Best Friends Forever (35 page)

“How’d you pay?” The gas station where we’d stopped had abutted a six-stal car wash.

Shirtless guys in droopy jeans had been standing there, waiting with rags in their hands. As the wet cars had come through, they’d toweled them off. A radio had been blasting reggaeton.

I remembered the guys smiling at Val as she’d twitched her shoulders to the beat before I’d gone to the restroom, leaving my purse in the car beside her. I’d reclaimed custody of our cash, and that had been tucked into the front pocket of my jeans, but my purse held my wal et…and al of my credit cards. Now I held my breath, hoping that I was wrong. Maybe Val had tucked a twenty into her bra—a Naomi-style tucked a twenty into her bra—a Naomi-style trick.

“I used a…” Her face got pale, and her voice, when she spoke, was tiny. “Oh. Oh, shit.”

“You used your credit card?”

“Um.” She folded up the bag of pork rinds and tucked it back under her chair. “No. Yours.”

“Valerie!”

“Wel , I’m sorry!” she said, jumping to her feet. “I left mine at home, and I figured you wouldn’t mind, and I forgot we weren’t supposed to be using them.”

“How could you forget?”

“I’ve got a lot on my mind right now! You know, this whole mess with Dan, and remember how I told you that the station went high-def? I’m already getting laser resurfacing once a month, and even that…”

“Pork rinds,” I said, grabbing the bag and waving it at her. “Pork rinds! I can’t believe this.

We’re going to go to jail because you had to have your freakin’ pork rinds!”

“It’s not that I had to have them,” she said sul enly. “They’re just a relatively healthy snack option.” She swung her legs off her lounge chair and started pacing. “Okay,” she said. “Let’s not panic. Maybe they’l think we’re in Nashvil e.”

I started talking, thinking out loud. “We got the money in St. Louis. We spent the night in Atlanta…”

“But they won’t know about that,” she said patiently. “We paid cash at the hotels, and we used fake names.”

I made myself take a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Val. This isn’t going to work. Not for very much longer.”

“It’s not my fault,” she said. Her face set in a pout.

I waited until she picked up the bag and shoved another pork rind into her mouth. Then I said, “We need to talk about what comes next.” I paused, watching her face, reading the weather in her eyes. “If they find Dan.”

She crunched her snack thoughtful y.

“We’l tel them it was an accident,” she said.

“Tomorrow. I’l cal the police tomorrow and tel them what happened.”

“Wil you tel them what Dan did to you?”

A crease appeared between her eyes. “I don’t know. It’d be al over the papers. And the blogs. Everyone would be al up in my business.”

“There’s worse things than that.”

Val didn’t seem to hear me. “And I left the scene of the crime. I never reported it.”

True. “Maybe say you had post-traumatic stress disorder? That you saw him and you flipped out?”

She was shaking her head, the crease deepening as she frowned. “I’m never going to get my job back. I’m in a position of public trust, you know.”

I made myself breathe in, then out. “Val. You know I love you, but you’re not exactly Walter Cronkite.”

“People wil laugh at me,” she said darkly, and tugged at a strand of her hair.

“Walter Cronkite never rode a mechanical bul …”

“Oh, would you let that go?” she snapped.

“Having people laugh at you is not the worst thing in the world.” I remembered the little boy in the booth in the HOT…APPLE

…PIE restaurant. I remembered his mother. I remembered the guidance counselor and her fistful of platitudes, a footbal player with his face hanging out of the bus window, mouth open, hol ering “Burn it off, fattie!”

I touched her shoulder. “Maybe Dan’s okay.”

“I hit him with my car.” She had her chin tucked against her chest, her eyes on her knees.

“You’re general y not okay after that happens.” She lowered her eyes some more. “Probably dead in a ditch.”

“We checked the ditches,” I said.

“We’re going to get in trouble.” Her voice was flat. “I mean, we did rob a bank.”

“We’l just say it was a misunderstanding,”

I said. Let her think we’d actual y robbed the bank, I decided. She’d been so pleased at the time.

She scrunched her eyes shut. “Maybe they’d buy that,” she said. “I could say we just wanted to make a withdrawal, but the girl saw my gun and got scared.” She picked some polish off her nails, letting the scarlet flecks drift down around her. The sun was setting, a glowing orange bal dipping majestical y toward the water to the cheers and applause of the crowd in Mal ory Square, where, I knew, the tourists gathered each night to sip frozen drinks and watch the sunset and the street performers—guys who juggled chainsaws, dogs who swal owed fire.

“Screw it,” Val muttered. “Who needs it, anyhow? Stupid weather. Like I care. I’l just stay down here. Be a waitress. Whatever.”

She looked at me. “You could stay, too. I’l bet it’s great for painting. The light, you know.

And Jon could come. We could take him to the beach…”

I closed my eyes. That was Val, always running. To California, to Kentucky, to Dal as and Boston and wherever else her glamorous job would take her. She could run, and I was stuck in place, and I would be until I died.

“You could sel your house,” she said.

“And I’l sel my condo. We could work at a bar. I’l bet half these places are hiring…”

“I need to tel you something,” I said. She looked unsurprised as she settled into her chair and waved the bag in my direction. “Pork rind?”

I shook my head. “I think I might be sick.”

“Huh?” She blinked. “What are you talking about? You didn’t even eat any.”

“I found a lump.”

Val sat up fast. “You did? When? Where?”

“About a week before the reunion. I think…” I gulped. I wasn’t sure I could say the words out loud, wasn’t sure if speaking them would somehow make them real. “I think it’s what my mother had.”

“Oh my God.” She stared at me. “What are you going to do?”

“I’m supposed to see a doctor on Thursday. My mom’s doctor. Her oncologist. That was the soonest they could take me. Thursday morning.”

“We’l go home,” Val promised. “First thing tomorrow, so you can go see the doctor. We’l go to the police, and I’l tel them what I did.” She thought for another minute. “But I’m total y going with that post-traumatic stress thing.” She chewed on her thumb.

“Maybe I should get a book about it. Or look it up on Wikipedia.”

“Okay.”

“Can I stay with you?” Before I could answer, she nodded as if she’d made up her mind.

“Yeah. If I don’t go to jail, I’l stay with you.”

My throat was tight, my eyes were stinging. Nobody had ever stayed with me. Vijay had never spent the night. It had just been me in the house since my mother had died. “For how long, do you think?”

Val took my hand and I felt her fingers, thin and strong, lacing through mine. “For as long as you need me,” she said.

FORTY-FIVE

Even through his sorrow, through the tape loop playing the words “little girl” over and over in his head, Jordan Novick managed to be impressed when his Monday morning flight, on an airline he’d never heard of, pul ed away from the gate on time and touched down a mere fifteen minutes behind schedule. In the noisy Miami airport, he waited in line behind a family chattering in a language he didn’t recognize for thirty minutes before the rental-car line inched forward enough to deposit him in front of an agent (there were puddle-jumper flights from Miami to Key West, but driving was cheaper and he hated little planes).

By the time he’d picked up his car and made his way onto I-95 South it was after two o’clock. He got off the highway long enough to grab a burger and fries, and drove until the road dwindled to two lanes, a ribbon of blacktop draped like a necklace over astonishing blue-green water. His rented car had satel ite radio with an al Bruce Springsteen, al the time station, which was a nice surprise. When he drove past the Dolphin Research Center in Marathon (SWIM WITH THE DOLPHINS!

invited a bil board out front), he gave the school-bus-sized concrete dolphin leaping in the parking lot a thumbs-up and sang along to “Badlands” in a voice that was, to his own ears, credibly Bruce-like. He passed Key Largo and Islamorada, Lower Matecumbe and Conch Key, Little Duck Key and Little Torch Key, heading toward the sunset with the windows rol ed down.

By six o’clock, he’d arrived in Key West. Making his way through the outskirts of town, Jordan thought it could have been any medium-sized city in America, with its big box stores and fast-food chains…but as a series of turns took him closer to the water, the streets narrowed, and the palm trees got more plentiful, and pedestrians and cats outnumbered the cars.

The sky was pink from the sunset. The air smel ed like salt and liquor, and everyone seemed cheerful (although, to be fair, many of them also seemed drunk). After a few wrong turns, he found his motel and checked into his room, a cheerless, boxy bedroom on the second floor of a two-story cinderblock building, with a mattress that sagged in the center and the scent of mildew and Pine-Sol in the air. He hung his jackets in the closet and put his shirts and underwear in one of the bureau drawers, and looked at the telephone for a long moment before making himself look away.

At seven, he turned up the rattling air conditioner as high as it would go, made sure he had his wal et and his room key (this place was so budget that it stil had actual keys attached to a diamond of aqua plastic with the room number printed in white), and made his way to Duval Street, which the brochure he’d grabbed informed him was Key West’s main drag. Before he’d left Pleasant Ridge, he’d printed a list of the rental agencies and was pleased to find one of them stil open. But his good luck ended there: the clerk behind the counter hadn’t ever rented a cottage to Charlie Carstairs or Valerie Adler or Adelaide Downs, and he didn’t recognize their pictures (Jordan had downloaded Valerie’s from the TV station’s website, and Addie’s he’d pocketed at the Crossroads). “It could’ve been a private rental,” one young man told him. “You know, they could have set it up over the Internet with someone who owned their own place and not gone through an agency at al .”

Great. Jordan marched up one side of the street and down the other, ducking into scoot-er-rental shops and souvenir stores, gal eries and boutiques and bars, plodding through packs of drunks and rowdies and sweating parents who pushed tank-sized strol ers and glared at pedestrians who didn’t get out of the way fast enough, flashing Addie’s and Val’s photographs, asking over and over Have you seen them, unsurprised when, over and over, the answer was no.

By ten o’clock he was lightheaded. A beer and a burger seemed like a good idea. ( Two burgers in one day? Patti asked in his head, and Jordan told her to shut up, because what did she care what he ate anymore? She had a new husband and probably a baby now, unless the cross-dressing banker had gotten it wrong, so what did she care about anything?) He stopped into the first place he saw, not realizing until he’d taken a seat at the bar and been handed his laminated plastic menu that he wasn’t in a restaurant as much as a Jimmy Buffett theme park, with a gift shop up front and a menu fil ed with Buffett-inspired fare. If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em, he thought, and ordered a Cheeseburger in Paradise and a Red Stripe.

One beer became two, two turned into three, and then the guy next to Jordan at the bar bought everyone a round of Coronas and paid the bartender fifty bucks to put “Fins” on repeat, which necessitated more beer, plus a shot of tequila to dul the din of a hundred sunburned middle-aged Parrotheads waving their hands in the air and singing.

“You okay?” asked his ponytailed waitress as she dropped the check in front of him. She had a steel bar through the top of her ear, through her pinna, which was a useful Scrabble word. Jordan and Patti had once been Scrabble buffs. They’d had a travel set and taken it everywhere they might have been stuck with time to kil . They’d played on the beach on that last trip to the Bahamas and, before that, in the doctor’s waiting room, and in the hospital, where Patti lay, pale and wan, an IV needle in the back of her hand, ultrasound gel on her bel y, trying not to let him see her cry.

“Can I ask you a question?” He fumbled in his pocket with the waitress staring at him, and wondered how many times she’d been propositioned by vacationing Midwesterners who were old enough to be, if not her father, then her much older brother. “Have you seen either of these two ladies?”

She gave the pictures a cursory glance, then shook her head. “Did you lose someone?”

she asked.

Oh yes, he thought.

“Hey, good luck,” said the waitress. He left her a big tip and dragged himself back out into the sticky, thumping night. A group of three guys in khaki shorts and basebal caps were

standing

underneath

a

streetlamp, consulting a map. Jordan tapped the smal est one on the shoulder and flashed the photograph. “Have you guys seen…” He swal owed, struggling to remember the rest of the sentence, and the smal guy patted his shoulder.

“Dude,” he said not unkindly. “You are wrecked.”

Jordan licked his lips. “What are you drinking?” Each of the boys had a plastic pail—the things were too enormous to be cal ed cups—ful of something pale-brown and eye-wateringly potent.

“Voodoo Bucket,” said one of the guys. He lifted his pail in a toast as his friends whooped, and used his elbow to point toward an open-air bar on the opposite corner. The place had wal s papered with autographed dol ar bil s. A tanned man wearing nothing but a Speedo and a cowboy hat sat alone at the bar, his elbows propped on the polished wood. Somewhere nearby, a steel drum band was playing “Oye Como Va.” Jordan crossed the street and caught the bartender’s eye.

“One Voodoo Bucket, please.” A Voodoo Bucket, Jordan thought as he careful y carried his beverage back to his car and then up to his room, was festive. It was the kind of drink you’d enjoy on the deck of a cruise ship, or in a lounge chair overlooking the pool. It tasted like rum and fruit juice. Possibly grain alcohol. Maybe antifreeze. Jordan wasn’t sure. Up in his room, stripped to his boxer shorts, he sat as close to the rattling air conditioner as he could, sipped his drink, and dialed the station to check in. Things were fine, Hol y assured him. They were fol owing up. Tracking down leads. Watching the phones. Everything was completely under control.