Chapter Twenty-Three Buffalo, New York Present Day
Chapter Twenty-Three
Buffalo, New York
Present Day
If it had been up to Chrissie, she’d have pushed through the last leg of the road trip in one long day.
The second half of the journey was always meant to be the more exciting part.
Where the Dakotas and Midwest offered long stretches of open skies and isolation, the East Coast had cities and cultural outposts.
All the places Chrissie had never been before and had hoped to see on this trip—Detroit and Cleveland, Niagara Falls and maybe even Toronto—passed in a blur as she drove with her foot heavy on the gas.
“I think we should stop here in Buffalo,” she said as she pulled up in front of a fifties-style motel that had been recently revamped and painted electric pink.
The flamingo-shaped neon sign out front was just kitschy enough to appeal to Scarlett’s quest for eccentricity, while the modern updates appealed to Chrissie’s quest for comfort.
Not for herself, obviously, but for Scarlett.
Ever since the truth about where they were going—and why—had come out, Scarlett seemed to have relinquished the ironlike grip she’d held on herself.
She’d still woken up well before the sun that morning, but she was no longer attempting to cover it up with jokes about sleeping when she was dead or by pretending she was a carefree tourist making the most of her time away from work.
She was just a woman appreciating her final days on this planet, staving off the inevitable for as long as she possibly could.
“Is there something here you wanted to see?” Scarlett flipped her sunglasses to the top of her head and frowned at their surroundings.
“Because I’m not gonna lie… Buffalo is kind of a drag.
I was here for a work conference once, and we got buried in our hotel after a freak blizzard hit.
We ran out of booze after the first day. ”
Chrissie allowed herself to be diverted by this. “Out of how many total days?”
“Well, only three. But two days trapped in a hotel with radio personalities and no alcohol is its own circle of hell. You know how loud and obnoxious I get once I start in on a subject. Imagine a hundred of me all talking at once and then remove anything harder than a handful of antihistamines to take the edge off.”
“Well, I’ve never been here before, so we’re staying.
” Chrissie turned off the car and stretched as she exited, fighting every urge she had to bustle over to the passenger side and help Scarlett out.
“And if I get too loud and obnoxious for you, just say the word. I can be quiet for as long as you need.”
“Not for all the booze in the world.” Scarlett linked her arm with Chrissie’s and started walking toward the lobby.
To all outward appearances, they were just two women stepping into a neon pink hotel, but Chrissie felt the pull of Scarlett’s body weight, sensed how each step was wearing on her.
“I don’t want you to be quiet. I want you to stay up all night talking with me like we used to when we were kids. ”
“When we were kids, I used to pray that you’d wear yourself out so I could finally close my eyes, but you never did. I think I sleepwalked through our entire eighth-grade year.”
“Don’t worry. You should get plenty of sleep after next week. I promise not to haunt you after ten o’clock on weeknights.”
Not unsurprisingly, this joke made neither one of them laugh.
Instead, it robbed the entire pink hotel of its charm.
Rather than appreciating the cheeky decor or the way their room boasted a photo of a pinup girl who looked exactly like Marilyn Monroe with brown hair, Chrissie felt the enormity of what this place signified.
This is the last bed Scarlett will sleep in that isn’t also her deathbed. After tonight, we’ll be heading into the final chapter of her life.
Even though neither one of them spoke the words aloud, they seemed to echo off the gingham-papered walls.
It had been Chrissie’s intention to make it through the rest of the trip without enacting any big dramas, but she suddenly felt so exhausted that all she could do was sink to the mattress and stare out the window, where cars zipped by the freeway as though the world contained nothing more than a series of starting points and destinations.
“It was a bad joke,” Scarlett said as she sank to the mattress next to her. “I’m sorry. I promised myself I wouldn’t reduce our trip to that, but you know how I get. Excessive emotions make me seasick.”
“They don’t make you seasick. They make you confront reality. That’s the thing you hate about them.”
Scarlett rested her head on Chrissie’s shoulder. Her short hair tickled Chrissie’s cheek, but she didn’t brush it away. That living, itchy reminder of Scarlett’s existence suddenly seemed like the most precious thing in the world.
“I know,” Scarlett said. “I used to think it was the childhood cancer that did that to me—gave me a chip on the shoulder and an inability to appropriately process human emotions—but I’m pretty sure I just used it as an excuse.
It’s easier to be a selfish bitch if you pretend like normal things don’t affect you. ”
“If you’re waiting for me to contradict you, I’m not going to do it.”
Scarlett slipped her fingers through Chrissie’s.
“I know you aren’t. It’s always been my favorite thing about you.
I can be my worst self around you, and you’ll still love me with every fiber of your being.
” She hesitated. “Do you know how many people find that? Let alone when they’re seven years old? ”
“I mean, I would have preferred you to be your best self all those years, but I was willing to take what I could get.”
Scarlett gave a watery chuckle, her grip suddenly talon-tight. “Can we go out tonight? Somewhere entirely inappropriate for a woman with stage-four breast cancer? I know I should be taking things easy, but I can’t. I just can’t.”
The last thing Chrissie wanted right now was to put on anything other than her volleyball mom sweatshirt.
She wanted to curl up under the blankets, put on a low-stakes rom-com, and fall asleep next to her best friend in the whole world.
But the truth was, Scarlett was selfish.
She’d always put her own needs above those of the other people in her life, forcing everyone around her to match her in energy and pitch or risk getting left behind.
Even now, on her determined march to death, she was doing it.
Instead of accepting the inevitability of her diagnosis—playing by the rules that forced everyone else into their proverbial lives of quiet desperation—Scarlett was pushing fast forward.
She was skipping the messy bits, the painful bits.
She was forcing Chrissie to keep up so she could stand by and watch as Scarlett leaped into the great and final unknown without her.
“Okay,” Chrissie said.
Scarlett did a legitimate double take. “Wait. Really? You’re not going to fight me? Or sigh and drag your feet every step of the way?”
“Of course not.”
Chrissie smiled then, a slow, creeping thing that both looked and felt genuine. To Scarlett, fighting meant the obvious—pitched battles and raised voices, adrenaline pumping every step of the way. But Chrissie had been fighting more insidious battles her whole life.
That was the one thing Scarlett had never been able to understand about her. Where she saw Chrissie bending and twisting to make way for the winds that tried to knock her down, Chrissie saw only the strength it took to stay rooted where life had planted her.
* * *
“Okay. So, walk me through your expectations for Tranquility Estates. I need to take a few notes.”
Chrissie sat perched on a barstool, a martini in front of her left hand and a pad of paper on her right. Scarlett had made an annoyed tsk when Chrissie had pulled both it and a pen out of her oversized purse, but she’d known better than to put up more than a nominal protest.
“Define what you mean by ‘expectations,’” Scarlett asked as she twirled an olive on the end of a swizzle stick.
“The usual. What kind of staff will be there? What’s my exact role? Will I be in your cabin with you, or are there rules about who can sleep where? After it’s all over, am I responsible for getting your remains back to Oregon? Do you even want to go back to Oregon?”
Chrissie sipped her drink and grimaced at the powerful, pine-needle punch of gin on an empty stomach.
Scarlett, naturally, pounced on that rather than any of the other things Chrissie had just said. “You hate gin, Chrissie. You always have. Why did you order a martini if you don’t even want one? Have we learned nothing these past few weeks?”
Chrissie fought the urge to toss the rest of the glass’s contents in Scarlett’s face.
“You brought us to a martini bar, Scarlett. The waitress asked what I wanted before we even sat down. Forgive me for panicking and ordering a martini.”
Scarlett rolled her eyes and lifted a hand. Right on cue, their waitress, a fiftysomething woman who looked as harassed as Chrissie felt, came bustling back. “Is everything okay?”
“I’m so sorry, but my friend here doesn’t actually want this martini. She panic-ordered it. Her first instinct is to always say what she thinks people want to hear rather than what’s in her heart. Is there any way we can get you to replace it?”
The waitress smiled as though people routinely came into this bar and mistakenly ordered twenty-dollar drinks. “No problem. What would you rather have, hon?”
“It’s not a crime to consider other people’s feelings,” Chrissie said.
The waitress blinked down at her. “Um…we have a few specials, if you’d like to hear them. Otherwise I can leave you with the menu and—”
“It’s not a crime to order something you want, either,” Scarlett returned.
The waitress took a step backwards. “I feel like maybe you two could use a minute.”