Best Friends Forever (4 page)

“is an ex-parrot!” There was a half-sized refrigerator down where he kept his beer and grape soda for me and sometimes a candy bar that we’d share. On top of the fridge was a plug-in kettle where he’d heat water for instant coffee or hot chocolate in the winter.

I knew, from the other families on Crescent Drive and the kids at school, that nobody else’s father stayed home while their mother worked. Most of the dads took the 7:44 train into Chicago. My school bus would rol past them every morning, lined up on the platform, wearing suits, carrying briefcases, reading newspapers folded into thirds. The truth was, I liked having my father around; I was never happier than when I was down in the basement, snug on the couch, working on long division or fractions or spel ing words, and he’d cal me by a private name, Pal. I loved that name. At school, I was nobody’s pal. Even though I’d known most of my classmates since nursery school, it felt like they’d made a complex set of secret al iances when I wasn’t looking; like every girl was paired off and spoken for by a best friend, and I was on my own, unless one of the teachers took pity and let me eat my lunch at my desk or work on my paintings during recess. Later, I would realize that my early exposure to al of that comedy hadn’t helped. Word-for-word recitations of Bil Cosby’s trip to the dentist or George Carlin’s routine about there being no blue food were not the way to attract other little girls.

Jon and I watched as a faded red VW Bug pul ed up behind the moving van. The woman who got out of the driver’s seat was tal and tanned, with an ankle-length Indianprint skirt wrapped low around her hips, and blond hair piled on top of her head. She wore movie-star sunglasses, huge and opaque, leather thong sandals, and a stack of turquoise-and-silver bracelets piled on one wrist.

“Hippies,” said my father. He’d tucked the pancake-batter bowl under his arm and come to the window to see. He was freshly shaved. His hair was neatly combed back from his high white forehead. My guess was that he’d slept on the couch in the basement last night. He has bad dreams, my mother told me when I asked. Jon had another theory: he said that my father slept in the basement because they didn’t love each other anymore. Mom’s a cow, he’d said, and I’d punched him on the arm as hard as I could, then started crying. He’d stared at me for a minute, then hugged me roughly around my shoulders with his un-punched arm. Don’t cry, he’d said. It’s not your fault. Which was not the same as tel ing me that it wasn’t true.

“Hippies on Crescent Drive?” my mother cal ed from the kitchen. Jon pursed his lips in a soundless whistle as the woman with the bracelets stretched her arms over her head, exposing a sliver of midriff. Then the passenger’s-side door of the Bug opened and a girl about my age got out. She wore droopy cutoff denim shorts and a dingy white T-shirt. There were ratty white high-top sneakers on her feet ( boy’s sneakers, I thought, and felt myself blushing on the girl’s behalf). She was tal and gangly, with knobby elbows and narrow wrists.

“They’ve got a little girl, Pal,” my father reported.

“Isn’t that nice!” cal ed my mom. “Addie, maybe you can go over and say hel o.”

I shook my head. There were people—my brother was one of them—for whom talking to strangers came easily. Then there were people like me, who had to plan out what they’d say in advance and rehearse the words in their heads, and stil wound up drymouthed and stam-mering, or blurting out lengthy passages of Bil Cosby, when the moment arrived.

“Come on,” my mother cajoled. “We can bake them cookies!”

The cookies were tempting, but not tempting enough. I shook my head again. My mom came back to the living room. She took my hand in hers and squeezed. I could smel her: Ivory soap and vanil a mixed with hair spray and her perfume that came in a white bottle with flowers painted on the sides and was cal ed Anaïs Anaïs. “Addie,” she said, bending down to look at me. “Imagine if you were that girl. You just moved to a new town, you don’t know a soul…wouldn’t you like it if someone came over to welcome you to the neighborhood?”

I didn’t answer. I wasn’t sure about this new girl, who seemed utterly at ease, in a way I never was, like she had no idea that her clothes and shoes and hair were al wrong. Jon peered out the window again.

“She’s looking at us,” he said. I held my breath, watching, as the girl stood in the street with her hands in her pockets, checking out our house. There was a hopscotch grid chalked on our driveway, next to my bike, with a banana seat and purple-and-silver streamers hanging from the handlebars, which added up to the equivalent of a bil board stuck in our yard: Nine-year-old girl here!

The girl squinted toward the window, and it seemed for a minute that she was looking right at me. Then she crossed the street, walking decisively across our lawn. We heard a knock, and I turned to my mother.

“Answer it!” I whispered.

She shook her head, bemused. “Adelaide, you can answer the door by yourself.”

I shook my head, wondering if I had time to dash back to the kitchen and gobble a fast half pancake. Jon sighed, then got to his feet. “Come on,” he said. He took my hand, not unkindly, marched me to the door, and pul ed it open. The girl was standing there. “Hel o,” she said. Her voice was husky and low, a memorable voice. “I’m Valerie Violet Adler. Who are you?”

“I’m Jon, and this is Addie. It’s nice to meet you.” My brother gave me a pat on the back that was almost a shove and left me there. For a minute, the girl and I just looked at each other. She had freckles, big splotchy ones dotting her cheeks, and buck teeth that were jagged along the bottom. Around one of her ankles was fastened a loop of colorful beads on blue thread, an item it had never occurred to me to want, a thing I was now certain I couldn’t live another day without.

“We just moved here from California,” she told me, pushing the hair that had escaped from the ponytail behind one ear.

“Hi,” I said. My own voice was so soft I could barely hear it.

“I like your bike,” said the girl.

“Do you want to ride it?” Oh, no, I thought as the tips of my ears got hot. That was wrong.

I should have asked if she had a wrong. I should have asked if she had a bike, should have said, Maybe we can go

for a ride together…

The girl shook her head. “Mine’s in there.”

She cocked her thumb toward the van.

“Maybe we can go for a ride later. You can show me around.”

I looked at the new girl, ready to offer her the most valuable thing I had, the secret that probably nobody else would tel her. “The lady who used to live in your house died there.”

The other girl’s eyes widened. “Real y? She died in the house?”

“Uh-huh. It was the middle of the night, and the ambulance came and woke everyone up.”

I didn’t tel her how Mr. DiMeo had walked outside alongside the body, holding his wife’s hand, weeping, and how a week later he’d moved into the Presbyterian Home, where he’d eventual y died. I’d save that for later.

“Huh,” said Valerie. “That was my grandmother.”

“Real y?” I stared, wondering why I’d never seen her before.

The girl ran her tongue along the jagged ridges of her front teeth. “Do you know which room it happened in?”

“The big bedroom, probably,” I said. I was already plotting when I’d ask her if she’d be my bosom friend, and whether “bosom” was a word I was prepared to say out loud.

“Don’t worry. Your parents wil probably sleep there.”

“My mom,” she said. “It’s just me and my mom. My parents are divorced.”

“Oh.” I didn’t know anyone whose parents were divorced. It seemed both tragic and glamorous. Mostly tragic, I decided, thinking about my father singing in the basement, using his pocketknife to cut a Snickers bar in two pieces and offering me half.

“That’s why we moved. My dad’s a stuntman, so he had to stay in California. That’s where the movies are.”

“Oh,” I said again. “Wow.”

We stood there for a minute, Valerie on the threshold, al freckles and scabs and tangled hair, me with my hand on the doorknob, my starched skirt rustling around my knees. I can remember the dirt-edged Band-Aid on her elbow, the smel of syrup and bacon, the pol eny, green-grass haze in the humid air. I can remember, even then, the feeling of my life balanced on top of a triangle—a fulcrum, it was cal ed; my father had told me that—getting ready to tilt one way or the other.

Across the street, the beautiful woman raised her hand. Her silver bracelets clinked as they slid down her arm. I lifted my arm to wave back as Valerie looked unhappily over her shoulder. “Hey,” she said, “can I come in? She probably wants to start unpacking.”

She yawned enormously. “We drove…” She paused, yawning again. “…al night.” She flipped her ponytail over her shoulder.

“Actual y, not quite al night. We stopped at a rest stop. We camped out in the car. Did you ever do that?”

I shook my head. When my family went on car trips, we set out armed with an AAA TripTik and reservations at Days Inns along the way. My mother would pack picnic lunches: turkey sandwiches, hard-boiled eggs, carrot sticks, and a thermos ful of milk.

“You can camp outside,” Valerie said. “In your backyard. I’l show you how to make a tent.

Al you need is an old sheet.” I nodded. I could picture it: a crisp white sheet forming a perfect triangle, Valerie and I, our faces lit by flashlights, side by side beneath it. Valerie lifted her head and sniffed. “Are you having breakfast?”

“Are you hungry?” I asked.

Her stomach growled before she could say anything. I swung the door open wide and made a little bow, a sweeping gesture with my arm, something I’d probably seen on TV.

“Come in,” I said, and she did.

SIX

In the kitchen, the kettle whistled. I turned the flame down and studied my old friend. Underneath her coat she wore a tight red dress that clung to her chest and hips and dipped low in the back. There was a belt of wide gold links around her waist and, on her feet, high-heeled pumps with pointed toes. Diamonds winked at her earlobes and on her right hand, and she carried a capacious handbag made of soft red leather over one shoulder. “Are you alone?”

she asked. No, I’ve got a bunch of Chippendale

dancers back in the bedroom! Wearing

nothing but baby oil and teeny little togas!

“Yes, Valerie. I’m alone. What do you want?”

I asked in a not entirely friendly tone of voice.

“I can’t believe you’re stil here,” she said, surveying the kitchen, which was much improved since she’d been there last. I’d taken up the linoleum and put in glazed terra-cotta tiles. I’d ripped out the mirrored backsplash, a living shrine to the 1970s, and banished the harvest-gold Formica and avocado-green appliances, replacing them with softer, richer shades: cream and butter and rich rusty red on the wal s. A farmhouse sink with a gorgeously curved, ruinously expensive faucet sat beneath the window that looked out at the backyard.

There was a round oak table, crisp cream-colored curtains framing the new windows, cabinets that I’d painted myself…but the liquor, that col ection of dusty bottles of Chivas and Ron-rico rum, some of them given to me as gifts and some dating from my parents’

marriage, was stil in the same place, in the cabinet over the refrigerator.

Val stood on her tiptoes and extracted a bottle of vodka. She rummaged in the freezer and came up with a handful of ice.

“Drink?” she asked. I shook my head. She dumped the ice and a slug of vodka into a juice glass and gulped. Then she hoisted herself onto the counter next to the sink

—her old familiar perch, the place I’d seen her a hundred, maybe a thousand times, with her long legs swinging, dirty white socks on her feet, and usual y a scrape or a BandAid or two decorating each knee. “Where are Ron and Nancy?” I could hear the strain in her voice as she tried for her old familiar tone, that life’s-a-lark buoyancy with which she’d formerly addressed, or discussed, my parents (how amused she’d been to learn that they had the exact same names as our president and first lady!).

I lifted the kettle from the stove. “They died.”

“Both of them?”

“Yes.”

Sadness flickered across Valerie’s face. Her lips fluttered; her careful y tended eyebrows drew together. It was the same expression she probably used to convey her sorrow when tel ing the people of the Chicago metro area that there were thunderstorms on the way, and just in time to spoil the holiday weekend. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I thought I’d heard something, but my mom moved away. When was this?”

“A while back.” I pul ed two mugs off the shelf, found spoons and tea bags and sugar.

“Would you like some tea, or are we sticking with the hard stuff tonight?” Val shook her head.

I put one of the mugs back and fil ed the other for myself as she rubbed her hands against her thighs, then wrapped her arms around herself.

“And Jon?” She hopped off the counter and circled the room, stopping to check out a painting of a Granny Smith apple in a copper bowl. “Did you do this?”

I nodded. “Pretty, Val said, and wandered over to the refrigerator, where she read the note I’d taped there. “Military funeral?” she asked. “Did you join the army?”

“Valerie,” I said. “We haven’t spoken in years, and now you show up in the middle of the night, looking like you’ve seen a ghost, with blood on your coat…”

She cringed inside her red dress. “I can explain,” she said. Instead of throaty, her voice sounded hoarse. “I’l tel you everything, but you have to promise to help m e . ” I’m not promising you anything, I started to say. I’d gotten as far as opening my mouth when Val said, “It’s about Dan Swansea.”

My skin prickled with goose bumps. My mouth felt dry as salt. “What about him?”

“He was at the reunion.”

I shrugged. No surprise there. Dan Swansea had been a star footbal player and the best-looking boy in our class. He’d also been a troublemaker, a snapper of bra straps, an instigator of food fights and Senior Skip Day, a creative and habitual cheater, the kind of guy who’d stuff the occasional nerd in a locker just to break up the boredom of the school week. For most of high school, he’d also been the object of my extremely secret crush. By senior year, he’d turned into something else altogether.