The Good Sister by Wendy Corsi Staub Page B

wonders, yet again, how Nicki could have changed so drastically in six or seven months.
    What was going on in her life that made her decide to end it?
    If Carley has any idea, she’s not talking about it.
    Now Jen is grateful that the girls have drifted apart, for her own daughter’s sake. This would have been even more torturous had it happened when they were inseparable.
    But then, maybe it wouldn’t have happened at all. When Jen thinks about Nicki, about how alone and desperate she must have been feeling, her heart aches for the girl.
    Could a friend have saved her?
    Could her mother have saved her?
    Jen remembers what she was thinking just the other day when she and Thad were discussing Carley’s trouble at school.
    That’s what moms do. We fix things for our kids and we worry about them and we ask about their day when they walk in the door . . .
    Was it only a few days ago that it seemed like the worst thing in the world was to have your daughter victimized by the mean girls at school?
    Jen thinks about her friend Debbie, wondering how she’s coping, wondering how you can possibly go on when you’ve lost a child.
    Whatever you do , she warns herself, don’t go and ask her that when you see her. Don’t blurt out anything stupid.
    She’s had two days now to figure out exactly what she can say to Debbie at a time like this, and she’s come up with only one acceptable thing.
    I’m so sorry.
    It’s what she said when she called Debbie’s house on Saturday morning and got voice mail. “It’s Jen. I just heard, and I’m so sorry . . .”
    Too choked up to go on, she hung up mid-message.
    When she finally pulled herself together and called back, the voice mailbox was full and no longer accepting messages. She sent a carefully composed e-mail. When that went unanswered, she texted Debbie’s cell phone a few times—no reply.
    Yesterday, she made a tray of ziti and took it over there, along with a dozen of the untouched peanut butter cookies and the sponge cake she’d intended for the new neighbors.
    Debbie’s sister-in-law from Ohio, whom Jen had heard about but never met, answered the door. She said Debbie and Andrew were at the funeral home, “making arrangements.”
    “Tell them that Jen was here, and that I’m so sorry, and—”
    Again, she choked on a lump in her throat and couldn’t finish the sentence.
    “What’s wrong with me?” she asked Thad later in frustration. “Why can’t I be one of those people who always says the right thing and has perfect composure, grace under pressure  . . .”
    “Because you’re a Bonafacio,” he reminded her, and he was right.
    How many times has Jen—or one of her sisters, or her mother—said just that, in an effort to explain why when they talk, they talk too much; when they laugh, they laugh uncontrollably; when they cry . . .
    Same thing.
    “It’s because we’re Bonafacios.” Her family—the women in her family, anyway—tend to be overly emotional, and they lack filters. That’s just how it is.
    At this point, Jen feels as though she’s drained every last teardrop in her body. But she knows that when she sees Debbie, she’s going to start sobbing again.
    She drives on past the funeral home, flipping her turn signal and braking carefully on the slick pavement at the stop sign. She makes a right and brakes at the railroad tracks, looking both ways before bumping across them.
    Once, years ago, the signal failed at a crossing in the neighborhood. That was the official story. But an eyewitness claimed that the teenage driver, Jimmy Fazzoleri, was trying to beat it.
    He didn’t make it.
    Jen was just in elementary school then, but she remembers the horror of that accident, the tragic, violently morbid tale told and retold by her sisters and their friends until Jimmy had taken on folk hero status.
    Still—it was an accident. No one ever speculated that Jimmy had taken his own life. Either he’d been the victim of malfunctioning