Best Friends Forever Part 6

"This can't be right," I said, peering through the window at the numbers on the houses as Valerie slowed the car to a crawl.

She squinted down at the cla.s.s directory, open on her lap, then out at the dark street in the town of Aurora, a suburb forty-five minutes west of Pleasant Ridge. "Three-ninety-six Larchmont. This is it."

"But it's..." Val's headlights washed over the white sign stuck in the lawn in front of the two-story clapboard building. FIRST PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH: THANKS AND GIVING, SERVICES SUNDAY MORNING, 10 A.M., CHILD CARE AVAILABLE. "It's a church."

She cut the motor and unbuckled her seat belt. "Maybe it's been converted into condos."

I got out of the car and looked at the building, then studied the sign's small print, which advertised AA meetings Wednesday mornings at ten and read, at the very bottom, CHARLES MASON, PASTOR. "Val," I said. "When you were talking to Chip Mason at the reunion, did you happen to notice a black shirt and a white collar? Priestly garments? Rosary beads? A big wooden cross?" My father was Jewish but not observant, my mother had grown up Lutheran, and Jon and I had been raised as nothing in particular-we'd light a menorah in December and bring in a tree that we'd decorate, and there would be dyed eggs and chocolate rabbits in the springtime, without much in the way of explanation about what any of it meant-so I was a little bit vague on how you could recognize a churchgoing (or church-running) man.

Val made a face. "Oh, I'm sorry. Was I supposed to go to my high school reunion and listen to other people talk about themselves?"

"I guess not."

"Bunch of breeders pa.s.sing around pictures of their kids," she grumbled, helping herself to a cruller from the wax-paper bag full of doughnuts we'd bought. "Like anybody cares." She took a big bite. "Like all babies don't look just like Ed Asner."

"Not the black ones," I pointed out.

"Funny," said Val, who knew as well as I did that of our cla.s.s of 280 or so, fewer than a dozen had been black, bused in from Chicago as part of a program to give them more academic opportunities, then bused back home before they had a chance to join any teams or make any friends. The chance that one of them had felt connected enough to the cla.s.s to actually show up at a reunion was slim.

I pried the Cla.s.s of '92 guide out of Valerie's hands and found his name in the directory. "Reverend Charles Mason," I read. "Reverend. As in, G.o.d."

Val frowned. "Huh. Now that you mention it, he was talking about working on his service. I figured he just meant tennis or something."

"Jesus Christ," I said. Together, we walked up the flagstone path that led from the street to the church and climbed the half-dozen steps to the front door. Val cupped her hands around the pane of gla.s.s and peered through the window. "Pews," she reported. "Big cross up front." She took a step sideways to the next windowpane. "Um. Sign says Christmas organ concert on the seventeenth, but I don't see anybody there..."

"Excuse me!"

Val turned around. "Duck!" she hissed. I hopped off the stairs and crouched in the shadow beside, invisible as I'd wished to be back in high school, as a man in striped pajamas and a bathrobe-the elusive and now holier-than-us Chip Mason, I presumed-came from behind the church. His hair was thinning, his belly strained the waistband of his pajama bottoms, and he looked weary... although, in his defense, it was very late. "What are you doing here?" he demanded, then looked more closely. "Valerie?"

Val raised her hand and managed a weak wave. "Hi, Chip." She lifted the wax-paper bag. "Want a doughnut?"

"Is everything all right?" he asked, now sounding more puzzled than angry.

"I... came... for..."

Oh, s.h.i.t, I thought, and leaned forward, ready to spring out of the shadows and defend us... or run.

"Salvation!" Val continued. "Just lately I've been... you know... thinking about G.o.d and stuff."

G.o.d and stuff. Kill me now. But Chip Mason actually seemed to be buying it as Val came tripping down the steps and onto the frost-crinkly lawn. "There are things in my life... things I've done that I'm not proud of." She stood close to him as she looked down, head bowed, then up, tossing her hair and angling her body even closer to Chip's paunch. "And it's been years and years since my last confession."

Chip frowned. "You know this isn't a Catholic church."

"Oh, of course." She gave a shrill little giggle. "Of course not. But I just thought, you know, with someone who knew me... and knew G.o.d... it'd be, like, a setup! Blind dates are always better when there's someone who knows both people."

"Maybe we could talk about this on Sunday," he said. "Come to services. I'd be happy to speak with you after."

"Okay, but... well, it's just that there's something that's really been on my mind. I had... I guess you'd call it an epiphany last night." She led Chip to the car, and when they were directly beneath the streetlamp, she turned her head and mouthed the words Find Dan.

Great. I waited until she'd unlocked the car and somehow sweet-talked Chip Mason into the pa.s.senger's seat, where, presumably, they could arrange her night out with the Almighty. Then I bent over and hustled along the side of the building. The church was two stories, and behind it was a one-story brick addition that looked like living quarters-I could see a light through one of the windows, a stove with a kettle on it, a vase of red carnations on a cluttered kitchen table. I peeked through the window. No sign of Dan. Breathing deeply, I walked to the door of the rectory, or the parsonage, or whatever believers called the place where the priest lived. The door was closed but unlocked.

I turned the k.n.o.b and stepped inside to a short entry hall with a coatrack and a pair of winter boots and a snow shovel at the ready, leaning against the wall. The kitchen was empty: I saw a woodcut of praying hands affixed to the wall, 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 n.o.body on the couch or in either of the armchairs that sat across from it. I hurried down the hallway to the bedroom. Unmade double bed, vacant; closet with shirts and pants on wire hangers, ditto; bathroom with a gla.s.sed-in shower stall with a Waterpik and a tube of Rogaine next to the sink.

I pulled back the shower curtain and peered under the bed. There was n.o.body 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. Finally 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. Pastor Charles Mason was sitting in the pa.s.senger'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 G.o.d," 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's-side 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 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."

"Will I see you on Sunday?" asked Chip Mason.

Val gave him a silvery-sounding laugh as she slid behind the wheel. "We'll 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 especially hopeful.

"No Dan," I confirmed. "Oh, and by the way, what was that all 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 allowed to get married."

"Oh." She seemed disappointed to hear it. "Are you sure?"

"Positive."

Val pulled over to the curb underneath a streetlamp and grabbed the cla.s.s 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 pulled open the cla.s.s 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 a.s.sumed 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 b.u.t.ton-down shirt, was flipping through a copy of Mademoiselle. 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 fell 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'll 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 TRESemme 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 selling, 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 bills, 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 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 ca.s.serole with crumbled potato chips on top, ziti studded with chunks of sausage, baked beans and franks-to the Ba.s.ses' house.

Val shook her head. "I think it should be a c.o.c.ktail 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.

"Well, 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 antic.i.p.ated. 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 fall asleep; to actually get out of bed and go jogging when the alarm I'd set for six a.m. rang, instead of hitting the snooze b.u.t.ton and rolling 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 canapes, the little lights, which would surely go on sale after Christmastime. My mother wrote a poem inviting the neighbors to come celebrate. Mrs. Ba.s.s, who did calligraphy 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 bells 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 small 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. Ba.s.s 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 doorbell rang and people started piling into the foyer: the Carvilles 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 baseball 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 normally 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 literally, although people were definitely more dressed up than they were at the neighborhood barbecues or the potlucks. All 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 bells sewn on the front. Mrs. Ba.s.s was glamorous in a floor-length black velvet gown that smelled faintly of mothb.a.l.l.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 jelly 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 pulled off her coat, even Jon stared. Her dress was pale pink, with a bodice that clung to her b.r.e.a.s.t.s 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, yelling "I do!" over and over again until all 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 swallowing the vows, and the bride and groom hadn't slow-danced 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 "Maneater," which, even at eleven, struck me as highly inappropriate.

"Sara / You're the poet in my heart," Stevie Nicks sang on the tape I'd made. Valerie circulated with champagne. Mrs. Adler closed her eyes, turning in dreamy circles. Her skirt spun out from around her body; her hair flared out from around her head. Val looked proud as she watched.

I played my tapes on my parents' stereo, where the songs sounded so much better than they did on my tinny little boom box. When the first tape ran out, I was ready to go with Sting's The Dream of the Blue Turtles, but my father intercepted me. He'd worn his tuxedo, the same one he'd been married in, but at some point he'd ditched the jacket and c.u.mmerbund and was now slim and graceful in his black pants and white shirt. "I got this, Pal," he said, setting his empty champagne gla.s.s down on the bookcase. His pale face was flushed, his hair was damp and curling over his forehead, and he looked more relaxed, happier, than I could remember seeing him. He reached into a cupboard and retrieved a stack of alb.u.ms, flipping rapidly through them until he found the Rolling Stones' Sticky Fingers, which he put on the turntable, cranking the volume up loud. "Brown Sugar" came blasting through the speakers. By the door, Jon was so startled he jumped. Mrs. Adler threw her hands in the air, laughing. My father crossed the room and took her by the hands and spun her, and I was struck by how right they looked together, paired and partnered in a way I'd never seen my father and my mother. My heart gave an unhappy lurch as Mrs. Adler turned around, swinging her hips and smiling over her shoulder at my father.

"Whoo-hoo!" somebody shouted... and then another couple started dancing, and then two more. Within minutes, our living room was filled with people waving their hands, singing along, dancing. Jon leaned against the wall with his mouth half open, like a kid at a fireworks display. Val sidled up to me and cupped her hands around my ear. "Isn't this great?" she shouted. She poured more champagne into my plastic cup and clinked hers against it in a toast. As "Sway" turned into "Wild Horses," Mr. Kominski crossed the room. I held my breath as he approached, but I wasn't surprised, and I tried not to be disappointed, when he asked Val if she wanted to dance. He led her to the center of the room, where Val smiled up at him, lifting her mouth to his ear to shout answers to the questions he must have been asking, then quickly pressing her lips together, the way she'd been doing lately, to hide her teeth. I sat down on the couch that we'd pushed against the wall, letting the music pound through me. It was okay if boys liked Val better. Someone would love me someday. Even if I wasn't an obvious choice, I'd be somebody's choice, some boy's choice, the way I'd once been Valerie's. The wind was howling outside, bending the trees, rattling the windowpanes, but inside we were warm and happy, all of us safe and together.

"Here we go!" one of the husbands shouted. The music skidded into silence, and Mr. Preston snapped on the TV just in time to see the glittering ball begin its descent in Times Square. "Four... three... two... ONE!" The room exploded with cheers. Husbands kissed wives, and not the polite closed-lipped kisses that Val and I had seen on our babysitting jobs, when the husbands came home from work. Some of these couples were kissing like they meant it.

Suddenly Val was beside me, grabbing my hands. "Come with me," she said, pulling me off the couch.

"Where?" I asked as she led me down the hall to the kitchen. "What's going on?"

"Shh," she hissed. She stuck her head around the corner, waited, then beckoned for me. I stood on my tiptoes, craning my neck. At first what I saw hardly seemed remarkable: my father, with a bottle of champagne in his hand and his white tuxedo shirt clinging to his chest, leaning against the refrigerator, as Mrs. Adler stood in front of him, talking earnestly. Her feet were bare-she'd ditched the silver shoes somewhere-and as I watched, she tilted her head up shyly, clasping her hands behind her back. My father said something, and she nodded, b.r.e.a.s.t.s bouncing below her tight neckline.

"That's it, that's it exactly!" she said. "G.o.d. You really get it. To go from California to a place like this... it's so small-minded. Little boxes. Like the song."

I frowned. That didn't make sense. Except for college and Vietnam, my father had lived his whole life in Illinois, so how could he really "get it"? And then, as Val and I watched, Mrs. Adler wrapped her hands around his neck and kissed him.

I sucked in my breath. From far away, I could feel Val grab my hand, could hear her whisper, "Isn't this great?" I squeezed my eyes shut, but I could still hear them-Mrs. Adler (call me Naomi!) murmuring softly, my father's lower tones as he answered.

"I should get my mom."

Val squeezed my hand harder. "Why? This is perfect."

I made myself open my eyes. "What are you talking about?"

"Because we'll get to be sisters," she said.

"What about my mom?" As I watched, my father reached behind his head, took Mrs. Adler's hands from around his neck, and folded them on top of her chest.

"I think," he told her, "we've both had a few too many."

"Oh, no," she said, looking at him with her eyes wide, drawing her no-o-o-o into a little girl's whine. "I'm fine! I'm having fun!"

"Come on," said my dad, putting one hand on her waist, turning her around, and trying to steer her out of the kitchen. "Let's get you home."

She dragged her feet over the floor. "Will you walk me?"

"Addie and I will take you," said my dad. He paused by the edge of the kitchen and saw Val and me standing there. "Val, you want to grab your mother's coat?"

Val's face was unreadable as she turned and ran up the stairs. This is perfect, I heard her say in my head. I was furious at Val if she'd meant what I thought she had, and angry at her mother and my father, too (she'd kissed him first, but he'd kissed her back). I was also, I found, consumed by a kind of guilty curiosity. What would it be like if Mrs. Adler and my father got married? What if Valerie and I were really, truly sisters? My mother could stay here with Jon and take care of him. My father and Mrs. Adler could live in the DiMeos' old house-my dad was handy, he could fix it up, sc.r.a.pe off the peeling paint, patch the holes in the walls, and it would be weird for a while, but people got used to all kinds of things. Val would have a father. We would finally finish her pink-and-green bedroom, and we'd get matching beds that Val had shown me in a magazine, and...

"Here, Mom." Val's lips were pressed into a thin line as she helped her mother slip into her coat. Then, kneeling, she slid Naomi's feet into her high-heeled silver shoes. "Come on," she said. "The party's over. Let's go home."

FOURTEEN.

"So what happened to your parents?" Valerie asked as we drove east, along the wide, empty lanes of the Eisenhower Expressway, heading toward Chicago, where Dan lived in one of the high-rise buildings downtown. It was five in the morning, my first all-nighter in years, and I was exhausted, shaky from adrenaline and lack of sleep, but Val looked fresh as a flower, her skin creamy, hair falling in curls to her shoulders.