Best Friends Forever (13 page)

I turned the knob and stepped inside to a short entry hal with a coatrack and a pair of winter boots and a snow shovel at the ready, leaning against the wal . The kitchen was empty: I saw a woodcut of praying hands affixed to the wal , underneath a noisily ticking plastic clock, and a box of Entenmann’s cookies on the counter. The powder room was neat and vacant. The living room had stacks of church newsletters and different religious and self-help texts on the shelves. A leather-bound Bible sat open on the wood coffee table. There was nobody on the couch or in either of the armchairs that sat across from it. I hurried down the hal way to the bedroom. Unmade double bed, vacant; closet with shirts and pants on wire hangers, ditto; bathroom with a glassed-in shower stal with a Waterpik and a tube of Rogaine next to the sink.

I pul ed back the shower curtain and peered under the bed. There was nobody there. No signs of anyone, either—no kicked-off pair of shoes, no jacket draped over a chair, no droplets of blood in the sinks.

I slipped through the front door, closed it behind me, and dashed around the building, ducking back behind the hedge, then creeping forward until I could see Valerie’s Jaguar. The motor was running. Plumes of white smoke rose up from the exhaust pipe. The windows were fogged. I squatted down, shivering, figuring that any minute Father Chip would conclude his spiritual counsel. He’d go back to his house, I’d get back in the car, and Val and I could figure out where to go next. The minutes crawled by. The door stayed shut. My knees creaked as I adjusted my position and held it until my thighs were shaking. Final y I approached the car, thinking that maybe I could knock on the back window as a signal to Val that it was time to go…but as I got closer, I could see through the window that the driver’s seat was empty. Pas-tor Charles Mason was sitting in the passenger’s seat, and Valerie had climbed on top of him.

His mouth was open on her neck, and one hand groped her breast through her black lace body suit.

“Oh, for the love of God,” I said, loud enough for them to hear if they’d been listening, which clearly they weren’t. I waited until the car started rocking back and forth. Then I thumped twice on the window and turned my back. A minute later, the driver’sside door opened and Chip Mason climbed out into the night, smoothing the tented front of his bathrobe.

“Addie?” he said, peering at me. “Is that Addie Downs? My goodness, you got thin!”

“And you got religion!” I said.

I could see the moonlight gleaming on his bald pate as he cleared his throat. “I was hoping to see you tonight,” he said. “I hoping to see you tonight,” he said. “I wanted to apologize for my role…in…” He cleared his throat again and looked at me.

“I’ve changed,” he said. “I’m a different person now.”

“Good for you,” I said as Val came tumbling out of the driver’s seat, patting her hair into place and looking like a vampire who’d just gotten a fresh infusion of blood.

“We need to be going.”

“Wil I see you on Sunday?” asked Chip Mason.

Val gave him a silvery-sounding laugh as she slid behind the wheel. “We’l see,” she said.

I climbed into the car and we drove off, leaving Chip standing there in his bathrobe.

“No Dan?” asked Val, who didn’t sound especial y hopeful.

“No Dan,” I confirmed. “Oh, and by the way, what was that al about?”

“I was creating a diversion,” she said, as if this was obvious. “And it was hot. Very Thorn Birds. ”

“Val,” I said, “Presbyterian priests aren’t celibate. They’re al owed to get married.”

“Oh.” She seemed disappointed to hear it.

“Are you sure?”

“Positive.”

Val pul ed over to the curb underneath a streetlamp and grabbed the class directory from where it had gotten wedged between the seats. “You know what? Maybe we should just go see if he’s home.”

I felt my stomach clench, but I didn’t say anything as Val pul ed open the class guide, located Dan’s address, plugged it into her car’s GPS, and started to drive.

THIRTEEN

The New Year’s Eve party was Valerie’s idea, and I was surprised that my parents went for it. Maybe I shouldn’t have been: Valerie, my mother used to say, could charm the bark off of trees, and she made the event sound like the most exciting thing that had ever hit Pleasant Ridge, or at least our cul-de-sac.

“A New Year’s Eve celebration,” she’d decreed from my bedroom floor, where we’d assumed our customary positions, head to head, propped up on our elbows on the carpet, with our feet pointing toward opposite corners of the room. Val, in her usual jeans and boy’s button-down shirt, was

flipping

through

a

copy

of

Mademoisel e. She hadn’t changed the way she dressed now that we were in high school, but she’d started reading about clothes, and she’d show up at the bus stop with her hair puffed up with mousse or gloss painted on her lips. I was in jeans of my own and an oversized sweatshirt that fel past my hips, working through a bag of Cheez Doodles, holding each puff underneath my tongue until it dissolved. “For the neighborhood.”

“Not for other kids?”

She shook her head. “A grown-up party. A dress-up party.”

“Like tuxedos?” The men on our street wore suits, or at least shirts and ties to work, but on weekends they were found mostly in jeans or khakis and polo shirts.

“They can rent them if they don’t have them.” She flipped onto her back and gazed at the puckered plaster of my bedroom ceiling. “And the ladies should wear evening gowns. We can have a champagne toast at midnight, and we’l decorate with those little white Christmas lights.” She bounced up off the floor onto her toes and clapped her hands twice, sharply, in front of her chest. This was a move I recognized from the cheerleading squad, and I wondered unhappily whether Val was planning on trying out in the spring, whether that was what the Seventeen subscription and the cans of TRESemmé mousse meant. “Let’s ask your mom right now.”

We found her on the sunporch, curled up in a pile of cushions with a legal pad half covered in looping black cursive on her lap. She’d had her most successful card yet the year before, a birthday card with a cartoon drawing of a little old lady with white curls and a cane on the front. Think of it this way:

You’re not just getting older, the front flap read…and then you’d open it to reveal the words You’re also getting shorter. I wasn’t sure exactly why it was funny, but it had been sel ing, as my mother said, like hotcakes.

“A New Year’s Eve party?” my mom asked. Her hair was more silver than brown by then, her big blue eyes hammocked in a nest of fine wrinkles. I could see words on the notebook page and also, in the margin, a column of numbers. She worried about money, I knew—sometimes, late at night, I’d hear my parents whispering about the costs of Jon’s therapists, credit-card bil s, and insurance deductibles. My father had papered the town with his Honey-Do flyers, even venturing into other towns to put them up, and my mother was never without her notebook, not in the car or at the kitchen table, not even, I suspected, in the bathroom.

“New Year’s Rockin’ Eve,” Val explained.

“We can invite everyone on the street.”

My mom propped herself up on her elbow.

“Do you think your mother would like that?”

Val nodded. That summer, Mrs. Adler had had a new boyfriend, a man named Randy, who was, Val said, a stockbroker. On Sunday nights he’d sleep over, and I’d see him leaving Val’s house in his suit and tie on Monday mornings, off to join the other dads at the train station. But in November, Randy disappeared, and Mrs. Adler spent even more time than normal lying prone on the couch, blowing smoke rings toward the ceiling with the silent telephone balanced on her chest.

“Were you thinking of a potluck?” my mother asked. We’d have one of those every winter.

Everyone on the street brought a dish—tuna casserole with crumbled potato chips on top, ziti studded with chunks of sausage, baked beans and franks—to the Basses’ house.

Val shook her head. “I think it should be a cocktail party, with champagne and fancy food.

My mom makes good crab puffs.”

This was true. Crab puffs were, in fact, one of the two things I’d ever known Mrs. Adler to cook. She could do crab puffs and sake-glazed duck, which was delicious, but not the kind of thing you could cook, or would want to eat, seven nights of the week. My mother sat up, adjusting her knitted shawl, and I could see her making an effort to smile, to act like this would be fun.

“And it should be dressy,” Val continued.

“Wel , it is New Year’s Eve,” my mother said.

“Can I get something new?” I wasn’t sure whether getting dressed up for the party was something I dreaded or anticipated. I was already wearing the largest sizes available in the juniors department, and I could see that unless I managed to do something, to stick to a diet, to stop the secret eating on nights when I woke up at two a.m. and couldn’t fal asleep; to actual y get out of bed and go jogging when the alarm I’d set for six a.m. rang, instead of hitting the snooze button and rol ing over, I’d be shopping in the big-lady specialty stores and Dan Swansea, my secret crush, would never notice me. But Val’s enthusiasm was seductive.

Maybe the combination of twinkling white lights and music and champagne at midnight would work some kind of magic. Maybe I’d find a dress that could transform me. Maybe my mother would let me go to Shear Elegance for an updo. Waiting for her answer, I promised myself that I’d throw out the bag of cheese curls as soon as we got back to the bedroom.

My mother looked at her legal pad. “I think it sounds like a great idea.”

Valerie started listing the things they’d need: champagne and champagne flutes, serving trays for the canapés, the little lights, which would surely go on sale after Christmastime. My mother wrote a poem inviting the neighbors to come celebrate. Mrs. Bass, who did cal igraphy in her spare time, wrote them out, and I painted little watercolors on each invitation, pictures of our street, each house under a dark-blue sky, with a single star visible above it. Valerie and I tied the invitations up with silver ribbons and slipped one into every mailbox on the street.

For the ten days of Christmas break, I taped songs off the radio, Whitney Houston and Simple Minds, Steve Winwood and Bon Jovi. My mother came through with an outfit for me, a long, sheer gold skirt with tiny bel s sewn onto the hem and a forgiving elastic waistband, that I’d wear with a black bodysuit and black lace-trimmed leggings underneath. She even cut a length of elasticized black lace and sewed it into a headband to match the trim on the leggings. The party started at the sophisticated hour of nine p.m., after people had had their dinners and the families with smal children had welcomed the sitters and put the kids to bed. It had snowed the night before, draping the frost-burned lawns in a blanket of white. Valerie and I had twisted strands of Christmas lights into the hedges and through the bare branches of the trees, and Val had used sand and votive candles and a hundred brown-paper lunch bags to make luminarias that were set along our driveway, lighting the path to the door.

Jon stood in the entryway, waiting for the guests to arrive: first Mr. and Mrs. Bass from next door, then Mrs. Shea from the end of the street, alone and looking exhausted in green slacks and a red sweater, with an unblended blotch of rouge staining one cheek. The three of them sipped champagne and warmed up in front of the fire while Mrs. Shea told the story of how her husband had brought home a puppy for Christmas—“and just when the babies were out of diapers,” I heard her say. Then the doorbel rang and people started piling into the foyer: the Car-vil es and the Buccis and the Prestons. Val nudged me, grinning, as Mr. and Mrs. Kominski arrived—they were the young married couple who’d just moved to the street, and Mr.

Kominski was cute, as long as he kept his basebal cap on and you couldn’t see that he was already mostly bald.

Jon carried everyone’s coats upstairs and piled them on our parents’ bed. He was having a good night so far—he wasn’t as slow or as stumbly as he normal y was, he wasn’t drooling or constantly wetting his lips with his tongue, and when people asked him questions, there was only a slight hitch, a barely perceptible pause, before he’d answer.

Even though my mother had tried to talk her out of it, Val had insisted that the invitations say “black tie.” Most of the guests hadn’t taken her literal y, although people hadn’t taken her literal y, although people were definitely more dressed up than they were at the neighborhood barbecues or the potlucks. Al of the men wore ties. Some wore suits, and a handful were in tuxedos. Most of the ladies wore wool skirts and Christmas sweaters with embroidered reindeer or jingling sleigh bel s sewn on the front. Mrs. Bass was glamorous in a floorlength black velvet gown that smel ed faintly of mothbal s, and a few of the younger mothers wore jeans and blazers with low-cut tops underneath. Mrs. Alexander, whose kids Val and I sometimes babysat, wore tight black pants and a silver halter that left her freckled shoulder blades bare. (Mrs. Alexander kept a diaphragm and a tube of contraceptive jel y in her bedside table, and every time Val and I went over we checked on the tube to see if any gel had been squeezed.)

Valerie’s mother arrived just before eleven, and when she pul ed off her coat, even Jon stared. Her dress was pale pink, with a bodice that clung to her breasts and hips, and she wore high-heeled silver shoes. “That was her wedding dress,” Val whispered.

I knew it was. I’d recognized it from the pictures. Valerie’s parents had gotten married on the beach in Cape Cod. Mrs. Adler had described the day: the wind that had whipped their hair and the hem of her dress, blowing so hard that not even the priest could hear their vows, and he’d made them repeat them, yel ing “I do!” over and over again until al the guests were laughing. Their reception was at a vineyard, where they’d danced beneath the setting sun. It had sounded so romantic. The only wedding I’d ever attended was when my mother’s cousin got married three years ago. The service had been in a church, and the party had been at the Marriott. There was no salt-scented wind swal owing the vows, and the bride and groom hadn’t slowdanced underneath an arbor or fed each other morsels of wedding cake with their fingers. There was, instead, a buffet with tired-looking lasagna set over blue-flamed tins of Sterno, and a disc jockey who played