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Carine snatched up the remote and mashed the red power button. “I bet you were identified as gifted and talented in preschool, weren’t you? Maniacal little genius doing quadratic equations in the playground sand.”
“Third grade, actually. I didn’t talk much at school before then, and when you don’t talk, people assume you lack anything notable to contribute.”
Carine settled on a campy butter sculpting competition documentary and left the remote on the sofa back. “Why didn’t you talk?”
Heidi had apparently been joking about making coffee. She was pulling unsalted butter packages from the freezer out of what seemed to be an endless supply. “Most of the time, I didn’t feel like I needed to.”
“Shy?”
Heidi chuckled and set her readers onto her nose. “I could be outgoing in the right settings. I don’t know. Maybe I was being stubborn. They peeled me apart from my best friend after kindergarten and wouldn’t put us in the same class anymore. Principal said we were codependent. I guess I rebelled after that. If they didn’t want me to have my friend, I wouldn’t be theirs. I wasn’t going to tell them all the things I knew. Confused the hell out of my parents because, at home, I never seemed to have a problem finding things to say.”
“What happened to the friend? Did you drift apart?”
“Oh, no. We’re still close. Not geographically, though. She enlisted in the service, ended up in Germany, and liked it so much that she never left. There’s a picture of her and her family on the fridge.”
“This one?” Carine tapped the photo attached to the nickel-tone freezer door with a wrinkled strip of duct tape. Stainless steel was an on-trend look, but some folks never got used to the fact that magnets wouldn’t stick to many of the surfaces.
The woman in the picture seemed vaguely familiar to Carine. Northeastern North Carolina wasn’t so large that anyone could be truly anonymous. She’d probably seen her a time or two in one of the local big box stores while Stateside visiting family. Beneath her uniform cap, she wore her braided hair in an impeccable bun. The joy in her smile radiated. She held a little girl on her hip who gestured to the picture-taker in a frustrated way. The waving, starry-eyed man at her right, who must have been her husband, had on the ugliest Christmas sweater Carine had ever seen.
Their grins were so warm that Carine believed for a few seconds that they were her friends, too. And then that made her sad. There wasn’t a single person she’d kept in touch with for so many years as Heidi had with her friend.
“Do you talk often?” Carine asked.
She realized she actually didn’t know anything about Heidi’s social life outside of Clay’s place, and she’d known her for years. It took a lot of effort to be that much of a mystery.
“Texts and emails, mostly because of the time difference.” Heidi lifted a big pasta pot into the sink and turned on the water. “We’re not really phone people, anyway. We have the kind of friendship where we keep up with everything important in bullet points when we need to. But when we get together…”
“You’ll talk for hours and hours like you’d never parted.”
“Exactly.”
“Did you send her a Christmas card, too?” Carine swallowed a giggle as she imagined what might have graced the front of such a greeting. Heidi was a lesbian divorcee with a grown son, an ex-husband she spoke to multiple times daily, and no pets. Plenty of houseplants, though. Carine decided that Heidi would probably pose beside the massive potted palm wearing one of her festive sequined mini-dresses and holding a crop. The fancy script text would read, “Seasons’ Beatings.”
“Of course I did.”
Carine’s internal laughter fell off because she’d managed to hurt her own feelings. She’d always thought that took incredible skill. “What?”
“I do have manners, Carine. I send out cards every year.”
“I didn’t get a card.”
“You’re not on my list.”
“How do I get on the list? And what was on the card?”
Heidi turned off the water and heaved the pot onto the stove. “Ask me nicely, and I’ll add you. And it was a joint card from Tim and Me. We jumped off a yacht in Santa hats into the Albemarle Sound.”
“Valerie was all right with that?”
“Valerie took the picture. There was no caption on it. Folks who know, know. Timmy likes to keep Valerie out of the shenanigans as much as possible. She’s still considered to be an outsider here, you know? He doesn’t want folks gossiping about her, and I’m always happy to divert any negative attention away.”
Carine snapped her fingers, remembering her encounter at the craft store. “Damn. I forgot to tell you that the cashier at the craft store—”
“Mercy?” Heidi ripped the opener tab off a pound of butter.
“So, youdoknow her?”
“Of course. I don’t forget faces.”
