounds like fun,” Debbie says to Juniper, a sincere look on her face.

Clinton is about to ask Debbie to throw the Ziploc away when another idea comes to him. He grabs the paper from Juniper and skims the instructions, then looks at Debbie who is holding out their bags of food. “If you’re free next week, you can come over and help us make it,” he says.

“Me?”

“Sure? Why not?” Clinton grins as he takes the bags from her and puts them on the floor of the passenger seat. He tosses the soggy napkins into one of the bags.

“It’s so yummy!” Juniper adds.

Clinton doesn’t consider himself a fast thinker, but he’s able to count ahead ten days and is pleased to discover that it’s a day that Juniper is with him. “Are you free next Saturday? Around ten? We can do lunch after.” The car behind him honks a few times. Clinton sticks his head out of the window and yells, “One minute!” Idiot. What is it with people today?

“Okay,” Debbie says, her eyes shining. She glances apologetically at the car behind him. “Sorry, but I kind of have to keep everything
going. Here’s my number.” She looks around for something to write on. Flustered, she grabs an apple pie from the warming rack and writes her number on the sleeve with a Sharpie. She hands it to him.

Clinton fumbles for his wallet again, not wanting to take advantage. “Let me pay …”

“No, no,” she says hastily. “It’s on the house.”

Clinton grins. “Okay, great. So, next Saturday, then.”

“Next Saturday.” She waves goodbye and Clinton notices for the first time that her eyes are a lovely clear blue. He pulls carefully out of the drive thru and tries to seal the Ziploc one more time.

This time it works.

“Oh, bother.” Edie lets out a sigh of defeat.

Richard looks up from the medical journal he’s reading. “What’s wrong?” he asks. A smile tugs at the corners of his mouth as he watches Edie bend over a square piece of paper. “Look at you—you’re just so crafty, honey. I’m proud of you.”

Alphabet stickers are stuck to her fingers, bits of patterned paper and embellishments everywhere. She’s already spilled glitter on the floor and there’s a smudge of it on her cheek. She’s burned herself twice with the hot glue gun. Edie considers herself a competent person but at the moment feels completely helpless and inept.

“This is why people spend so much time scrapbooking,” she tells him. She tries to hold the scrapbook page in place as she pulls the stickers from her fingertips. Part of the letter “E” rips and an “A” folds on itself. “It takes forever to get anything done!” She manages to spell out her name then sits back to survey her work.

It looks terrible. It took her a full thirty minutes, and now she has to do Richard’s name, too.

Why she agreed to this, she has no idea, but one of the women she recently interviewed, Bettie Shelton, is an avid scrapbooker with a home-based scrapbooking business on the side. She gave Edie a small starter packet to thank her for spreading the word about the smattering of break-ins over the past year, including her own in which two garden gnomes, a rusty rake (“Though I was happy to be rid of it, I have to say”), and a potted begonia were taken. Edie isn’t a hobbyist of any kind and tried to protest, but Bettie insisted, pressing the sealed packet into Edie’s hands. Then, to make matters worse, she invited Edie to attend the next scrapbooking meeting. There, Bettie promised, Edie would get an earful from other concerned citizens.

“The things I do for a good story,” Edie sighs. She can dig trenches, build a schoolhouse, teach basic English to someone who’s never spoken it before, but she can’t develop a “Passion for Paisley” or figure out how to stamp a piece of vellum with embossing ink.

“Hey, is that my name?” Richard asks. He puts down his reading and comes over to where Edie’s sitting. She decided to cheat and just put down “Dr. Richard” instead of “Richard Johnson” since it spares her the extra letters.

“The ladies of the Avalon Scrapbooking Society have a meeting next week and the theme is romance.”

“Hence me.”

“Hence you.” Edie glues a picture onto the page at an angle, thinking it looks more artistic. Or amateurish. She can’t decide, but it’s too late anyway.

Richard points to the picture of the two of them in Benin, West Africa. “You were out of cooking propane the day we met,” he reminds her affectionately.

“Yes.” Edie gives him a playful swat. “And you were too busy getting ready to play basketball to help me.”

“It was the ribbon-cutting ceremony,” he protests. “I spent two years raising the funds to build that basketball court. It was a big deal for the community—of course I had to be there.”

She does an eye roll. “My first day on site and you leave me to fend for myself.”

“Hey, it’s the toughest job you’ll ever love,” he says, repeating the Peace Corps motto. And it’s true, she did love it.

Edie rummages through the paper scraps and finds a piece of brown corrugated paper. She begins to cut out an outline of Benin, which always reminds her of a torch.

“It’s nice to see you’re becoming a part of the community.” Richard finds a die cut of a heart and glues it onto the page.

“I’m not sure that going to a couple of scrapbooking meetings qualifies, but it’s okay. Oh, and I’ve been having lunch with a girl from work.”

Richard looks impressed.

“Livvy Scott. Blond, bouncy. Tall.” Edie wishes Livvy weren’t so pretty. She’s seen pictures of Richard’s exes, girls much more glamorous than she, girls who know how to style their hair and put on makeup, who know how to work their femininity to their advantage. People have called Edie pretty before, but it’s usually in the context of smart pretty, not turn-heads kind of pretty. Edie didn’t know the difference until the seventh grade, when Missy Davidson made fun of the way she was dancing during the Fall Fling.

“Is this how you do it?” Missy had asked innocently, mimicking Edie’s middle school MTV move. Laughter erupted around them. It took Edie a minute to register that Missy was making fun of her. She suddenly felt clumsy and self-conscious, saw how the same turquoise blouse hung on her like a bedsheet while it hugged Missy’s body and breasts like a second skin. She watched Missy laugh, passing around her Bonne Bell lip gloss to girlfriends while Edie fingered the hard round tin of Carmex in her pocket. She forced a smile, pretending that she was in on the joke and not the joke itself, but the moment had done its job. After that, she let herself fall into the smart-girl category, the girl with a cause, the girl who didn’t have time for frivolous things like makeup and boy talk. She even boycotted her senior prom—the thought of having to find a suitable dress, much less a date, terrified her.

Edie can’t help adding, “She’s totally your type, I think. Maybe I should introduce you.”

Richard doesn’t bite. “Nice try, honey, but you’re not getting rid of me that easily.” He knits his eyebrows as he pushes some scattered sequins into a pile. “Livvy Scott … why do I know that name? What does she do?”

“She manages our display and classified advertising. She acts like a bubblehead sometimes, which I just don’t get. Maybe she thinks she has to play up to the stereotype.” Edie glues Benin onto the page.
There
. She’s done. It’s actually not half bad, now that everything is on the page together. She wishes she had some mementos from Benin, but she’s made it her practice to live light. She begins to clean up. “Maybe she came into the clinic for something.”

Richard shakes his head, frowning. “How well do you know her?” he asks.

“Not very. Her husband is in pharmaceutical sales.”

“She mention any other family?”

“It hasn’t come up. Why?”

“Because,” Richard says, “I think there’s something you should know about your friend.”

Livvy balances herself on the step stool and peers at a stack of boxes on the top shelf of the closet. It’s that time of year again, when the baby shower invitations start flooding the mailboxes in earnest. Chalk it up to the cold Illinois winters, she supposes. Carol Doyle and Jo Kay Buckley are both expecting in August and they each already have three children. It annoys Livvy that some people have babies so easily, Carol and Jo Kay especially. (“We weren’t even trying!” Jo Kay confided to Livvy on the phone, a fact Livvy finds hard to believe. For as long as she’s known her, Jo Kay has always been trying for something.)

It doesn’t seem fair somehow. Livvy recalls numerous conversations where all Carol and Jo Kay seem to do is complain: they’re so tired, their husbands don’t help, they don’t have enough time to do
the things that
they
want to do. Livvy doesn’t understand why they want more children.
I’ll take one
, she wants to say.
And
I
won’t complain
.

Livvy picks a box at random and turns off the closet light. Maybe it’s just sour grapes. She and Tom haven’t been trying that long, and it probably doesn’t help that she’s stressed out about the whole thing, wondering if they’ll have any problems, which is probably why they
are
having problems. It’s just that she never expected she wouldn’t be able to get pregnant right away if she wanted to. Livvy wonders if maybe, possibly, it’s some sort of divine punishment for what happened. She hopes not, but she doesn’t know.

She sits on her bed and opens the box. Inside is a mishmash of photos and other childhood memorabilia—a homemade pot holder, one too many God’s Eyes made from Popsicle sticks and yarn. Carol had asked Livvy if she would go through her old pictures to see if she could find any of Carol or Jo Kay “back in the day.” Both women have decided that the only gift they want are photo quilts for their babies with pictures of them and their husbands from birth to present.

“It’s
so
important to give children a sense of history,” Carol had informed her. “To let them see where they came from. Who needs more diaper rash cream or another stuffed animal?”

Livvy had cringed—she’d bought stuffed animals for all of their previous baby showers and had planned on doing it again. “Some of them are kind of cute,” she ventured.

Carol snorted. “Most of them are surface wash only. How can you really get them clean? It’s no wonder Ruben has asthma.” Ruben is Carol’s youngest, an overweight six-year-old who always has a fat-free licorice whip in hand. “Can you see if you have any pictures from cheerleading camp after sophomore year? I remember you took really good pictures and they turned out pretty cute.” Meaning that Carol looked pretty cute.

Livvy put it off for a couple of weeks, but now both Carol and Jo Kay are breathing down her neck, leaving voice messages and emails that border on harassment. Livvy reminds herself that they’re hormonal, that Julia had once warned her that pregnant women were not
to be reckoned with. That was a long time ago, when Julia was pregnant with Josh and had just passed her first trimester. They were getting pedicures, a birthday present from Julia for Livvy’s twenty-first birthday. Julia was always good about things like that, and it’s one of the many things that Livvy misses.

But now birthdays aren’t the same anymore because Julia’s absence is so noticeable Livvy would rather not celebrate them. Tom isn’t much for sentimentality—he barely remembers her birthday or even their anniversary. Livvy doesn’t fault him, though, because he’s always been that way. He’s the kind of guy who picks up a card from the drugstore on his way home from work or takes advice from a female salesclerk about what to buy his wife, even if the salesclerk knows nothing about Livvy.

But it’s not just the special days that Livvy misses—it’s every day. Every day used to be dotted with Julia, with visits, combined errand runs, last-minute babysitting requests. It wasn’t unusual to have two, three, even four phone calls exchanged between them in a single afternoon. It was Julia who remembered to pick up flowers for their mother on Mother’s Day and add Livvy’s name on the card, who cooked extra servings so Livvy wouldn’t have to figure out dinner on her own. It was always like that, and Livvy misses it.