“Come sit down.” Amy patted the side of her bed. “Would you think I was crazy if I said I’ve dreamed about this? About you and me connecting one day when we least expected it? I’ve missed you, Lisa. I’ve thought of you a million times over the years. When Mark and I got engaged, I tried to find you, but I didn’t know your parents had moved from Memphis. I sent a wedding invitation to an address I got from your brother Will in Indiana, but it came back with no forwarding address.”
“I know. My family is scattered. My mom and dad moved to Florida. Two of my brothers are in Texas. Will is in Ohio now, and Tom moved to Alaska.”
“Wow. I can’t believe your family is so dispersed. You’re here alone then? In Cincinnati?”
I nodded. “I’ve only been here for three months. Before that it was Houston for a year. I’ve moved a lot. There’s not much to tell. No exciting news. No interesting men in my life. Which is okay; I’m used to living with my own schedule.”
I thought for sure Amy would read into my answer that I was still trying to figure out who I was and what my life was supposed to be about. I waited for her eyes to narrow in a judgmental expression. A woman my age should have those basics under control by now.
Nothing but openness and acceptance beamed from Amy’s flushed face. She loved me. Still. After all these years. She loved me with the same childhood innocence and acceptance I’d first experienced when she gave up Barbies for me. I choked up because, in the haphazardness of my life, I realized Amy might be the only person on this planet who truly loved me just as I was.
“I’ve missed you, Amy,” I heard myself say as my throat tightened. “I’ve missed you more than you can even imagine. I hate that I let a date to the prom come between us. Especially a date with Charlie Neusman, of all people.”
Amy tilted her head and gave me a look of nonrecollection. “Lisa, Charlie Neusman had nothing to do with our friendship freezing up.”
“He didn’t? But the prom and—”
“Lisa, I pulled back because of your mom.”
“My mom?”
“Yes, your mom and the salvation paper.”
“The what?”
Amy’s jaw lowered. “You didn’t know about that?”
I shook my head. Baby Jeanette stirred in my arms.
“Oh, Lisa, I should have realized you didn’t know. I was so blind. I’m so, so sorry.” Tears rolled down her cheeks.
“I don’t understand. What salvation paper are you talking about? What did my mother say to you?” I instinctively drew tiny Jeanette closer.
With a steady breath, Amy unfurled a story of how my didactic mother had written out a page of Bible verses that related to salvation. When I wasn’t in the room, my mother laid the paper in front of Amy, asked her to read the verses aloud, and then asked Amy if she wanted to be saved. If the answer was yes, a line was provided at the bottom of the page for Amy to sign and date.
I felt sick. I didn’t know what to say.
“I didn’t sign the paper, and that really upset your mom. I guess I didn’t know exactly what it meant. I assumed that unless I signed it, I no longer was welcome to hang out with the Kroeker clan. That’s why I pulled back from you. I thought all of you felt the same way.”
“No. No!” I couldn’t stop shaking my head. “Amy, no.”
She dabbed her tears with the edge of the bedsheet. “Lisa, I should have talked to you about this right away. I can’t believe I didn’t. I told my mom what happened, and she said that since all your brothers had moved out by then and you were the only one living at home, I shouldn’t do anything that might alienate you from your mom.”
“But Amy, I’ve always felt alienated from my mom. I still am.”
“Oh, Lisa, I am so sorry.” Amy reached over and grabbed my wrist. “We have to start over, you and me. This is our fresh start. From now on you and I have to be there for each other, no matter what. No more isolating ourselves for any reason! No prom dates or mothers or … or … typhoons can come between us.”
She gave my wrist a firm squeeze. “Promise me, Lisa. Promise me we’ll start over. I’ve never found another friend like you. We’re sisters, you and I. We never should have been apart the way we were. We have to stay in each other’s lives from here on out. Promise me.”
“I promise.”
For the next forty minutes, baby Jeanette slept in my arms while Amy and I opened our hearts to each other. Amy’s bed always had been such a lovely place for telling secrets and making vows. That day, on her hotel bed, was no different.
Amy eagerly told me about how she had met Mark when, as a college student, she went to a campus Bible study. He was the faculty sponsor.
“If you can believe this, your mother’s salvation paper actually started my first conversation with Mark.”
I winced, but Amy laughed. “No, it was a good thing. I kept that paper in the back of the Bible you gave me. The second time I visited the Bible study, I pulled out the paper and asked Mark questions about each verse your mom had listed. Mark patiently explained how Christ had made a way for me to come to God. I saw it all in the verses. I was being offered the chance to receive forgiveness and to enter into a new life, eternal life, through Christ. I hadn’t understood that before. A light went on for me, and I believed. I received.” She was beaming.
I sat very quiet, listening. How strange to know that now I was the one hiding in the shadows while Amy was the one walking boldly in full light. Growing up I’d been told our family and our church possessed all the truth while Amy, her mom, and her grandmere were in the dark. We were told to pray for them. I dearly wanted Amy, who was now so full of life that she was brimming over with babies, to pray for me.
“So, see, Lisa? Everything your mom was trying in her own way to give me came to me at the right time. As a gift. From Christ. I know now that’s what your mom wanted all along. Salvation. In the end, her less-than-tactful approach didn’t hurt me at all.”
“But it hurt us,” I said.
“Yes, for a little while. But look! We’re back together now. At just the right time.”
Amy smiled softly, and I felt my curled-up spirit unfurl for the first time in ever so long. I took a deep breath.
“Mark says there are no maverick molecules in the universe. Everything works together according to God’s design. I don’t hold anything against your mother, Lisa. I really don’t. I hope you don’t, either.”
In that moment I didn’t. I couldn’t. All I could do was receive. In the same way that I tenderly held tiny Jeanette in my arms, I realized God had been holding me as a baby believer for many years. It was time to grow up. This time in my spirit. And once again the journey would be alongside the one and only Amelie Jeanette DuPree Rafferty.
Oui!
I mark that afternoon in the hotel room with Amy as the beginning of my adult faith journey. So much changed that day. I tossed out my list of potential boyfriends along with my list of dead-end jobs. With only a little coaxing from Amy and a little more coaching from Mark, I moved to Lexington and slowly finished my college degree. By the time I had my teaching credential, little Jeanette was seven and had a five-year-old sister, Elizabeth, and a two-year-old brother, David. I smiled at the memory of Amy’s favorite Monkee every time I heard her call her son Davy.
My first decade in Lexington didn’t produce any spikes in my static love life. I was busy and happy, though, and involved in a solid church community. Lots of love came my way as an honorary member of Mark and Amy’s extended family. I found it ironic that Amy was now the one with a large family and I was “Aunt Lisa,” who lived in a nearby condo with pretty frills and an expansive collection of videos, which seemed to be the equivalent for Amy’s children to having an enviable collection of Barbies.
My mission, I decided, was to slip Amy’s kids Hostess Ding Dongs and Sno Balls every chance I could. Amy’s objective was to make her kids do their chores, eat their vegetables, and write thank-you notes for every gift they received. She al
so insisted that her girls learn to hit a baseball and sit up straight in church.
We were becoming each other’s mothers! Only better versions. At least in our opinions.
Amy and I had established a settled rhythm to our friendship. We both acted as if we knew everything about the other. Then one summer afternoon I shocked Amy without meaning to. And then she shocked me right back.
We were making the rounds to the neighborhood garage sales when we came across a metal fan like the one that kept us cool in Amy’s bedroom when we were growing up.
“Look at this price tag!” Amy said. “Fifty dollars for what they’re calling a ‘vintage’ fan. Vintage! How do you like that? You and I aren’t old enough to be vintage.”
“No, but your mother’s old fan was vintage. Doesn’t it make you feel nostalgic?” I touched the base of the solid fan. “I should buy it just so we can turn off the air conditioning one night and lie on our stomachs in front of the clanking fan and reminisce.”
Amy smiled. “Remember the night we promised to be in each other’s weddings?”
“How could I forget? That was the night you told me where babies come from.”
“That’s right. Wow, it seems so long ago. If I never thanked you yet, Lisa, thanks for being there for me when each of my babies was born. And thanks, too, for all the other promises to me that you’ve kept.”
My conscience felt a nudge. I’d been meaning to tell Amy something for a long time, but the right opportunity never came up. Drawing in a deep breath, I plugged the nose of my subconscious and plunged into the deep end of a topic I knew could potentially drown me.
“Amy, I have to tell you something. I didn’t keep one promise.”
“What? The bridesmaid promise?”
“No, the promise I made about going to Paris with you.”
She put down the green vase she had been examining on the “Everything Fifty Cents” table. “What are you talking about?”
“I went to Paris. Without you.”
Amy laughed. “Right! You went to Paris, Kentucky, for lunch last month on my birthday. So did I. Remember? I was the one the waiters sang to after they brought over the chocolate cake.”
Amy’s favorite restaurant was located next to an antique store in the Lexington suburb. She loved to drive out of town, past the world-class thoroughbred pastures, and visit the darling lineup of shops in Paris, Kentucky. She always came home with a box of pastries from the Bon Jour Bakery.
“No, Amy” I said firmly. “I went to the real Paris. In France.”
“When?”
“The summer I was twenty-two. I went with some women from work. We traveled to Paris and London.”
Amy looked at me closely. “You’re not making this up. You really went to Paris.”
I nodded.
“Why didn’t you tell me before?”
“Because, well … because I knew I’d feel awkward—which is exactly how I feel right now. I knew how much going to Paris meant to you. I didn’t want you to …”
“To what? Be mad?”
“Yes. And I didn’t want to feel as if I betrayed you or something.”
Amy took slow steps across the driveway and headed for where I’d parked the car under a shady elm tree across the street. Instead of getting inside, we stood next to the car while Amy thought. I knew it was best not to say anything, even though I had so much to say, now that the subject had finally been brought out into the open.
After a few moments, Amy drew back her shoulders. “How was it? Paris, I mean.”
“It was terrible.”
“No, really. Tell me.”
I leaned against the trunk of the supportive tree. “I didn’t like Paris at all.”
“You didn’t? You really, truly didn’t like Paris?”
“No. Amy, Paris is not what you think. It’s a big city, and I think it’s awful.”
Amy looked perplexed all over again. “How could Paris be awful? It’s the most romantic city in the world. The City of Lights. Everyone loves Paris.”
“I didn’t.”
Now Amy was the one studying my expression.
“Seriously, Amy. I don’t want to go back to Paris again. Ever.”
I hated bursting her pink, puffy, poodle-bubble. This uneasy moment was exactly why I’d avoided the conversation all these years.
Before I could think of something to say that would smooth over my assessment of Paris, Amy lifted her chin, looked me in the eye, and with one defined eyebrow raised she asked, “What was his name?”
The hair on the back of my neck stood up. “Whose name?” I tried to keep my voice steady.
“The name of the man who broke your heart in Paris.”
At that moment I loved Amy for knowing. I wanted to throw my arms around her and finally release all the hurt and sorrow I’d carried with me ever since the day I was left standing alone at the Gare du Nord train station.
I was just about to tell Amy everything when a horrible screeching sound came toward us followed by a world-rocking wallop of a thud. We jumped back as a red truck turned my already ailing Honda into an accordion.
Amy and I didn’t get to finish our conversation for years. Because the crash diverted us into another topic: marriage. That day I met my husband.
Trevor, the driver of the car, missed his family’s driveway and hit my car while fiddling with the radio knob. Ronnie, my soon-to-be husband’s youngest son, was in the garage at the time and came running out to the elm tree. The entire neighborhood, it seemed, came out to peer at the shocking accident scene. The boys’ father, Joel, appeared and calmly made sense of the chaos. His wife had passed away when the boys were young, and Joel was accustomed to “managing the mess,” as he called it.
Our first “date” was to the insurance claim adjustor’s office. Our second “date” was to the used car lot five days later. By the third date (this one actually included food—Milky Way candy bars from the snack machine at the credit union where I signed papers for the loan on my new Jeep Wrangler), we both knew we were going to keep meeting like this for the rest of our lives.
Joel and I were married when I was thirty-seven and he was forty-two. To Amy’s delight, Joel had a pinch of French blood in him on his dad’s side. I moved into Joel’s house with the sheltering elm tree where our smashing first encounter took place. Fitting into the lives of three men came easily for me. Within a few short years, both the boys were out on their own, and Joel and I were as settled in as if we had been married for thirty years instead of only half a dozen.
That’s when the subject of Paris presented itself again.
This time it was Grandmere’s doing. The dear woman had passed away several years earlier, and Amy’s mom decided she was ready to leave the brick house on Forrest Avenue and move to Paris. Paris, Kentucky, that is.
Amy coerced me into going with her to Memphis to pack up her mom’s belongings. We planned to make the move from Tennessee to Kentucky over Memorial Day weekend sans husbands, since both of them had been planning a camping trip complete with pup tents and fishing poles. Neither of them expressed too much disappointment when Amy and I announced we wouldn’t be joining them. Amy’s girls quickly made plans with friends for the long weekend, and we all went our separate ways.
Armed with as many collapsed packing boxes as we could rustle up, Amy and I took turns at the wheel of a rumbling U-Rent truck for the eight-hour drive to Memphis. We packed boxes with fervor, swallowing a tear each time we wrapped one of Grandmere’s flower-painted glass dessert plates or sorted towels that had been embellished with her handiwork decades earlier.
When we reached Amy’s old room, the nostalgia engulfed both of us. Very little had changed in that pink room. The faded, sagging canopy over the bed came down with sneeze-inducing dust clouds and went in a Dumpster. We found my long-missing navy blue sweater under the bed along with an unopened roll of Necco candies that by all appearances seemed as fresh as they were thirty-plus years ago.
; On the top shelf of Amy’s closet we discovered a black vinyl Barbie case, with one blond Barbie and one Ken tucked inside.
“Why, hello there, Barbie,” I said in a deep voice, taking the Ken doll and walking him toward the Barbie in Amy’s hand. “Would you like to go to the dance with me?”
“Why, Ken!” Amy answered in a squirrelly voice. “I never thought you’d ask!”
We walked the dolls across the top of Amy’s bed. Then, because the only dance they could do with those stiff arms was “The Monkey,” we knelt beside the bed, and I defied my eighty-four-year-old mother by playing dancing Barbies. And I was the one playing with the Ken, no less! I felt a strangely smug sense of “so there!”
“You know what?” Amy pulled her Barbie off the dance floor, ruining all my fun. “Your mom was right.”
“Don’t say that.”
“Well, she was. Look at this doll. The body proportions are unrealistic. I mean, look at these legs. Barbie has no thighs. How many real women do you know have no thighs? And this waist. Yeah, right!”
“Come on, Barbie,” I said in my best Ken voice. “The night is still young. Let’s dance some more.”
“I’m going to the refreshment table, Ken,” Amy said in her Barbie voice. “I’ve decided it’s time I got myself some thighs. And maybe a little jelly roll around my middle, too.”
“I’ll join you. What’s for dessert?”
“Oh, Ken, you’re so supportive! After all those years of being locked up in that box, and yet just like me, the first thing you think of when you get out is chocolate!”
We laughed impishly, and Amy added in her Barbie voice, “You know what stressed is spelled backward, don’t you, Ken?”
I couldn’t switch the letters fast enough to figure out the answer, so in my Ken voice I said, “Ahh, it starts with a d, right?”