The Best of Us Read Free Page A

and carried her to the living room and checked to make sure she wasn’t bleeding. She wasn’t, but, oh, my God, if that pitcher had landed on her head . . . And then it hit me: I couldn’t hearanything upstairs. I ran so fast up those steps, I swear my feet didn’t touch them. But Eva was just sitting there, filling up her little plastic cups and pouring them out.”
    “That kind of thing happens to me all the time,” Tina said. She lifted her head and looked at Allie again. Her big brown eyes had lines of red running through the whites, like road maps documenting her exhaustion. “Ricocheting from crisis to crisis. Worrying there will be a time when I won’t get there fast enough. Just one time.”
    “Come to Jamaica,” Allie said.
    “I can’t,” Tina said. “The kids.” She bent her head and kissed the top of Jessica’s head, as if in apology, then gave Allie a wry smile. “Unless I bring them along, but somehow I don’t think Pauline had that in mind. I have a feeling we’d be asked to leave the first time someone threw up in the hot tub. Or definitely the second.”
    “My mom and dad are going to watch all the kids,” Allie said. She’d set it up with her folks the previous week and had been dying to tell Tina. “They can stay at my house with my kids, and my parents will sleep there.”
    Tina’s eyes grew wide, even as she protested. “No,” she said. “That’s too much for them.”
    “My girls are so excited,” Allie continued. “They’re going to help with the little ones—they’re like babysitters in training. I told them we’d pay them twenty bucks each. You know your kids love them. And my mom loves you . She really wants to do this.”
    “I love your mom, too, but it’s too much,” Tina said again, but Allie kept talking over her.
    “Tina, come on. My mom taught second grade for thirty-two years. And she’s still got more energy than both of us combined. She’d be insulted if she heard you say that!”
    Allie looked at her friend and remembered, as she so oftendid, the time when she’d played tennis with her father on a Saturday afternoon a decade earlier. Walking to his car after the game, he’d complained of a feeling of tightness in his left arm. He’d blamed it on a muscle pull and said he was going home to lie down. But something in his face had sent an icy tingle down Allie’s spine. Instead of driving home, she’d called Tina, who was just coming off a shift at the hospital where she worked as an ER nurse. Tina had asked quick, crisp questions—Did her dad seem confused? Did he have any other symptoms?—and when Allie had responded yes, come to think of it, he’d walked right past his car, and his face was pale, not at all flushed, like you’d expect after an hour of exercise in the heat, Tina hadn’t hesitated.
    “I’m turning around and heading to your parents’ house. I’ll meet you there,” she’d said. “It might not be anything, but it’s not worth taking a chance.”
    “Okay,” Allie had said, putting her car in drive. “I’m leaving now.”
    “Allie? Call 911 first.”
    “Really? Do you think—” Allie had begun, but Tina had cut her off: “Do it right now.”
    Her father had made it home and was lying on the couch, suffering a massive heart attack, by the time the paramedics arrived. Allie’s mother was out running errands. He was alone, and almost certainly would have died had it not been for Tina’s intervention.
    Now Allie reached over and rested her hand on top of her best friend’s. She and her mom had talked about it, and this was a gift they wanted to give to Tina. “There’s this terrific seventeen-year-old who sits for us sometimes—Lia. Remember I’ve mentioned her? She’s going to come over every afternoon for a couple hours to give my mom a hand. We can put the kids in day camp, too. It’s one week. They’ll be fine.”
    “I can’t—” Tina began, but this time she cut herself off. Allie could see tears