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“That’s terrible, Maria.” My voice slowed. I really hoped that this wasn’t going the way that I thought it was.
“I need help. Can you help me?” My heart sank. After all these years.
I said, “You’re asking me to do you a favor.”
Her eyes moistened. “Yes. Please. If you can.”
I never forget a favor. Because a favor equals a debt. It’s the Life. Someone does a favor for me, or I do one for them, either way, there’s a debt. And there may be a time it can be called in.
I asked her if she was sure, hoping she would change her mind.
She said she was.
I told her, “I’ll fix it.”
“Can you?”
A slow sigh drifted from me. It’s a big step. I felt like asking her if she was sure about this a second time, but I couldn’t. That’s not how it works. I regretted it, too. Maybe we could still be some kind of friends, but it wouldn’t ever be the same again.
Even if she changed her mind at that point, there’s no way she could have un-asked. From that moment, I knew that she saw me as something else. Maybe she always had.
Certainly I saw her differently. A moment ago, we were old friends. Friends since school with long histories, shared moments and memories.
She made the switch. She spoke to me as someone who can do things, get things done. Things nice people don’t want to talk about or even think about too much. Things they would rather hand off.
That’s a moment we couldn’t ever step back from.
In the Life, it’s not easy to have friends who are civilians. And you can only stay friends until they ask a favor. Once they cross that line, everything changes.
They may say, “I didn’t know.” But that’s a lie.
If they didn’t know, they wouldn’t have come to you to ask the favor in the first place.
I blinked. “It’s done, Maria.”
She smiled and let out a long sigh.
I said, “That person will never trouble your daughter Laurel again. And people around her will know that she’s taken care of. That she’s not somebody to mess with.”
A little shaky, she said, “Thank you, Lucia. You don’t know what this means to me.”
I told her, “Oh, Maria, believe me, I know.”
Her breath caught. She paused. Watching me. Studying my face as it sank in.
We haven’t spoken since.
Slowly sitting back down now, she pulls her lips in between her teeth.
There’s a knock on the frosted glass of her office door.
Her eyes stay on me and her voice cracks as she calls out, “Just a minute.” Then, “Could you come back in five, please.”
She says to me, “Maybe…”
“It’s done, Maria.”
She frowns. “When I came to you for help, I had no-one else to turn to. I was desperate. Now you want to turn that against me, to make me do this thing for you. After all the time we’ve been friends, how can you do that?”
