I settle into a routine at the restaurant. It’s good to have something to distract me, to pull my focus from myself. I skip my next interview with Teo and cancel coffee with Franny. I keep my therapy appointment, but I’m flirting with cutting that off, too. Linda can tell I’m distracted and asks me if I’d like to take a break. We’ve been over all the same ground, so maybe it would be good for me to see if I can make it through a few weeks on my own? I ask her if this is some kind of tough love, pushing me out so I can find my own bottom and admit the help I need, but no. She’s serious, and when I get out into the parking lot, I feel a weight lifting from my soul. I’m not saying I’ll never go back, but Linda was right. I needed to move on from her and the rut I’d created in her office, the deep depression in her couch that wouldn’t go away no matter how much fluffing we both did.
In the days that follow, I can feel myself cutting ties as if I’m taking an actual pair of scissors to them, snip, snip, snip. The only ones I keep are the children, and Sara, and my mom. These people used to be enough for me, and they ought to be enough for me now. And now it’s October twenty-ninth, a few days before Halloween, and it all seems flat. I hated the attention, but something about it made me feel alive in a way I don’t now. As if the attention was what made me real, and now that it’s gone, I’m like the photograph that made me famous in the first place. Artificial. A picture of someone I used to know.
“Cecily?”
“Yes?”
It’s one of the waiters, Carlos or Carlitos, I haven’t quite learned his name yet, much to my shame. I didn’t use to forget details like that.
“There’s someone on the phone for you. They say it’s an emergency.”
“The kids?”
My fear pushes him back on his heels.
“I don’t think so. It’s a man. I think his name is Joshua?”
I grab the phone from him. “Joshua? What is it? The girls? Franny?”
“No, not . . . I can’t do this on the phone. Can you come over?”
• • •
I know that most people have never understood my friendship with Franny. There’s the almost twenty-year age gap and our very different backgrounds, to start, and our very different personalities added to it. My mother thinks I’m trying to fill in for Kaitlyn, to be another mother to her, but that’s not it. My feelings toward Franny aren’t maternal.
My friend Sara’s theory is that I’m close to her because she’s wounded.
“You can’t pass a hurt person by. It was the same with Kaitlyn,” she said once when we’d gone for a drink last summer.
“Is that a bad thing?”
“Of course not. But you give too much of yourself. You need to leave room for you.”
But leaving room for me wasn’t working, it was giving me too much time to think, to regret, to ruminate. And I did feel bad for Franny. What a terrible position to be in, to have something you’ve wanted so badly ripped away from you. To know you were a secret that couldn’t be revealed even once the secret was out. If I felt lost in my manicured house surrounded by my healthy children and my mom and my friends, how must she be feeling? I wondered and wondered for weeks after Kaitlyn’s funeral, and then I started looking.
It wasn’t hard to find her. She was living in Chicago and had already connected with the survivor community, joining one of the support groups for people who’d lost parents on October tenth. The woman who ran the group told me where I could find her. She was working in a diner on the east side of Chicago. One of those leftover places from the fifties where the menus are caked with grease and the women look older than they should. All the customers were men.
I sat at a table in her section. Her uniform looked newer than the other waitresses’, as if she’d just cracked it out of the clear plastic wrap it surely came in. Her hair was pulled back tightly from her face, stretching it slightly. She looked tired and uncomfortable. I knew the feeling.
“What can I get you?”
“Hi, Franny.”
“Do I know you?”
I searched her face for some sign of Kaitlyn. “We met about a month ago at . . . Kaitlyn’s funeral.”
Her pencil remained poised above her pad of paper. “You’re one of her friends.”
“Yes.”
“What do you want?”
“Just to talk.”
“I’m on shift.”
“Maybe you could ask for a few minutes off? Don’t you get a break?”
She glanced over her shoulder at the counter. I could see the half hulk of a man through the order window.
“Give me a minute?”
“Sure.”
She disappeared. I pulled out my phone to check it, half expecting, still, a text or e-mail from Tom. That gentle flow of daily contact we’d always had, now a constant itch. Cassie had forgotten her homework at school, but there wasn’t anything I could do about that.
Franny returned and sat down.
“You sure you don’t want anything?” she asked.
“I’m fine. I’m trying to cut back on coffee.”
“How come?”
“Can’t sleep.”
Her eyes traveled to my wedding ring. “I’m sorry for your loss.”
“Thank you. How are you holding up?”
“Me?”
She laid her hands flat on the table. Her nails were painted a bright, festive red.
“I’m doing all right.”
“Are you okay for money?”
Her chin rose. “Why are you asking me that? You here to help me out?”
“No, I . . . This
