“Jesus, what took you so long?”
Janice has come out to the driveway to meet Donna wearing an old Michigan State shirt. She’s barefoot and holding two sweating glasses, filled nearly to their brims with vodka martinis. Two weeks ago she cut her hair short, in the same boyish fashion that more and more women Donna’s age seem to be favoring, and now, in the humidity, it flares out clownishly over her ears.
“I took the scenic route.” Donna closes the door and locks the car.
“There are no scenic routes in Illinois. In the meantime, you’ve left me no choice but to drink alone.”
“I’m a terrible friend.”
“Mmm.” Janice sips from her glass, and a few drops of booze splatter on her khaki capris. She waves across the street, to Sylvia Watson, who’s watering her azaleas. “Anyway, then, let’s see it.”
“See what?”
“The dress, you drip.”
Janice hands Donna her martini.
“Oh.” She drinks, and winces. “I couldn’t find one.”
“You spent all day at Oakbrook Center, and you couldn’t find a single dress.”
“Oh, I found some, sure, but they all looked so godawful on me. Like I was a piece of overripe fruit.” She takes another sip; this one goes down easier. “I should probably just try Ann Taylor or something.”
“Never admit that kind of defeat.”
“That’s easier for you to say. You’ve still got the hips of a nineteen-year-old.”
“Oh, boo-hoo. What’s wrong with your eyes, anyway?”
“Whaddya mean?”
“They’re all red. Were you crying? Christ, were the dresses that bad?”
Donna smoked over an hour ago, but suddenly she feels a dull burst of lingering paranoia.
“Pollen,” she says. “So much pollen in the air today. Happens to me every spring. All those goddamned flowers.”
Janice takes half her drink down in a single gulp. “Speaking of which, what do you say we take this inside? I can see Sylvia just itching to come say hello, and I swear to God if I have to hear another word about that sick dog of hers, I’ll keel over and die.”
“I thought Poppy died two weeks ago?”
“As if we could be that lucky. Her last round of doggy chemo bought her another month or two.” She finishes her martini. “The world’s not a fair place.”
“You’re awful.”
“That’s probably true. Now, come on.”
In the living room, Janice flops down on a beige sofa. Her feet dangle inches from a small square side table, on top of which sits a blue lamp, along with a framed picture of Janice, her husband, Gary, and their daughter, Amy. Donna picks up the photo to inspect it closer. They’re on a beach somewhere along Lake Michigan, and they’re wearing jeans and matching black polo shirts. All three of them have been professionally posed within an inch of their lives, heads tilted just so, faces stretched and pained, the unnatural smiles drooping. Donna wonders how much the photographer had charged. Whatever it was, Janice overpaid.
“What a lovely picture,” she says.
“Oh, that?” Janice doesn’t bother looking up. She wiggles her big toes. “We took it last summer, when Amy was home from Boulder. Last week I finally got around to getting the damned thing framed.”
“Hm.” Donna sets the picture down. She walks around a squat coffee table loaded with the sort of hardcover, glossy-paged books that everyone’s expected to have, but no one’s expected to read: a visual history of modern American art, Nate Berkus’s The Things That Matter, Barbra Streisand’s My Passion for Design. She’s about to sink down into an overstuffed leather chair when Janice says:
“Oh, hey, before you get around to making yourself comfortable, would you mind?” She taps her ring against her glass.
“I’ve hardly made a dent in mine yet.”
“Well, whose fault is that?”
“Oh, give it here.”
Donna slips out of her shoes and pads into the kitchen, where she finds the martini shaker in the sink. She rinses it out, and then fills it with ice from the automatic dispenser on the freezer door. The whole room smells like orange juice and bologna, and Donna wonders what Janice could have possibly made for lunch.
“Whatever happened with the Reynoldses’ tree? You never told me.” She unscrews the cap from the vodka bottle and lets the viscous booze slop into the shaker.
“You mean my tree.”
“Where the hell is your vermouth?”
“Oh, I ran out on the last round. If you’re feeling ambitious, squeeze a little lemon in mine. If you’re not, plain ol’ vodka’s fine.”
Donna drains the drink into Janice’s glass and returns to the living room.
“Your tree, their tree. Whatever. What happened with all that?”
“Give me that.” She snatches the glass away from Donna. “Incidentally, it does matter whose tree it is. It matters very much.” She drinks and stares up at the ceiling. “And, for the record, it’s ours. The most substantial part of the root structure is technically on our property.”
Donna sinks into her chair and looks out the window. Next door, in the Reynoldses’ front lawn, the sycamore’s leaves obscure the twilight.
“And they still won’t agree to cut the damned thing down?”
“No! Even though the roots are practically tearing up our entire driveway.”
“Did you…”
“Tie floss around it like you said?”
“Yes.”
Janice props herself up on her elbow and sets her drink on the floor. “I did. Crawled out there wearing all black in the middle of the night like some goddamned spy, and you won’t believe what happened.”
“Tell me.”
“The next day, I was standing at that window right there with a pair of binoculars. I wanted to see if the bark on either side of the floss was starting to dry out and die, like you’d said it would. Anyway, I couldn’t see it, the floss. So, that night, I dressed up all in black again and went out there to check if it was still there, and the damned thing was gone.”
“No.”
“Swear to God. This morning I saw some crows picking around the trunk. I’m guessing one of them pecked it off or something. Just as easy as that. How’s that for a ‘fuck you.’”
Donna laughs, though privately she’s relieved. She’d given Janice the idea of using floss to kill the Reynoldses’ tree two weeks ago, after she’d seen an episode of Judge Judy in which the defendant was accused of using a similar method of arboreal sabotage. It had been an evening almost identical to this one—Janice sprawled on the couch; Donna propped in her chair; both of them waiting for House Hunters International to begin so they could ignore it and continue to drink. And like now, they had been gossiping in that way that’s particular to two people who’ve lived across the street from each other for three decades, and who’ve built the foundation of their friendship on dissecting the lives of those around them.
A phone in the kitchen rings, and Janice sighs.