Lauren sat almost rigid in the front passenger seat of the van, staring straight ahead while Joe drove, ignoring the squabbling of her children in the back seat. Poor Joe had to referee, giving her worried looks from time to time, because Joe's parents, in the row behind the kids, couldn't do much to intervene, or maybe wouldn't was more accurate. 

"Hey, kids!" Joe said too brightly. "Look, we're going over the bridge! Hey, there's Poplar Island over there. Your mom and I used to pretend we were pirates rowing our boat there to dig up buried treasure."

No interest from the children in their halcyon days. "Is that a Wal-Mart over there?" Naomi asked, referring to the giant superstore on the Queensborough side of the bridge, sitting like a portly, gluttonous king amid a court of smaller outlet stores in a section called Queensborough Landing. "Can we go there later?"

"We don't need to go there," Lauren said without turning to face them.

"Pleeeeease!" Naomi said, and Tosh got into the act too.

Now Lauren turned to them, and something on her face must have shocked them into silence. "We're going to a memorial today," she said. "It's going to be sad and exhausting. I don't know how long it will take, but I will not feel up to chasing you through the aisles of Wal-Mart later, and I don't think Nonno and Nonna will either."

"You mamma's right," Mr. DiTomaso said. "I think I go see Signora one last time, I pay my respect, I talk to some people, and then I go home and have a nap."

Napping seemed to be all he ever did nowadays, but at least his health needs took his wife's attention away from Lauren and her own inadequacies as a mother.

"Hey, Uncle Sunny's going to be there," Joe said to try and brighten things. "Maybe Harpreet and Ajit will be there too! There's a nice field outside the community centre, so maybe you guys can play while Mommy and Daddy meet with people."

Joe looked at her while he said this last part, and she knew he was acknowledging her case of nerves. Not only would Uncle Sunny and Aunt Tej be there; Al had told her he was coming, and Rachel had told Sunny she might be there.

After the unnerving phone call where Rachel had shouted into the ether at all of her unseen tormentors, Lauren had promptly given Sunny her number and then gone at reconnecting with her from a different direction: the Facebook friend request. She hadn't known how often Rachel checked her Facebook page nowadays, but hopefully it would inform her of the request.

Once she'd done that, she'd decided to make this an official reunion of the LSDC, and had looked for Al. He'd been even easier to find on Facebook than Rachel. The shy little boy had grown into a not bad looking man, his brown hair spotted with a little bit of grey, his smile soft and non-threatening. He was a Cataloguing Assistant at Vancouver Public Library. Lauren found that sufficiently bland and in keeping with the Al she remembered, not that she would have ever considered what her friends would do when they grew up, not back then.

Knowing Sunny was going to call Rachel, she'd thought it would only be fair to give Al the same courtesy. It had been easy enough to call the library, be directed to Cataloguing, and find Al on the phone. Hearing his voice, deeper now but still recognizably his, had felt like being wrapped in a warm blanket, and when they'd reminisced about the LSDC, she'd found herself close to tears. It had felt good talking to him again, almost as if no time at all had passed.

Then, to her delight, not only had he accepted her friend request, but by the next day Rachel had too, and her initial greeting had been much warmer than the reception she'd gotten over the phone.

Hi, Lauren. Wow, you look hardly a day older than you did when I moved away. I can't believe you and Joe actually got married and had kids! It's so nice to hear from you again after all these years. I heard from Sunny about Mrs. Anderson, and can you believe I ran into Al at the library downtown? It's like we're all coming together again. Will I see you at the memorial? I told Sunny I'd go, but I'm really nervous about it.

Lauren, encouraged, had written back:

Hi Rachel! I'm so happy to hear from you after all these years! Isn't Facebook amazing? I could never have found you without it. Yes, Joe and I stayed together, do you remember how much I went on about him when we were kids? I'm a private investigator now, and Sunny's law firm uses my firm to do investigative work on divorce files, so he hired me to find you, can you believe it? I'll definitely be at the memorial, and I can't wait to see you again!

She hadn't gotten a response back from her since then, and now she wondered if Rachel would come after all, or if she'd chicken out.

They parked in the big parking lot beside the community centre, and Lauren was surprised to see that a playground stood behind the community centre that hadn't been there when she'd last been in Queensborough. A sign proclaimed it and the fields beyond it to be Ryall Park. She smiled at that, remembering Ryall Park in a different place entirely, and she couldn't remember if it had been moved because of the highway connector or for some other reason. Of course, as soon as they saw it, the kids wanted to play in the playground, but Joe corralled them and they made their way to the community centre.

She should have predicted, by how full the parking lot was, that the ballroom would be full too, but she was still surprised by how many people were here. She kept Tosh and Naomi near her while the in-laws circulated and Joe looked for friends. She saw Sunny chatting with a man she would later learn was the mayor.

"Mommy, I'm hungry," Tosh said. "Can I get something from the table?" There were tables full of finger foods and sandwich meats.

"Why don't we all get something?" she said, happy to occupy the kids, and herself, while she waited.

While the kids ate, and she had some non-alcoholic punch, she noticed Al had just entered with his mother. She was surprised his mom came, as she didn't remember her and Mrs. Anderson being close, necessarily, but it made her smile to see the small boy she used to know had grown into a tall man who looked so solicitous of his smaller mother. She already saw that Joe had spotted him and was on the move to greet him, and left him to it; Al hadn't talked to Joe yet, so he deserved a chance to catch up with him first.

Lauren noticed the projected photos on the wall and was captivated by one of the five of them when they were kids, on their bikes, smiling up at Mrs. Anderson, who smiled benevolently on them. It surprised her that this montage of Mrs. Anderson's life would include them; aside from Rachel, they hadn't been that close to her, except for the time she'd helped them with Danny Trybek. It was touching, and it made her glad she came, aside from the chance to reunite with those same friends all these years later.

Naomi and Tosh began tugging at her arms, pleading to escape this place full of adults, and to her relief Joe appeared. "Let me take them off your hands a while," he said. "Al's here, maybe you want to say hi."

"I do," she said. "Thank you. How is he?"

"Still smaller than I am. Still a nice guy, if a bit awkward."

"He's probably intimidated by you."

"Yeah, probably."

He took the kids out of the room for a while, and Lauren went looking for Al. She lost sight of him until she spotted Sunny's pink turban, and saw that he'd found Al first. They were talking about the old days, and about the LSDC.

"Did I hear someone say LSDC?" she asked as she sidled up behind them.

They both turned, and Al's face lit up when he saw her. "Lauren!" he exclaimed.

She squealed and threw herself in his arms.

They barely had time to catch up before she saw Rachel enter the room, and then her vision tunnelled so that all she saw was her best friend in the entire world.

She looked dreadful. Tired. Worn out. Lauren knew it was the fault of the CEO who'd had her framed, the bosses who'd fired her, and those fuckers on Twitter. She hated them, and she knew then and there that she would even the score for her, because she saw in those green eyes the girl she'd known all those years ago, known and loved, and had even traded pleasures with one fateful night, and there was nothing she wouldn't do for that girl.

She went to her with open arms.

On the way home, Joe's mom asked, "Hey, where you go the whole time Signora memorial goin' on?"

"Sorry, Ma," Joe said. "We were outside with the kids, and with Sunny, and Al and Rachel showed up, remember them?"

"Was that Rachel I heard cryin'?" Joe's dad asked.

"Yeah, it was," Lauren said. She'd been shocked by Rachel's break down in the middle of the ballroom, before the mayor had even started his speech, and they'd had to take her outside just to calm her down and remove the disruption.

"Ah, poor ragazza," he said sadly. "Signora mean a lot to her."

Maybe that was it, and Lauren was always surprised at how much her father-in-law did remember, especially from so long ago, when, after his illness, his circuits failed to connect even on the names of his grandchildren sometimes.

"How was the rest of the memorial?" Lauren asked them.

"Ehhh," her mother-in-law said, that particularly Italian utterance that seemed to say so much in a singular sound. It was both uncertainty and disgust. "No mass, no burial," she went on. "What kinda goodbye is that?"

"Signora was no Catholic, bella," her father-in-law said. "She don't want no mass. And her husband was cremated too, so now they together."

That was rather conciliatory from a man who rarely showed Lauren any conciliation, but she knew Mr. DiTomaso had had a special relationship with Mrs. Anderson; Lauren still remembered the place of honour she and her husband James had at the ten year dinner the DiTomasos had thrown back in 1979. They'd been at the head table with the family and the parish priest, so they'd counted as an honorary family in their eyes. The Andersons had helped them and other immigrant families feel welcome in Canada.

"So, you have fun with you friends?" Mrs. DiTomaso asked. "You no seen them in a long time, eh?"

"Not Al and Rachel, no," Joe said. "Sunny's been back in our lives a few years already, as you know."

"Sunny?" Mr. DiTomaso asked, as if the name were new to him, even though Sunny had seen them since he'd come back into their lives. There was that missed connection again.

"You know," Mrs. DiTomaso said. She'd become her husband's memory keeper. "Sunny, the Hindu boy."

Oh, dear. "He's Sikh, not Hindu," Lauren said, knowing that to Mrs. DiTomaso and her generation, every person of South Asian descent was a Hindu, even though it was a religion and not a nationality.

"Ehhh," she said again, and this time it meant, what's the difference? Lauren had no energy to start an argument about race right now, so she let it go.

When they finally dropped them off and arrived at home, got dinner on the table and settled the kids in front of the TV for the evening (if letting the TV babysit the kids made Lauren a bad mother, then so be it), Lauren said to Joe, "Okay, what now?"

Joe's brow furrowed. "What do you mean, what now?"

"Rachel's in a bad way. How do we help her?"

"Uh," Joe said, clearly startled by Lauren's zeal. "Did Rachel ask us for help?"

"No, not in so many words, but did you see her? That's not the Rachel we knew."

"Lauren, honey, we just reunited with this woman. We haven't seen her in thirty years. We don't know what she's been up to or what her deal is."

"She was fired from her job as an accountant because she was framed by her client. She's not working right now, I'll bet. How is she making any money?"

"I don't know, is that really our business? And are we sure she was framed?"

He took a step back when he saw the look she gave him.

"This is our friend," she said.

"This was our friend," he corrected.

"So... what? That's it? We never see her again? Never see Al or Sunny? We just go back to our normal lives and forget them all?"

"Well... Sunny's kind of around for work stuff, and our kids get along..."

"So, he only counts because he has kids? And maybe his wife is hot?"

Joe reddened. "I never said that!"

"Yeah, but I bet you were thinking it."

He shook his head in disbelief, trying to come to terms with what she was saying. "So, really? You want Al and Rachel back in your life?"

"Honestly? Yes! I want my friends back! When I found Sunny again, by happy accident, I couldn't believe my luck! And I always wondered what it would be like to find Al and Rachel too!"

"I didn't know you were this passionate about it."

She sighed. "All I have is my work, my kids, my parents, you and your family."

Joe shrugged. "That's all I have too."

"But for you, it's enough. You have your brother to hang out with, and I don't have a sibling. My friends in Queensborough were the closest thing I had to family back then, and now that I finally have them back in my life, I don't want to let them go."

Joe studied her for a second, then nodded slowly. "Okay."

"Okay?"

"Yeah. I want you to be happy, and if reconnecting with them will make you happy, then I'm all for it. It was nice to see them again. Maybe I'm just a little afraid to open myself up to new friendships, get out of my comfort zone, you know?"

She walked up to him, stood on tiptoes, and Joe lifted her the rest of the way to kiss her on the lips. "I'm scared too," she conceded. "But you know what? I'm also excited! For the first time in years!"

"All right," he said. "The adventure begins. So, you want to help Rachel. What do you propose?"

"We get her unfired by proving she was framed."

"Um, okay, that might be hard. Anything else?"

"She needs to be working, and she's pretty much blackballed because of the allegations. Can we do something about that?"

"She's an accountant, you say?"

She nodded.

He scratched his chin. "Let me call Johnny. We might have some piece work. It might not be enough, but it's a start."

"Okay!" she said, excited now. "I'll talk to my colleagues at Justiciar, too, maybe we can rejig some things. And Sunny! Maybe his firm will have something!"

That was the beginning. With this one act, she was able to tie the knots she needed so Rachel wouldn't drift away again.

In the first novel, I described the reunion through Al and Rachel's point of view. This chapter describes it through Lauren's, but doesn't go into the discussion of the will or what happened to Danny Trybek. The focus here was on Lauren's mission to get Rachel back to being her best friend again. If you liked what you just read, hit the "Vote" button and leave a comment. To see what Lauren was up to while Al was searching the park for the car in the present day, click on "Continue reading."