Best Friends Forever (3 page)

“Don’t worry,” he said, giving the woman a fast (and, he told himself, completely professional) once-over. Five-five, one-forty, Caucasian, brown and brown. Sweatpants, ponytail, crusted patch of either vomit or dried applesauce on her shirt, diaper bag on her shoulder, recycled-plastic shopping bag in her hand, panicked look in her eyes and dark circles underneath them. “Why don’t you and the little one sit in the cruiser and stay warm?”

She nodded grateful y, babbling thankyous as he walked her to his car and got her settled in the backseat. He took the woman’s key fob, which held no actual keys, just a plastic rectangle, shut his car door, and stood for a moment, surveying the parking lot. The drugstore anchored one end of Pleasant Ridge’s two-block downtown, which, Patti used to joke, had been zoned

“cute.” Next to the parking lot was the town hal , a stately brick building with Doric columns and a marble memorial to the World War I dead out front. Next to that was the organic grocery store, a coffee shop where you could obtain a four-dol ar scone or a five-dol ar cappuccino, the post office, a bookstore, and a handful of boutiques that sold things like potpourri and pottery. He scratched his stubble, thinking, then waved the key fob next to the driver’s-side door of the Prius the lady had indicated. Nothing happened. He scanned the rows of cars and located three other Priuses (Pri ? he wondered). The second one had an infant seat in the back, and its locks popped open obligingly when he approached. “Close the books on that one,” Jordan said, then looked around to make sure no one had heard.

Back in the cruiser, the woman had pul ed up her shirt, and the baby had stopped squealing and started nursing. Jordan caught a glimpse of the woman’s bare white bel y and the curve of her breast before hastily averting his eyes.

“I’m so sorry,” she said, sounding wretched. “We ran out of Tylenol, and my husband’s out of town, and I didn’t know what else to do.”

“It’s fine,” Jordan said. “I believe I’ve solved the mystery.” He explained, without looking at her, that she’d been aiming her key fob at the wrong car.

The woman slumped back against the seat and pounded at her forehead with the heel of her free hand. “You must think I’m the biggest idiot in the world.”

“No, ma’am,” he said, and meant it. The biggest idiot in the world is the guy—the detective—whose wife is having an affair with her dentist and who fails to notice the new lingerie, or the gym membership, or that she’s suddenly walking around with a mouthful of blinding-white teeth. “These things happen.”

He waited until she’d burped the baby (its name was Spencer, and Jordan wasn’t sure if that made it a boy or a girl), then walked her back to her car. “Drive safe,” he said as she strapped Spencer into the seat, fastened her own seat belt, and gave Jordan a weary wave.

He shoved his hands into the pockets of his parka and considered the night sky.

Something is coming, he thought…but he couldn’t say why he was thinking it, or what he imagined was approaching. Snow, probably—snow was usual y coming toward the end of November in Chicago…but maybe something else was on its way, something better. Jordan took a deep breath, then climbed into his cruiser to head back to the station and type out a report on the Case of the Locked Prius, by far the biggest event of his shift. Something was coming, and he’d just have to hope that he was ready when it came.

FIVE

Valerie Adler’s family moved into the greenand-tan ranch house across the street in June of 1983, when I was nine years old. They arrived on a Saturday morning. My brother and mother and I were sitting at the kitchen table as the moving van roared around the corner. Attracted by the noise, we went to the living room to look. I could hear the grumble of a lawnmower from the house next door (Mr. Bass would be pushing it, wearing a sleeveless undershirt and leather sandals that exposed his thick yel ow toenails, while his wife watched from their screened-in porch, reading a paperback and pointing out the spots he’d missed).

“New neighbors,” Jon cal ed to my father, who was at his station at the stove, making his famous pancakes.

“Real y?” My mother put her hands on Jon’s shoulders, standing on her tiptoes to peek over his head. She watched the truck for a minute, then went back to the kitchen. That morning she was dressed in her blue cotton bathrobe, with her hair in a thick braid over one shoulder. Her breasts swung above the belt that barely made it around her midsection, and her broad feet pushed at the seams of her slippers.

This was the year I had begun to understand that most mothers weren’t like my mother, that my family was different from other families in Pleasant Ridge. Some of my classmates’

moms were skinny and some of them were plump, but none of the plump ones were near the size of my mom, who had to work hard every time she got up from a chair or out of our station wagon, who had to stand through my parent-teacher conferences because she couldn’t fit behind the desks.

“Wow, look at her,” I’d heard Lauren Felsey whisper to Kara Tait when my mom had come to school on Career Day. I’d felt furious at Lauren, but furious at my mother, too, for fail-ing to be a normal mom, in jeans or khakis, with a neat haircut and a brisk manner. My mom was big, and soft, and dreamy, and until then I’d always thought she was beautiful. She had pale skin and rosy cheeks, like a painted dol , round blue eyes and light-brown hair that fel to the smal of her back. At night, I loved to lie on her bed and watch her brush her hair, as light and fluffy as the stuff you’d pul out of milkweed pods. She had a beautiful voice, and even though she moved slowly, she was graceful and light on her feet, as if she were being moved by invisible gusts of wind. When I was in nursery school, I’d drawn pictures of her with a body made of clouds, outlined in blue crayon, big and puffy and insubstantial as air. I’d drawn myself on the ground, a squat flesh-colored stump with a scribble of brown loops for hair, holding on to her shoelace as a string, keeping her tethered to the world.

My parents had met in summer camp when they were seventeen. My mom had been in charge of the chorus and of writing the end-of-summer musical at Camp Wa-NaKee-Tah, and my father, tanned and broadshouldered, had taught archery at the boys’

camp across the lake. They’d never told me how they’d met. Sometimes I’d imagined that it had been in the water: that my mom had been swimming across the lake one bright summer afternoon with the shaft of a misfired arrow in her hand, and my father had swum out to meet her.

They’d both gone off to col ege, and then my dad had gone to Vietnam, and they’d met again at a camp reunion the summer they were both twenty-five. My dad was doing odd jobs—he’d driven school buses for a while, and washed dishes in a restaurant. My mom was working at Marshal Field’s, writing copy for the newspaper ads for hats and suits and dresses, and singing in community theater productions at night. She lived in an apartment downtown, with two roommates. “I walked right up to her and said, ‘How’s the prettiest girl in bunk eight?’”

was how my father told it. “Oh, Ron,” my mom would say, and swat at him with her hand or a dishtowel, but you could tel the story pleased her. They’d gotten married eight months after the reunion. My mother’s roommates had been her bridesmaids.

My parents moved to Pleasant Ridge, and had a baby boy, my brother, Jon, and then me, eighteen months later. Fourteen Crescent Drive was a tranquil house, with no raised voices, not even a slammed door. As I got older, I learned that this was because of my father, of what had happened to him during the four months he never talked about, the months he’d spent in the war. He was as handsome as he’d been in the camp photographs I’d seen, but pale and thoughtful, twitchy and il at ease unless he had a hammer or a screwdriver or some kind of tool in his hand. My father would flinch if the refrigerator door shut too fast or if one of us cracked open a can of soda unexpectedly. Once when we were sitting at the table, a car on Crescent Drive had backfired, the sound like a gunshot in the stil summer air, and my father had jerked in his chair, as startled as if he’d been slapped. I remember how my mother had led him into the living room, how she’d wrapped her arms around him, murmuring things I couldn’t hear, smoothing his hair from his forehead. “Mom?” I’d whispered, edging into the room.

“Addie, bring your dad a glass of water,”

she’d said without letting go of him or looking at me. I’d gone running to the kitchen, and by the time I came back they were sitting on the couch. Beads of sweat stood on my father’s forehead, but he managed a smile for me, and the hand that took the glass trembled only slightly.

“Sorry, Pal,” he said. “I just took a bad turn there.”

When I was grown myself, I figured out that the war had been his bad turn. My father had been a good student in col ege, with law school or an MBA in his future, but whatever he’d done or seen overseas had ended that somehow. He couldn’t manage a nine-to-five job, couldn’t stand being inside al day, couldn’t handle the pressures of deadlines or answering to a boss or dealing with the public. He worked as a handyman, doing smal repairs, painting and shingling and plowing driveways in the winter. Every few months, I’d help him put up flyers in the grocery store and the post office— Honey

Do! they would say. I wil do the things your

honey don’t! I would decorate them with a drawing of my father on a ladder, painting a house one year, up changing a chandelier’s lightbulbs the next, and he swore that the il ustrated flyers got double the number of cal s the plain ones had.

My mother worked ful -time, first writing newspaper ads, and then copy for Happy Hearts greeting cards, contributing rhyming couplets for birthday and anniversary and get-wel -soon and condolence cards. As the 1980s progressed, she wrote cards for Hanukkah and Kwan-zaa and Secretary’s Day. Eventual y she worked exclusively on the Modern Moments line, which featured, for example, cards you could send to someone upon the occasion of entering rehab (“I’m glad to know /You’re taking this

important step / Getting the help you need /

For yourself and everyone who loves you”). Our house was a split-level ranch, brick on the bottom and pale yel ow paint on top, with three bedrooms on the top floor (two of them tiny and one just smal ) and a kitchen and dining/ living room downstairs, and a basement underneath that. The basement was my favorite part of the house. One side was a playroom—there was a piece of redand-blue carpet left over from Jon’s bedroom covering the concrete, a wooden toy chest with chipped green paint. On the other side of the basement was my father’s workshop. He’d put a bright braided wool rug on the floor, an old black leather couch against one wal , and an ancient television set on a coffee table in front of it. His tools

—the awls and hammers, the levels and chisels and saws—hung in neat rows on a peg-board, and he had a long work-table set on top of sawhorses next to a miter saw. There were plastic bins of fabric scraps, yarn, beads, tubes of paint, and coils of wire along the edge of the table, along with a record player, in a pebbly plastic carrying case with a bright orange handle, so my dad could listen to his comedy albums: Bil Cosby, George Carlin, Richard Pry-or, Steve Martin, Bob Newhart, and Monty Python, while he built puppets, intricate marionettes with articulated joints and hinged jaws and painted faces.

Jon and I were the recipients of the bulk of his handiwork. My brother had a complete set of Viking puppets (they rowed a carved wooden boat), and a dozen wooden soldiers in miniature red felt coats, and a Superman that actual y seemed to fly, suspended from fishing line above his bed. I had Flora, Fauna, and Merriweather, plus Aurora herself, from Sleeping Beauty, and a pair of puppets that looked like my parents (the mother’s hair was fluff that I’d gotten from pul ing apart and combing cotton bal s, and the father wore a miniature cardigan, just like Mr. Rogers). For my birthday, my father like Mr. Rogers). For my birthday, my father was already working on a miniature me, with hair made from golden-brown thread, and a tiny copy of Anne of Green Gables glued to its hands. In addition to making puppets for Jon and me, my father made them for my mother’s nieces and nephews, and dozens more that he’d pack into cardboard boxes and take to shelters in Chicago every December. “You could sel them,” I’d suggested once, and he’d thought about it, then shaken his head. “They’re not fancy enough for people to pay for,” he’d told me. Maybe they weren’t fancy, but I thought they were wonderful.

While my mother wrote on the sunporch, my father would straighten up around the house—“policing the area,” he cal ed it. He’d change the station wagon’s oil, fix a leaky faucet or a squeaky hinge. He’d clean out the refrigerator, scrubbing the shelves, spraying them with Windex and wiping them down with paper towels before putting them al back. He would sweep and mop the garage floor, sift through our closets to pile up the clothes we’d outgrown, and pick up groceries twice a week. In the afternoons he’d return to the basement. The gooseneck lamp he’d picked up from someone’s curb on trash day would be angled so that it shone a bright circle of light on whatever he was working on—cutting out a puppet-sized coat or a dress, or painting a pair of shoes on a puppet’s wooden feet. One of his albums would be playing, and sometimes there’d be an open can of beer on the table.

“Hey, Pal,” he’d say, handing me the broom so that I could sweep wood shavings into a fragrant pile before he headed upstairs to join the family.

In the summer, Jon spent his afternoons at the swimming pool. In the winter, he’d go ice-skating in Kresse Park, dropping his backpack in the closet and dashing out of the house minutes after he’d entered it, with his skates laced together and slung over his shoulder. Jon played soccer in the fal and T-bal and, later, basebal in the spring. I wasn’t on any teams—the combination of being shy and uncoordinated had proved fatal deterrents early on.

My ankles wobbled when I skated, and when I swam, I stayed in the shal ow end, where my feet could touch the bottom, one hand hovering by the pool’s ledge, ready to grab on for support. Most afternoons I’d stay in my dad’s workshop, sitting on the couch doing my homework, then sketching and painting while my father sawed and sanded and laughed along with Monty Python. “That, sir,” we’d say together,