Excerpt from All You Have to Do Is Call by Kerri Maher, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Now, seven years after those girls' births, Veronica knew exactly where to find the cake knife and dessert plates in Patty's kitchen even if a new distance had begun to settle in between them.

Veronica cut a slice of the cake, put it on a plate, and pushed it toward Patty. "You know what Aunt Martha always says. Life's short. Eat dessert first."

"I wouldn't dream of flouting Aunt Martha's advice," Patty said, picturing Veronica's flamboyant kimono-wearing maiden aunt who'd been a fixture at every event of their growing up together-plays, recitals, graduations, weddings, showers-to which she'd brought what seemed like an impossibly chic urban glamour, like perfume from her city apartment. Patty often wondered what it would have been like to be her, a teacher who'd never married and who traveled as far away as Egypt on vacations. Aunt Martha's life in Chicago was in no small way part of the reason both of them had wound up living in the city rather than in one of the fancier suburbs to which their own parents had gravitated as Park Forest became, in Patty's late mother's words, "too different."

"Didn't she just get back from Sweden?" Patty asked.

"A few months ago. Now she's in India. I'm so jealous."

"I don't think I could stomach all the poverty," Patty said, feeling vaguely ashamed of herself, as she tended to when she confessed something like this to Vee. And yet she felt compelled to be honest with her oldest friend; with anyone else, she'd keep her mouth shut.

"It would be hard to see." Veronica nodded. "But necessary. And there's so much more to the country than that."

"I suppose. Well, anyway. I am not surprised at all that Aunt Martha is making the best of her retirement." Patty pulled the plate with Veronica's cake on it toward her and took a bite. It was perfection, like everything that had ever come out of her friend's oven. Patty shoveled bite after spicy, crumbly bite into her mouth. "This is so good."

Veronica smiled. "Hey, have you ... Have you heard from Eliza at all?"

Patty shook her head. "The last I heard was that postcard from Toronto, like three or four months ago?" On the back of a rectangular card with a bright red Canadian maple leaf on the front, Patty's sister had written:

Hi, Sis,

The band's playing almost every night. Want to come for a show?

-E

And that was it. Even if she'd wanted to attend a show, there was no way to contact her sister to find out where to go. Patty sighed the same sigh she'd been sighing ever since Eliza had left the letter with their father three years ago saying:

I'm not missing. I'm on the road with Christopher, and you don't have to look for me. I'll be in touch.

She'd graduated from high school six weeks before. Patty knew she'd only stuck around that long to get her usual check of $250 on her eighteenth birthday.

"Although ..." Patty trailed off. She didn't want to sound paranoid.

"Yeeeeessss?"

"Well," she admitted, "I have been getting some hang-up calls lately, and I keep wondering if they are Eliza. I've gotten three so far. I pick up the phone, say hello, and there's a short silence, then a dial tone."

"It's definitely not one of Karen's friends prank calling?"

Patty laughed. "God, no. Those are so obvious. 'Is your refrigerator running? Then you better go catch it!'" Patty faked a kid voice.

Veronica laughed and then shrugged. "Well, if it is Eliza, I hope she speaks up soon. Has your dad heard anything?"

Patty shook her head. "No. And we had lunch last week, like we always do on the first Wednesday of the month, when Linda's getting her monthly massage and facial." Patty huffed. "I don't get it. I mean, I love a good facial, but Mom ... She was nothing like that."

"I remember. If she couldn't create it herself, she didn't do it. Remember that summer you made all those soaps?"

Excerpted from All You Have to Do Is Call by Kerri Maher. Copyright © 2023 by Kerri Maher. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.