The Perfect Stranger (Social Media #2)(25)

That was true. And while she continues to buy print books as well, she’s been surprised to find that the electronic device has come in handy for reading in bed on restless nights or when Rob turns out the light earlier than she’d like. Even better, it allowed her to pack a pile of beach reads into her carry-on for Easter week in Playa Del Carmen.

The thought of that trip brings to mind, yet again, the prospect of traveling up to Cincinnati for Meredith’s funeral.

She manages to resist the urge to check the Web for updated information about the arrangements, or updates on the investigation. She’s been looking every so often—more often, perhaps, than is healthy—and so far there’s been nothing.

This afternoon she had a brief e-mail from Elena, who thanked her for sharing the grim news. She said she has to work straight through until tonight and will call if it isn’t too late when she gets home.

There’s been nothing more from Jaycee. She’d tried calling A-Okay again right before she ordered the pizza. Once again the line went into voice mail.

Forget it. Stop thinking about it for a few minutes, will you?

She focuses on the ereader. Last night she’d left off in the middle of a trashy celebrity tell-all she’d been too self-conscious to buy in Page & Palette, her favorite bookstore in Fairhope, where everyone on the staff knows her name and probably expects her to purchase more highbrow literature. She’s been fascinated by Hollywood gossip from the time she was a little girl playing Movie Star dress-up games in her mother’s closet.

But tonight, distracted, all she can think about is Meredith. Meredith frightened, Meredith hurt, Meredith dying.

It’s so wrong, so unfair.

Come on. Who are you kidding?

Violent death at the hands of someone else is always, always wrong and unfair. But for it to happen to someone who’s been through cancer—someone who already stared the prospect of terminal illness in the face, not once, but twice, and won—it seems even more cruel.

On the table beside her chair, her cell phone rings.

Landry pounces on it, hoping it’s one of her blogger friends at last.

But the number in the caller ID window belongs to her cousin Barbie June.

Their mothers are sisters and they’d grown up like sisters themselves, born just ten months apart and raised right across the road from each other. They looked so much alike they were often mistaken for twins. They ran with the same crowd in high school, became roommates in their college sorority house, maid of honor at each other’s weddings and godmother to each other’s firstborns.

Ordinarily, Landry would pick up her cousin’s call, but not tonight. She just isn’t in the mood to try to explain about Meredith to someone who won’t understand—and there’s no way Barbie June will understand.

Her cousin has lots of great qualities.

Subtlety and empathy aren’t among them.

“I know you’re scared,” Barbie June told Landry when she opted for a preventative mastectomy over a lumpectomy, “but why put yourself through major surgery? Why disfigure yourself when you don’t have to? How are you going to wear that darling strapless dress you bought last month at Dillard’s?”

Landry bit back her anger and frustration, explaining why it was the right choice for her, despite the fact that her cancer was stage one—microscopic cells limited to one breast, with relatively low odds for a relapse.

There were no guarantees even with the surgery, but she had a husband and two young kids who needed her, and she intended to do everything within her power to take control and perhaps further reduce her chances of a recurrence.

Barbie June just didn’t get it.

“But look at Grammy,” Barbie June said. “She didn’t do anything so drastic, and she was just fine.”

Their maternal grandmother had been diagnosed with breast cancer a good forty years ago. She’d survived it with just a lumpectomy, minor treatment, and faith that God would let her live to a ripe old age. He did.

Unfortunately, she passed away just a year before Landry’s diagnosis. The quintessential steel magnolia, she’d have been a godsend: a fellow wife and mother who knew what it was like to face your mortality one day out of the clear blue sky.

That was why it was such a relief to her when she found Meredith and the others.

Naturally, Barbie June had since made her share of comments about her blog and social networking in general, hinting that it was for people who don’t have anything else to do.

Landry had always thought pretty much the same thing—until the day she went searching online for information about reconstructive surgery and stumbled across an irreverent breast cancer blog on the subject.

Back then, she barely knew what a blog was.

“I think it’s a sort of online daily journal,” she explained to Barbie June when she made the initial mistake of telling her about it.

When she described the post—an account of nipple reconstruction that managed to be simultaneously poignant and hilarious—her cousin reacted with an incredulous, “Why on God’s green earth would any halfway decent person put something like that out there in public for just anyone to read?”

“I don’t know,” she’d said. “I guess for the same reasons people keep diaries. Because sometimes it’s cathartic to write about things you can’t find the nerve to talk about. It’s an outlet.”