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Suri's arms come around my shoulders and I smell the cinnamon rolls burning as she hugs me tightly. "I can't believe they're doing this to him." She pats my back and I hide my face in her chest, feeling like a child—I never cry—but unwilling to pull away because I know how hideous I look when I do, and I don't want to subject Suri to that even though she's seen it a time or two.
When I finally compose myself, there's a definite smoky smell in the kitchen. Suri squeezes my arm once more before dashing to the oven and yanking the cinnamon rolls out. They look like they've survived a volcanic eruption at close range.
"I'm sorry!" She looks anguished as she stares down at the cinnamon rolls.
"Suri." I can't help laughing, because this is classic Suri, dealing with a crisis via yummy foods, concert tickets, fruity daiquiris, and spa trips. It's actually pretty great, and I’ve enjoyed it since we were kids.
"I don't care about the cinnamon rolls," I say, unable to swallow a laugh at their horrible appearance. "It's the thought that counts." I smile, although my tears have started up again. "Do you want to go out or something? Maybe we can break Cross free from that shithole and move him here."
"That's the thing," she says, her voice going all high-pitched like it does when she's really distressed. "Adam is making me fly to New York tonight. Some special occasion he won't tell me anything about."
Despite my leaking eyes, my brain shifts gears. "Do you think that he's proposing?"
"I don't know, but he better not," she says, waving her arms. "He knows how I feel about New York, and he can be a literary agent on the West Coast much more easily than I can run Northern California Interiors from New York! His clients are all virtual. Mine have homes."
She bares her teeth and mimes a cat scratch, and I know things must have gotten really rough with Adam. I think it's safe to say he's not proposing.
"So the two of you are still at an impasse about where to live?"
She nods miserably but quickly finds a smile. "Maybe he's finally going to give in. I would so accept a Cali-shaped cupcake or...I dunno, Alcatraz earrings."
"Alcatraz earrings." I smile a little, and Suri giggles.
"I can hope," she says.
She pulls a napkin from the pocket of her apron and dabs at her eyes, and I put my arm around her. She wraps hers around me, and together we walk over to one of the windows. I'm not sure who steered us here: her or me. It's like a game of Ouija Board; maybe we both needed a look outside.
It's quiet inside the house, so all we can hear is the low whoosh of the heat through the vents down by our feet, and the utter quiet beyond the glass-paned windows.
When Suri speaks, her voice is high and shaky. "Remember when we were in seventh grade and Cross invited you to Fall Ball?"
I nod, smiling at the memory. He came to my house to ask, wearing a black leather jacket and jeans with holes. I frown next, because I remember how his parents never drove him anywhere. It was always Renault, the Carlsons' butler.
Suri inhales softly, and I watch her face as she sucks her lips in and makes a classic Suri Thinking face. Then she drops a bomb. "Ever since then I kind of had a secret crush on him."
I shriek. "Suri, you have got to be kidding me!"
She shakes her head, blushing three shades of pink. I slap her arm. "How could you harbor such a huge secret?"
"I don't know." She smiles, and shakes her head, and I know the answer before she says it.
"I guess I just met Adam and...that was that." Her eyes tear again. "I still love my Cross."
"Me, too."
“I want to do something for him,” Suri says.
I do, too. In fact, I have to.
*
Maybe it's because of Mom that I freak out. I don't have that many childhood memories of her being whisked away to rehab, and I think that's mostly because she never went. Not until I was a teenager. But she was locked away from me in other ways. Always in and out of altered states, sleeping just like Cross is now.
I have too many memories of watching from the foot of her bed as one of the many private nurses Mom went through hooked up saline to the IV stand she stashed in her make-up room. Sometimes, when I was really little, I would cry and my dad would tell me she was sleeping.
"She loves you, honey, but she's sleeping today."
After Suri leaves, I feel gripped by that old sensation, panic at my lack of access to someone that I love. But I'm not a child anymore. I grab my car keys and race to my old, powder blue Camry. I'm out of breath by the time I crank it, but that doesn't stop me from speeding to Mom's house, a massive, white Southern antebellum-style home with a huge wrap-around porch, situated in the rolling hills fifteen miles northwest of downtown Napa.
