Jodi Picoult - Sing You Home

Rajasi stops. “And?” she says.

“And what?”

“Here I am going on about my love life when you haven’t mentioned a single thing about yours…”

I laugh. “Rajasi, I have a better chance of hooking up with your Punjabi than anyone else right now. I think my romantic pool has gone bone-dry.”

“You make it sound like you’re sixty,” Rajasi says. “Like you’re going to sit home all weekend crocheting with a hundred cats.”

“Don’t be silly. Cats are much better at cross-stitching. Besides, I have big plans for the weekend. I’m headed to Boston to see a ballet.”

“Isn’t it supposed to snow?”

“Not enough to stop us from going,” I say.

“Us,” Rajasi repeats. “Do tell…”

“She’s just a friend. We’re celebrating her anniversary.”

“Without her husband?”

“It’s a divorce thing,” I say. “I’m trying to get her through a rough spot.”

Zoe and I had become pretty good friends in the weeks since our encounter at the Y. I must have called her first, since I was the one who had her home number. I was going to be picking up a painting from a frame shop near her house, and did she want to meet for lunch? Over deli sandwiches, we talked about the research she was doing on depression and music therapy; I told her about broaching the topic with Lucy’s parents. The next weekend, she won two tickets to a movie preview on a radio giveaway, and asked me if I wanted to go. We began spending time together, and in that bizarre exponential way that new friendships seem to snowball, it grew hard to imagine a time when I didn’t know her.

We’ve talked about how she found out about music therapy (as a kid, she broke her arm and needed a pin put in surgically, and there was a music therapist in the pediatrics wing of the hospital). We’ve talked about her mother (who calls Zoe three times a day, often to discuss something completely unnecessary, like last night’s Anderson Cooper report or what day Christmas falls on three years from now). We’ve talked about Max, his drinking, and the rumor mill that now puts him at the right hand of the pastor of the Eternal Glory Church.

Here’s what I hadn’t expected about Zoe: she was funny. She had a way of looking at the world that was just off-kilter enough to surprise me into laughing:

If someone with multiple personality disorder tries to kill himself, is it attempted homicide?

Isn’t it a little upsetting that doctors call what they do “practice”?

Why are you in a movie but on TV?

Isn’t a smoking section in a restaurant a little like a peeing section in a pool?

We had a lot in common. We’d grown up in households with single parents (her father deceased, mine running off with his secretary); we had always wanted to travel and never had enough money to do it; we both were freaked out by clowns. We had a secret fascination with reality TV. We loved the smell of gasoline, hated the smell of bleach, and wished we knew how to use fondant, like pastry chefs. We preferred white wine to red, extreme cold to extreme heat, and Goobers to Raisinets. We both had no problem using a men’s room at a public venue if the line for the ladies’ room was too long.

Tomorrow would have been her tenth wedding anniversary, and I could tell she was dreading it. Zoe’s mom, Dara, was away in San Diego this weekend at a life coaching conference, so I suggested that we do something Max would never in a million years have wanted to do. Immediately, Zoe picked the ballet at the Wang Theatre in Boston. It was Romeo and Juliet, Prokofiev. Max, she had told me, never could handle classical dance. If he wasn’t remarking on the men’s tights, he was fast asleep.

“Maybe that’s what I should do,” Rajasi muses. “Take this fool my parents are flying in to a place he’ll absolutely detest.” She glances up. “What would a Brahmin hate the most?”

“All-you-can-eat barbecue?” I suggest.

“A heavy metal rave.”

Then we look at each other. “NASCAR,” we say at the same time.

“Well, I’d better go,” I say. “I’m supposed to pick Zoe up in fifteen minutes.”

Rajasi pivots the hairdressing chair toward the mirror again and winces.

When your hairdresser winces, it’s never good. My hair is so short that it sticks up in small, grasslike clumps on the top of my head. Rajasi opens her mouth, and I shoot a dagger look in her direction. “Don’t you dare tell me it’ll grow out…”

“I was going to say the good news is that the military look is in this spring…”

I rub my hands through my hair, trying to mess it up a little, not that it helps. “I would kill you,” I say, “but I actually think you’ll suffer more by being alive to meet the Punjabi guy.”

“See? You’re already starting to like this look. If you didn’t, you’d be too busy crying to make jokes.” She takes the money I hold out to her. “Be careful driving,” Rajasi warns. “It’s already starting to snow.”

“A dusting,” I say, waving good-bye. “No worries.”

Another thing, it turns out, that we have in common: Romeo and Juliet. “It’s always been my favorite Shakespeare play,” Zoe says, once the company has taken its bows and she rejoins me in the sumptuous renovated lobby of the Wang Theatre after a trip to the restroom. “I always wanted a guy to walk up to me and start a conversation that naturally became a sonnet.”

“Max didn’t do that?” I ask, smiling.

She snorts. “Max thought a sonnet was something you ask for in the plumbing section of Home Depot.”

“I once told the head of the English department at school that I liked Romeo and Juliet the best,” I say, “and she told me I was a philistine.”

“What! Why?”

“Because it’s not as complex as King Lear or Hamlet, I guess.”

“But it’s dreamier. It’s everyone’s fantasy, right?”

“To die with your lover?”

Zoe laughs. “No. To die before you start making lists of all the things about him that drive you crazy.”

“Yeah, imagine the sequel, if it had ended differently,” I reply. “Romeo and Juliet are disowned by their families and move into a trailer park. Romeo grows a mullet and becomes addicted to online poker while Juliet has an affair with Friar Lawrence.”

“Who, it turns out,” Zoe adds, “runs a meth lab in his basement.”

“Totally. Why else would he have known what drug to give her in the first place?” I loop my scarf around my neck as we brace ourselves to walk into the cold.

“Now what?” Zoe asks. “You think it’s too late to grab dinner some…” Her voice trails off as we step outside. In the three hours we have been in the theater, the storm has thickened into a blizzard. I cannot see even a foot in front of me, the snow is whirling that fiercely. I start to step into the street, and my shoe sinks into nearly eight inches of accumulation.

“Wow,” I say. “This sort of sucks.”

“Maybe we should wait it out before driving home,” Zoe replies.

A limo driver who’s leaning against his vehicle glances over at us. “Settle in for a nice long wait, then, ladies,” he says. “AccuWeather says we’re getting two feet before this is all over.”

“Sleepover,” Zoe announces. “There are plenty of hotels around-”

“Which cost a fortune-”

“Not if we split the cost of a room.” She shrugs. “Besides. That’s what credit cards are for.” She links her arm through mine and drags me into the wild breath of the storm. On the other side of the street is a CVS. “Toothbrushes, toothpaste, and I need to get some tampons,” she says, as the sliding doors close behind us. “We can get nail polish, too, and curlers, and make each other up and stay up late and talk about boys…”