We became friends shortly after I started high school in Kentucky. We shared freshman homeroom and would share half a cigarette walking to the agriculture buildings (where our homeroom was located), stub it out and smoke the other half walking back to the main building. We were rebels. One day we didn't stub it out very well and smoke and flames erupted from her school jacket pocket in the middle of roll call. I ran out with her to help put the flames out and we laughed all the way through detention that semester.
We'd spend most of our time staying at each other's houses, or on the phone, talking about the boys we liked or about the girls we hated. Our summers were spent horseback riding to Nealis' store and drinking orange sodas while flirting with the boys that came in from working the farms to eat lunch. As we got older we swapped that summer activity for drinking beer, drive-by flirting/stalking and kissing/other personal things with the boys. We were hot chickies and we knew it. She knew all my secrets and I knew all hers. We were inseparable.
It was a few years after high school and she revealed to me that she liked a well known man whose family owned half the land in the county. He was older, he was rich, and he was beaten by an ugly stick twice, inside and out. He was an asshole. My only advice to her was to be careful and to have fun. I tolerated the man because she was my friend. Then one day she had to go out of town because of a family emergency for a week. It was during this week that he called my house and asked me out. Wait. I wasn't exactly asked out. He told me I could have anything in the world, a trip, cash, whatever I wanted in exchange for sex. I was repulsed. I was mortified. I told my friend after she returned. I was stupid.
She moved in with him a little while later, and life went on. I moved away and she stayed in a mansion in the holler. I heard bits and pieces about her over the years. They had a child. They never married. Her parents passed away. Her sister married and moved away. And through the years I would have flashback memories of my youth in Kentucky and she would always be a part of them.
Then one day my phone rang. A male voice asked if I was THE Laura from the little town in Kentucky. I said I indeed was and he identified himself as the older, rich, beaten by an ugly stick twice inside and out asshole. As I listened, he told me that my long lost friend was diagnosed over a year ago with cancer and all the treatments were in vain. She was dying. He told me that as he was driving her to the hospital this final time that she asked for me. He was calling me as she lay on her death bed. He told me she was pretty drugged up but asked if I would talk to her. I told him to put her on the phone.
In her groggy, medicated voice I heard the friend of my youth as she spoke my name. I don't remember everything we said to each other. I remember her saying she was sorry and that she missed me. I told her I was sorry and that I missed her. It was a quick exchange. The morphine or whatever was taking over fast. She said she had to go and I remember I told her I loved her and thanked her for being my friend and that I would see her later. He called me later that night to tell me she had passed. He said he was sorry for what he had done all those many years ago. I know the decent thing for me to have done was to tell him it was okay; to accept his apology. I didn't. I didn't say anything. I just put the receiver back in the cradle.
