Random Acts of Kindness by Lisa Verge Higgins

the feeling that if she just walked barefoot over the old pier and dove into the waters of Bay Roberts, she would somehow emerge psychically clean? If she just swam across to the little island, that spit of a thing with a half-dozen pines, she would somehow emerge as confident as the high school girl she once had been? One day was all that she needed. One day basking under the mountain sun, and her will would strengthen, her insecurities would melt, her spirits would rise to meet the challenges waiting for her when she returned home.
    The ball hissed by her. She hadn’t even heard the mechanical arm drop.
    Claire said, “I did shoot my mouth off last night, didn’t I? I never could hold my liquor.”
    “Forget it.” She wiped the sweat off her brow with her forearm. “I shouldn’t have mentioned it. I’m just jonesing for a nice cold Corona on Coley’s Point—”
    “You’ve got every right to wonder. I do have this thing about commitment. There’s a reason why I didn’t marry that Kiwi with the sheep farm outside of Wellington.”
    Nicole blinked. She’d never known Claire had had a fiancé.
    “Hell,” Claire continued, “I even chose Thai Buddhism because, unlike most other forms, it allows temporary ordination of monks and nuns.”
    “Shaving your head sounds like a commitment to me.”
    “Hair grows back quicker than you think. Don’t stop hitting balls for me, Nic. You’ve only got a few more minutes in the cage.”
    Claire suddenly squinted in the direction of a carnival game clear across the fairway, watching a squealing group of kids as if she had money on their water pistol competition. Nicole recognized the body language. Apparently, the chain-link fence between her and Claire wasn’t enough of a scrim, so Nicole turned away and dropped back into position to give Claire some emotional space.
    “You may be surprised by this,” Claire said, “but sometimes there were good reasons for me to quit. I didn’t really leave Buddhism just because of a passion for mesqui te-f lavored beef jerky.”
    Nicole wiped the sweat off her brow with her forearm. “The six a.m. meditations would have put me off. And the celibacy.”
    “For me, I had serious problems with the Dharma itself. Buddhism is the study of suffering. Where it comes from, why it exists, and most importantly, the path one must follow to end it. When I took off for Thailand, I had this crazy idea that if I just followed the precepts, I’d make some sense out of the mess of my own life. And Melana’s suffering.”
    The mention of Claire’s sister’s name split Nicole’s attention. The mechanical arm dropped, and a ball zipped by, but she caught only a piece of it.
    “Long before I got my own diagnosis,” Claire continued, in the kind of airy voice Nic had heard her use to point out a wind farm amid an alfalfa field, “I had a front-row seat to the joys of stage IV breast cancer. With my mother, but more so with Melana. I saw the blisters from the radiation. I saw what lymphedema can do to a slim, graceful arm. I wiped her down when she was feverish, tried to get water into her when the sores in her mouth were the most severe.” Claire’s humorless laugh sounded more like a clearing of her throat. “Yes, those were good times.”
    Nicole undercut the ball, cracking it with the top of the bat so that it flew straight up, tenting the netting before dropping at her feet. She was breathing hard, realizing how far she’d already pushed the softness of her out-of-shape body. Her mind scrambled back, trying to remember what Claire had told her about discovering her own disease at an earlier stage than her sister—was it stage III?—and realizing in the process how very little Claire had actually shared with her.
    Realizing how little she’d asked.
    “Right up to a few days before Melana died,” Claire continued, “she kept telling me that she was fine. That it really wasn’t so bad. She’d caught the disease a tick earlier than