Friendship Makes the Heart Grow Fonder by Lisa Verge Higgins Page A

on the shin she’d received
     as she hurried to dress in the hotel room, sliced by the edge of the lower bureau drawer.
    “You know what, Monie?” Becky said. “You’re right.”
    The scrape of utensils on Monique’s plate stopped. Judy’s noisy chewing slowed. Becky pressed her spine against the back of
     the chair until the wood squeaked. It was always easier to speak frankly in the dark. This was why she’d brought them here,
     after all. She was freaked out enough by her diagnosis, but each time they coddled her, they drove a sharp spike through her
     pride. She didn’t need to be reminded that someday she would be completely and hopelessly dependent.
    “Look,” Becky began, “this is the situation. Back home, on the third stair to the second floor in my house, there’s a crack
     in the riser that I’ve been nagging Marco to fix, but we’d have to rip up the carpet to do it right.” Ripping the carpet up
     meant spending money to have it repaired or replaced. And all nonessential repairs had been put off until Marco was no longer
     on furlough. “That riser always gives under my feet, especially if I’m racing up the stairs. It’s a slight difference. Marco
     doesn’t even notice it. But when Brian was sick with the flu last winter, and I heard him cry out, I took the stairs too fast.
     I didn’t compensate for the change in the rise. I stumbled and bruised my knee up good.”
    Becky felt a rush of air against her cheek, like Judy was waving her comment away. “Beck, do you know how many times I’ve
     skipped a step running up the stairs in my house? After all the knocks I’ve taken, I’ve now got shins of iron. Anyone could have done that.”
    “That’s my point.” Becky quite carefully, quite deliberately, placed her fork down, fingering the linen tablecloth until she
     found the spot for it right next to her plate. “Back home I just know these things. I know to walk carefully on the sidewalk
     by the old Norway maple halfway to town because the roots of that tree have pushed up the pavement. I also know that the Reeses
     never trim that ash tree in front of their house so I have to remember to dip my head not to get a branch in the eye.” Neighborhood
     memory, a map she’d sketched in her head. “But here, in strange places, I know none of this detail. Plus it feels like the
     whole European world is proportioned differently.”
    The risers on the hotel stairs were lower than she expected. The step to get into a taxi was higher. The ratio of the seat
     in a pub in relation to the table was different, somehow, so that in London she’d knocked her pint hard against the wood and
     sent ale sloshing. Walking on cobblestones made her feel like she was stumbling over a loosely packed ball pit. Amsterdam
     swarmed with bicycles, zooming without warning across her path.
     “I’m tripping up so much because everything is new,” she said. “It’s not because my eyesight is getting any worse.”
    Monique’s voice, flat and straight. “Beck, we don’t think your eyesight is getting any worse.”
    “Good. Then you both can stop seizing my elbow every time we approach a curb and warning me of every little obstacle. I have
     to figure this out by myself.” Becky patted the table in search of her wine until her fingers came in contact with the round
     bottom of the stemmed glass. “As long as the light is good, and the day is bright, then treat me like clumsy Becky Lorenzini,
     who’s run whitewater on the Lehigh River, climbed the high ropes in the park, and is currently in charge of a somewhat successful
     household. Just like the two of you.”
    Monique was doing something with her fork upon her plate, the little tines making scratching noises. “The rules change at
     night, though, don’t they?”
    Becky suppressed a ripple of helpless frustration. She really didn’t want to talk about this anymore. Hadn’t she already told
     them what they needed to know? She didn’t want to