Best Kept Secret

  Sadie, who had turned around mid-jump, was now sitting patiently on the ground by Peter’s feet.

  Francie bent down and took Sadie’s face in her hands. Sadie raised her eyebrows one at a time and stretched her mouth into a smile. “Good-bye, old girl,” Francie whispered.

  Peter helped Sadie into the car then, walked around to the passenger side, and climbed in beside Kaycee’s father. They drove off and Francie burst into tears.

  “Oh no! Don’t start that now!” wailed Dana. “We’ll be crying all day.”

  Francie was relieved that she had said good-bye to Kaycee, Amy, Beth, Isabel, and Dale the day before. Then, that evening, she had also said good-bye to Curtis. They had sat squished together in the front seat of his car, parked several blocks from Dana’s house on an isolated stretch of road.

  “We’ll talk every day we’re apart,” Curtis had said. “Every single day.”

  Francie had felt anxious rather than reassured. “Every day? You know, that might not be possible. I have a feeling we’re going to be awfully busy.”

  “Too busy for a phone call? There’s always time for a phone call.”

  “But I won’t have a phone in my room,” said Francie. “I’m going to be sharing one with three other people. I think we’ll keep it out in the hall. It won’t exactly be private.”

  Curtis appeared not to have heard her. “And you can come visit me on your fall break.”

  “What? No, I can’t! How am I going to pay for a plane ticket to Colorado?”

  “Then I’ll come visit you.”

  Francie felt smothered, as she sometimes did at the end of a long snowy winter when she’d been confined to her house too often.

  “Let’s see how it goes,” she had muttered.

  Curtis had frowned at her, but then he’d softened, taken her face in his hands, and kissed her.

  * * *

  “Seriously,” Dana said now. “Let’s save our tears for the moment Matthew and I are ready to leave Northampton this afternoon.”

  Francie made a huge effort and largely succeeded. Dry-eyed, she crammed herself into the one teensy spot that Matthew had cleared for her in the overpacked car. Dry-eyed, she watched, first her street, then Nassau Street and the university pass by as they made their way to Route 1. By the time they were flying along I-95, she had fallen asleep. But she awoke feeling jittery and apprehensive when Matthew called from the front seat, “Almost there!”

  Francie closed her eyes again. I’m not ready for this, she thought. I am so not ready.

  She leaned forward. “Maybe I could take a deferment,” she said suddenly. “Maybe we should leave and come back next year.”

  “And what do you propose to do between now and then?” asked Dana just as Matthew said, “Look! There’s a sign for Smith College.”

  Francie slumped back into her seat. “I don’t know.”

  Matthew, following directions that Dana read from a pad in her lap, turned off the highway and onto a road leading into Northampton. He made a left on Main Street, and before Francie knew it, she saw Grécourt Gate, and beyond it, the brick buildings of Smith College.

  Dana directed them to the dorms on the Quadrangle, and Francie, now a bundle of nervous energy, looked around her in awe. The roads were jammed with packed station wagons and anxious parents looking for parking spots.

  “Hey!” exclaimed Matthew as he finally pulled into the Quad. “What do you know? A spot right in front of the door to Gardiner House.”

  Francie looked up at the ivy-covered dorm that would be her home for the next four years. “Let’s turn around right now,” she whispered.

  Neither of her parents answered her. Matthew had already slid out of his seat and was opening the back of the station wagon. “What floor are you on?” he asked.

  “Fourth,” muttered Francie.

  “The top floor? I hope there’s an elevator.”

  There wasn’t. Francie and her parents struggled up three flights of stairs, lugging as many items as they could carry. When they reached the double room Francie would be sharing with a girl named Claudia Werner, they discovered that the Werners must already have arrived. One of the single beds was neatly made, one of the closets was full of clothes, and several cartons were stacked in a corner.

  “She’s tidy,” Dana commented approvingly.

  “But this room is … sterile!” exclaimed Francie. It was true. Except for Claudia’s things, the room held only two beds, two dressers, and two desks. A yellowing shade hung at each window.

  “Once you two have unpacked, it will look better,” Matthew promised.

  Francie and her parents made several more trips up and down the stairs before the car was emptied. Francie’s side of the room was now a colossal mess. “Will you guys stay for a while and help me with this?” she asked.

  “Is that a stalling tactic?” replied Dana.

  “What we should really do,” said Matthew, “is go into town and get a bite to eat. Then we’ll open a checking account for you at Pioneer Bank, and after that, your mother and I should be on our way.”

  Francie flopped on the bed and groaned.

  “What’s wrong?” said a voice from the doorway.

  Francie sat up. A tall girl with long dark hair smiled at her. “Francie?” she said.

  “Claudia?”

  “Yup. What’s wrong?”

  “Well … I don’t know.”

  “We’re just about to go into town,” Dana said. She held out her hand. “I’m Dana, Francie’s mother.”

  “And I’m Matthew,” said her father. “Would you like to have lunch with us?”

  “Have your parents already left?” asked Francie before Claudia could answer. Her roommate seemed awfully calm.

  “They’re saying good-bye to my sister. She’s a senior. She’s in Cushing House.”

  “So you’ve been to Smith before?” said Francie.

  “Tons of times. You’re going to like it here. I promise.”

  “And I promise I’m not always this messy. I just need to put everything away.”

  “Do you want to go shopping later?” asked Claudia. “This room needs some plants. And some character.”

  Dana grinned. “Character. Definitely.”

  “Francie, I hate to say this, but we really should get going,” said Matthew. “Claudia, would you like to come with us?”

  “I would, but my parents are coming back to say good-bye. I’ll wait for you here, Francie, okay? Then we can do something about this room.”

  Years later, after Francie and Claudia became graduates, after they became mothers, after they became grandmothers — years later, they would remember this meeting. They would remember deciding to go shopping so that their room would have character. They would remember the trip that afternoon to the store on Green Street, where they would buy mugs and posters and two pothos plants that they named Irene and Henrietta. Irene and Henrietta would live long lives. After graduation, Irene would move back to Princeton with Francie, and Henrietta would move to Houston, Texas, with Claudia, who by then would already be married. The daughter she would have one day would be Francie’s goddaughter.

  * * *

  Francie hurried her parents through lunch at a restaurant called Fitzwilly’s and later through their business at the bank. When her checking account had been opened and a book of checks was safely stowed in her purse, she returned to Gardiner House with her parents. The tearful good-bye she had feared turned into a rushed good-bye as other freshmen kept peeking through the open doorway to Francie and Claudia’s room and introducing themselves.

  “Let’s all sit together in the dining room tonight,” said one.

  “Meeting in the Smoker after dinner,” said another.

  “Hey, are boys allowed in —” another started to say, and then noticed Dana and Matthew.

  “I think it’s time for us to leave,” said Matthew. Francie didn’t disagree.

  “I’ll walk downstairs with you,” said Claudia, “and
then we can go shopping. Oh, and I want to show you Paradise Pond….”

  Francie paused just long enough by her parents’ car to give Matthew and Dana each a quick hug. “I’ll call you Sunday,” she said. “We can have Sunday morning phone calls, okay?” She and Claudia waved to the car as it circled the Quad and exited through the archway. Then they put their arms around each other and made their way to Green Street.

  “How is it possible,” said Claudia later that afternoon, “to know that someone you’ve just met is destined to become your lifelong friend?”

  “I don’t know, but it is. You know, Dana told me this would happen — that I would find a family of friends here at Smith — and she was right.” She paused, then added, “She’s always right.”

  * * *

  Francie ate her first Gardiner House meal in the dining room that night at a table of other freshmen, Claudia at her side.

  “The food is pretty good,” she said.

  “For the most part,” said Claudia. “Just wait until liver night.”

  “Maybe I’ll become a vegetarian.”

  “Me, too.”

  “Vegetarians can eat chocolate, right?”

  “In my world, they can,” said Claudia.

  “Hey,” said the girl sitting across from Francie (Francie thought her name was Sue), addressing the entire table. “You know the house meeting tonight in the Smoker? We’re supposed to go in our nightgowns.”

  “Seriously?” Francie replied, immediately feeling uncomfortable. She turned to Claudia. “I can’t go in my nightgown!” she whispered desperately.

  “If you don’t, you’ll be out of place.”

  “Are you going to wear yours?”

  “Yes. You know what happens at the end of the nightgown meetings in the Smoker? We get to eat Dunkin’ Donuts that the seniors buy.”

  “I do like donuts,” said Francie.

  That evening, Francie and Claudia gamely attended their first house meeting wearing their nightgowns. They ate donuts and eyed the seniors, who seemed eons older than the freshmen. Later, they fell into their beds. Just when Francie was starting to feel tearful, imagining her mother and Matthew and Peter and Sadie at their homes in Princeton, she heard Claudia say from across the room, “Good night, Irene. Good night, Henrietta.”

  Francie began to laugh. Then she and Claudia, lights out, talked until Francie’s clock read 2:46.

  Francie stood on Vandeventer Avenue in Princeton, gazing up at the old Victorian house. “Those were my bedroom windows,” she said, pointing to the second floor. She gripped her husband’s hand. “Boy, did I spend a lot of time looking out of them. I used to stare at the Newcomers’ house and wish I had brothers and sisters.” She laughed. “All those Newcomer children.”

  She had watched for the black station wagon, too, obsessively peering down at the street in the days following her encounter with the man and Bubbles. But this she kept to herself.

  George Noble looked over his shoulder at the house across the street. “Do the Newcomers still live there?” he asked.

  Francie shook her head. “They moved away when I was in high school.”

  “So what do you think?” asked George, turning back to Francie’s old house.

  “What do I think? Are you serious? It’s my dream to live here again. I loved this house. But can we really afford to buy it?”

  George frowned. “I think so. I mean, you know as well as I do. We’ve done the math.”

  Francie nodded, recalling the nights she and George had sat in their apartment outside of Princeton, hunched over their bank statements and a pad of yellow paper, figuring, then figuring again.

  Francie had graduated from Smith just two years earlier. On a sunny day in May, she had said tearful (very tearful) good-byes to Claudia and Sue, to friends she had known since her first day at Smith, and to friends she had met during her senior year. They had hugged and hugged and hugged some more. They had exchanged addresses. They had promised to keep in touch forever, to come back for every reunion, to name their babies after one another. Finally, Dana had looked pointedly at her watch and Matthew had opened the car doors. Five minutes later, Francie and her parents were once again driving around the Quad. Then they were inching through Northampton, and soon enough, they were flying down I-95. Francie suddenly felt as though the last four years had been a mirage. They already seemed as unreal as they had before she had lived them.

  Francie had spent her first summer as a college graduate as Matthew and Maura’s live-in babysitter, taking care of Jordan and his little sister, Sarah, who had been born during Francie’s sophomore year at Smith. She and Claudia had written lengthy letters to each other — sometimes ten or more pages long. On the days when Matthew and Maura hadn’t required her services, she took the bus to New York City to interview for jobs in publishing, and to visit Dana, who had moved there not long after Peter died.

  Francie remembered in great detail the phone call she’d received at the beginning of her junior year, a year she’d been dreading, since most of her friends, including Claudia, had decided to take their junior year abroad. She’d been sitting cross-legged on her bed late one lonely, rainy Saturday night, looking out the window of her room in Gardiner House — a single that she cherished, although she still missed Claudia’s company — when her phone (her very own phone!) rang.

  “Hello?” she’d said, automatically checking her watch and trying to figure out what time it was in Europe.

  “Hi, honey,” said Dana.

  Something in her voice made Francie’s breath catch. “What’s wrong?” she’d asked.

  “It’s Peter.”

  “Peter?” Francie had been expecting to hear that Sadie — aged, deaf, arthritic Sadie — had died. She and Dana had been talking about this and trying to prepare Peter for what surely lay ahead.

  “He’s in the hospital. He caught a cold; it turned into pneumonia and …” Dana’s voice trailed off.

  In the silence, Francie could hear a door opening down the hall, a shout, a burst of laughter.

  “If you want to come home, I think there’s still time, but it —”

  Francie hadn’t heard anything else her mother said. She’d begun packing her suitcase while she was still on the phone.

  Two days later, Peter had died. The last thing he’d said was, “You can have my cowboy hat, Francie, my niece.”

  Francie, shaken, had returned to Smith a week later and hung the hat on her wall.

  The days had passed, then weeks, then months. Sadie, too, died, curling up on her bed one evening and not moving when Dana tried to rouse her for breakfast the next morning. Dana had put her house on the market then and moved back to New York, and Francie had grown used to dividing her vacations between Princeton and Manhattan.

  Then had come graduation and her search for a job in publishing. September rolled around; she was still unemployed; and she accepted Matthew’s offer to continue to live with him and Maura, to babysit occasionally, but to use the rest of her time to try her hand at writing seriously. She sent out one poem and short story after another and began writing a novel. Every day, she checked the mailbox for a letter saying that something she had written had been accepted for publication and would soon appear in print.

  Every day, there was nothing. Well, not nothing. There was mail for Matthew and Maura, and letters from Claudia and Sue for Francie. But no envelope bearing the news that Francie would be following in her grandfather Zander’s literary footsteps.

  Until December 31st. Late that afternoon, Francie had been in her room getting ready for a New Year’s Eve party when she heard a small knock on her door, and before she could announce that she was indecent, Jordan had burst inside. Seeing his big sister standing before the mirror in her bra and panties, he’d squeezed his eyes shut, squawked, “Ew!” and handed her an envelope. “You got mail,” he’d said, and fled from the room.

  Francie looked at the return address. Miller Press, in Pennsylvania. She opened it, read i
t dully, then read it again and shouted, “Matthew! Maura! I did it! I sold something!”

  It was a poem. She had sold it to a very small press, but it was the beginning of her writing career; Francie was sure of it. She had practically skipped to the party and greeted all her old friends — Kaycee, Amy, Beth, Dale, and Isabel, who were back in Princeton for the holidays — with her happy news. They were clustered around her, congratulating her, when she’d felt a hand on her shoulder, turned, and found herself facing George Noble.

  “Surprise,” he’d said. “Happy new year.”

  Francie’s smile had widened into a grin and she’d thrown her arms around him. They separated from the others and spent the evening together. When the ball had dropped in Times Square, the party guests crowded around Amy’s television, counting down the last ten seconds of 1992, and George pulled Francie to him and kissed her lightly on the lips.

  Six months later, they’d gotten married. Kaycee was Francie’s maid of honor, Claudia and Amy were bridesmaids, Jordan was the ring bearer, and Sarah was the flower girl. Francie and George had moved to an apartment off Route 1, and George had landed his dream job as a teacher at Littlebrook Elementary School. Francie continued writing, and sold a short story to the New Yorker.

  Now on this warm Friday in July, they found themselves standing in front of Francie’s childhood home.

  “So?” said George. “What do you think? We can just barely afford it.”

  Francie stared at the house for several more moments. At last, she said, “Let’s do it.”

  Then she placed her hand over her belly, pulled George to her, smiled gently, and told him about the baby who would be born in February. The baby she would love and protect and shelter from danger.

  Ann M. Martin is the acclaimed and bestselling author of a number of novels and series, including Belle Teal, A Corner of the Universe (a Newbery Honor book), A Dog’s Life, Here Today, P.S. Longer Letter Later (written with Paula Danziger), the Doll People series (written with Laura Godwin), the Main Street series, and the generation-defining series The Baby-sitters Club. She lives in New York.