One Good Friend Deserves Another (5 page)

Suddenly, three women gathered and peered into her face. Her heart palpitated oddly. She looked away to hide her expression—and instead caught her own reflection in the three-way mirror.

She stared at that woman swathed in plum-colored fabric. She searched the reflection for the free-spirited girl who had dared to fall in love with the Frisbee-wielding American son of a single mother and bring him home to her tradition-bound parents. But all she could see was the pure Indian in her, the Hindu (religion), Vaishya (caste), Khandewal (subcaste), Pitalia (clan), from Jaipur by way of Dholagarh. All dressed up like a village bride.

“I need some air.”

She yanked at the pleats at her waistband. She tugged at the fabric with strangely fumbling fingers. Her mother and aunts cried out and tried to stop her, their hands everywhere at once. She wrenched and pulled, panic rising.

Every jerk only bound her more firmly amid eighteen feet of Rajasthani silk.

I
t was a rainy Friday night, and Kelly clutched the DVD of
What’s Your Raashee?,
a lushly filmed love story from Bollywood director Ashutosh Gowariker. Dhara’s aunt Nisha had recommended the movie at the engagement party last week, and Kelly had spent three lunch hours searching for the DVD among the dusty boxes of several downtown street vendors. She’d squealed when she found it—which upped the price a few bucks—but Kelly didn’t care. Juicy, romantic stories were her favorite rainy-night date. So she’d put on her softest pajamas, popped the movie in, and settled on her couch with a box of tissues and a bowl of microwave popcorn.

Suddenly, the door buzzer sounded.

Kelly froze, a fistful of popcorn halfway to her mouth. She stared across the room at the intercom. There was only one person who would arrive at her apartment building without warning this late at night.

She jumped off the couch, upsetting the bowl. A warm flush prickled over every last freckle. She thrust her fingers into her unwashed, humidity-frizzed hair and frantically tumbled it on top of her head as she glanced around the living area of the one-bedroom apartment. She noticed the torn window shade she’d been meaning to replace, and the cat box in the corner that needed cleaning. She wondered if she had any eggs in the fridge or coffee in the cabinet. Then she gave up on her hopelessly wild hair, ran her palms down her pajama bottoms, and scolded herself for not taking a shower when she’d come home from work.

The buzzer went off again.

Shoving her hair behind each ear, she hurried to the intercom and pressed the button, tensely balancing on her toes. “Yes?”

“Kelly?”

The voice gave her pause. “Who’s this?”

“It’s Cole.”

Kelly stared at the slats of the intercom, not understanding. She thought he’d said “Cole,” not “Trey.” She must have heard wrong. She pressed the button harder. “
Who
is this?”

“It’s me, Kelly. It’s Cole.”

She knew that voice, though she hadn’t heard it in a long time. Disappointment dropped her to the soles of her feet.

“Kelly, you there?”

She fumbled with the button. “Yeah, yeah, I’m here.”

She pressed her head against the wall and berated herself for her raised hopes. She had her own damn self to blame. Trey had promised he’d call the next time he had a chance to come over—and he hadn’t called tonight. She really shouldn’t have jumped to conclusions. Look what she was becoming—
exactly
what she’d sworn not to be: pitiful Pavlov’s dog, salivating at the sound of the buzzer.

“Hey, Kelly, it’s friggin’ pouring out here. Can I come up?”

Kelly shook herself to her senses. “Of course.” She pressed the button to buzz the building door open. She wondered what Cole was doing here at ten o’clock on a Friday night when she hadn’t heard from him in months. After he and Dhara had broken up, Kelly had expected him to call her to commiserate about the state of the relationship and, perhaps, ask for her help to patch things up. But Cole had mumbled through every phone call Kelly had made to him, and so, after a while, she’d stopped calling.

When he tapped at the door, she unbolted and unchained it, pulling it open to peer at him from around the edge.

She started to say
hello stranger,
but the words died in her throat.

Cole had been raised as a vegetarian on an organic farm in Oregon. He’d always been long-muscled and whip-lean, the kind of guy who could wolf down prodigious amounts of food and not develop a fatty bulge. But she’d never seen him so thin that his clavicle pushed against the wet cotton of his soaked shirt, his skin so pale that she could see the bones in his wrist where he braced himself against the door.

“Hey, Kelly.” His eyes were lost in shadows. “Can I come in?”

She swung the door wide, and he stumbled over the threshold. He looped an arm around her neck, almost taking her down with him. Kelly seized his wrist and steadied him as she caught a blast of his breath. “What the hell, Cole—you’re drunk!”

“I had a few with the guys.”

“A few what? A few gallons?” Stumbling under his weight, she kicked the door closed behind her and then led him teetering toward the sofa. “It’s only ten o’clock.”

“Started after the markets closed,” he muttered, pushing aside the popcorn bowl and tumbling onto the couch. “No big deal.”

Kelly took a good, long look at him. His once sun-bleached brown hair, chopped short years ago in deference to Wall Street conformity, had grown dark and far out of its cut. It curled against his neck and stuck up at odd angles from his head. His face was sharp-edged at the cheekbones and chin, and his green irises showed eerily bright against the bloodshot whites.

Kelly didn’t always pick up on what the girls called normal social cues, but she didn’t need a neon sign to know that the drunk keeling over on her couch was in the midst of dealing with—or
not
dealing with—some serious issues. After Dhara’s sudden engagement last week, she had a pretty good idea what those issues were.

Poor Cole.
She dropped to one knee to pull his size ten shoes from his feet. “Jeez, you’re as wet as if you were out in a nor’easter.” She tipped the two-hundred-dollar Johnston & Murphy shoe to dump the water onto the carpet. “I didn’t think it was raining that hard.”

“I walked. From Mondo’s.”

Kelly frowned. The name was familiar. It was the kind of place that showed up on Page Six of the
New York Post
. “Isn’t that place on Houston Street?”

“I needed the air.”

For forty, fifty blocks?
She tossed the shoes toward the door. “Why didn’t you just take a cab?”

“Tapped out.” He blindly yanked at his pants pockets, pulling out the white cotton insides. “Totally tapped out.”

His argyle socks sagged with moisture. She pulled them off and dropped them into a soggy pile. His feet were icy to the touch. “You should have gone straight home. Your apartment is much closer to that bar. One phone call, and I would have caught the subway over. You
know
that.”

“Can’t go home.” He let his head fall onto the back of the couch, his Adam’s apple jutting. “I’ve been evicted.”

Yeah, right, Kelly thought. Evicted from the relationship with Dhara for sure, but certainly not from his apartment. This was just his puckish sense of humor. Cole swam in cash from working as a trader on Wall Street.

“Stop with the fish tales,” she said, determined to take care of first things first. “You need to get out of these clothes.”

Cole laughed, a phlegmy laugh that threatened to turn into a cough. “I knew I came to the right place.”

“Shut up.” She stood up and headed to her bedroom. “I think I have a pair of pajamas that’ll fit you. I don’t want your wet butt staining my yard-sale couch.”

She returned a few minutes later with a towel and an old pair of drawstring pajama bottoms. She flung them both in his general direction. He struggled to pull the damp button-down shirt over his head and then fumbled with his belt. To give him privacy, she went into the kitchen to clean the dishes in the sink and put on a pot of water to boil. She heard him stumbling around, drying himself, kicking off his pants, swearing as he tripped back onto the couch while pulling the pajamas up over his legs.

When she turned around, he was shirtless, wearing a pair of white cotton pajama bottoms speckled with little red hearts, which ended just below his knees. She thrust a glass of water in his hands and held out a couple of pills. “Take both of these and drink all the water.”

“Tell me they’re quaaludes.”

“Vitamin B
₁₂
and some aspirin. You’ll thank me in the morning.”

“Okay, Mom.”

“Don’t be a wiseass.” She tugged a
Star Trek
throw blanket off the back of the couch and then tossed it across his chest. He pulled it over him while he slugged back the pills. “Now, are you going to tell me what’s going on?”

“I told you,” he said, shrugging one bony shoulder. “I was evicted.”

“Cole—”

“Came back last night to find the locks changed,” he continued, lifting the glass, “and a sheriff’s posting on the door.”

Kelly fell silent. The Ramen noodles she’d eaten for dinner shifted. He couldn’t possibly be telling the truth. If he were, he wouldn’t be so frustratingly calm. Cole knew what it meant. Evictions happened to people like his mother, a feckless ex-debutante who, along with her organic garden, cultivated marijuana on the side to help pay the heating bill. Evictions happened to men like her father, fishermen in Gloucester, whose income rose and fell on seasonal stocks of flounder.

She said, “It must be a mistake.”

“No mistake. I was legally warned.” He looked beyond her, toward the kitchen. “You wouldn’t happen to have a beer, would you?”

“No.”

“Vodka? Whiskey?”

“You’ve had enough, don’t you think?”

“No.” Then he closed his eyes and rested his head on the back of the couch. “It’s never enough.”

Kelly sank onto the couch next to him, giving up all expectation of a cozy night watching a Bollywood movie. A boatload of real drama had just arrived on her doorstep. “You want to tell me how you got to this point?”

He made an ugly sound, a bitter little laugh. “Like you don’t know.”

“No, Cole. I don’t.”

He turned his head, opening his eyes into slits, and she could see the effort he was making to focus on her face.

“Dhara’s been tight as a clam.” She curled her legs up under her. “I had no
idea
your situation was so serious. At her engagement party last week, I confronted her, but she didn’t say a word about you.” Well, Kelly thought, except for that unbelievable tidbit that Cole had asked her to marry him and she’d said no. “She certainly didn’t say anything about an eviction.”

Cole went unnaturally still. His pupils constricted, making his striking eyes all the more green. He looked like he’d just received a fierce right hook and was struggling to regain some sort of equilibrium.

“Hey.” She pushed the hopeless frizz of her hair out of her eyes and leaned into him. “Are you okay?”

His lips moved, but no sound came out. He had the distressed, tight-faced look of a landlubber on his first deep-ocean voyage. She glanced at the
Star Trek
throw blanket, an old present from the girls, already so thin from age that she feared the threadbare split by Spock’s face would rip entirely if she washed it any more. She cast a swift glance toward the sink, wondering if she had enough time to fetch a bucket from under the counter before he hurled.

He tried to say something, but it came out garbled. Then he visibly took hold of himself.

“En…engagement?”

Kelly sucked in a long, slow breath. She covered her mouth with her hand. She’d just assumed he knew…assumed it was the news of the engagement that sent him on this bender. But now, thinking about it, Kelly wondered whom he would have heard the news from. After the breakup, he’d isolated himself. If he wasn’t talking to
her
, then he wasn’t talking to any of the girls.

She was such an idiot.

“I’m so sorry, Cole.” She spoke through her fingers. “I just…I just assumed the news of the engagement is what brought you to my apartment after so much time.”

Cole planted his elbows on his knees and then sank his head in his hands. She reached over and rubbed his back. She could feel the nubs of his vertebrae against her palm.

“When?” His voice had gone raw and husky. “When did this happen?”

“The engagement party was last Friday. It’s…it’s an arranged marriage.”

“Arranged.”

“We tried an intervention,” she said in a rush. “I mean, this was the one thing she swore she would never do. I still don’t understand it. None of us do. We keep calling her, trying to get her to talk. But she just keeps stubbornly insisting that this is what she wants. It’s exasperating.”

“Man,” he said, lifting his head, his elbows splayed on either side as he stretched back against the couch. “This is just fucking perfect. You sure you don’t have any scotch?”

“No.”

“Wine?”

“Cole—”

“Arsenic?”

Kelly squeezed his knee. “All I’ve got is tea,” she said, as the sound of a screaming kettle came from the kitchen. “Tea and a whole lot of time.”

When she returned five minutes later carrying two mugs of steaming chamomile, Cole looked, if possible, more haggard than before. The news had sobered him up. He barely acknowledged her return when she slid the mug across the coffee table toward him. He stared into the steam as if he could read his future in the milky fluid.

“Why don’t we start,” she said, sinking onto the couch beside him, “with the eviction.”

“It’s what usually happens when you don’t pay rent.”

“Okay.” She sipped the tea tentatively, a bit too weak. “Why would you ever forget to pay your rent on that fabulous two-bedroom with the fantastic view over the East River?”

“Because, when you lose your job, you don’t have any money.”

She tightened her grip on the warm cup. He’d been a trader on Wall Street since he’d earned his MBA, moving up the ranks by flipping from one bank to another, amassing an impressive portfolio of private and institutional clients, as well as a nice little fund of his own.