Best Friends Forever (7 page)

“Don’t be such a worrywart,” Mrs. Adler said, and reached down to give Val a push.

“Go throw some Tabs in the cooler. Oh, and Addie,” she said as she walked out of the room, hips swaying, bangles chiming. “Ask your parents if you can come, too.”

I exhaled, giddy with excitement and relief. Val’s lips were tight as she bent down, dumped the paint out of the pie tins and into the cans, and tamped the metal lids back in place, but when she straightened, her eyes had their familiar spark. “Do you like clams?”

“I love clams!” I’d never eaten clams, but this didn’t seem the time to say so.

“Okay.” Val put one finger in the center of her chin. “You’l need a bathing suit and pajamas.” She opened up her closet—my quick glimpse revealed that it was surprisingly empty—and pul ed out a pink backpack and a sleeping bag that was ripped along one seam.

Then she looked down the hal way and brought her lips so close to my ear that I could feel her breath, humid and maple-scented, against my cheek. “If you have any money, bring that, cheek. “If you have any money, bring that, too.”

Across the street, my parents had a brief, quiet discussion in the living room before deciding I could go (looking back, I think they were probably so relieved that I’d final y made a friend that they would have let me go to the moon with Valerie Adler). My mother gave me thirty dol ars, which I folded careful y into my pocket before I raced off to grab my own backpack, clothes, money from my piggy bank, food from our cupboards

…and then we were in the car, with Mrs. Adler beeping the horn as we sped down Crescent Drive, on our way to the ocean. I was only nine years old that summer, but I can stil remember every detail of that trip: the sticky crosshatched vinyl of the Bug’s bucket seat brand-ing the backs of my thighs, the salt and chemical taste of Tab in the back of my throat. I can remember the wind tangling my hair as we drove along I-90 through Indiana and Ohio, with the windows rol ed down, Mrs. Adler’s elbow cocked on the windowsil and Val sitting beside her with the atlas open in her lap, tracing our route with her finger.

At five o’clock, Val told her mother it was time to stop for dinner. Mrs. Adler seemed surprised to hear it, but she pul ed into a McDonald’s, where Val and I feasted on cheeseburgers and French fries while she sipped Diet Dr Pepper and smoked. By midnight we were in New York, between Buffalo and Albany, according to Val. Mrs. Adler pul ed into a rest stop and parked the car way down the parking lot, as far away from the other cars and the glare of the lights as possible. I fol owed Val’s example, carrying my backpack into the bathroom, where we used the facilities, washed our faces, brushed our teeth, and pul ed on our pajamas. Then Val pul ed out her sleeping bag, spread it on top of herself, and curled up in the Bug’s backseat. Mrs. Adler got back in the driver’s seat, reclining it as far as it would go. From the matter-of-fact way the

two

of

them

handled

these

arrangements, I figured this was something they’d done before.

“Are you okay, Addie?” Val whispered. Her eyes shone in the darkness as she popped her head between the seats to look at me.

“I’m fine,” I said, pushing the passenger’s seat backward until it was almost flat. I was actual y thril ed. This, far and away, was the best adventure I’d ever been on.

“Goodnight to the back!” Mrs. Adler cal ed.

“Goodnight to the front,” Val muttered a little grudgingly. I wanted to tel her not to worry: that having a beautiful mother who would take her on trips like this was a hundred times better than a pink-and-green bedroom. I wanted to promise that I would paint her bedroom, and I’d get my father and brother to help; that I would do anything as long as we could be best friends forever.

“Goodnight, Addie,” they said, and I said goodnight back. I was sure I’d never be able to sleep—the car was hot, and the seat was narrow, and the parking lot was brighter than any bedroom I’d ever been in. Worse, the half-open windows had al owed the car to fil with whirr-ing, whining bugs. I slapped at a mosquito and shut my eyes…and when I opened them, the sun was up and I was stiff and dry-mouthed and in desperate need of a toilet. It was just after six in the morning. Mrs. Adler walked us back to the restrooms, moving with her usual lazy, rol ing sashay. When we were scrubbed and brushed and combed and back in the car, she drove to a convenience store off the highway, where she bought doughnuts and milk and coffee and cigarettes. By noon on Sunday, twentyfour hours after we’d left Pleasant Ridge, we were whizzing past a red-and-white painted poster of a beach scene, with an umbrel a stuck jauntily in the golden sand, and the words WELCOME TO CAPE COD written in red underneath it.

We spent the afternoon in a town cal ed Eastham, on First Encounter Beach, where a river of salt water flowed through a marsh out to the bay. Mrs. Adler produced a bedsheet from the back of the Bug and snapped it open, bangles clinking as she spread it on the sand.

She rubbed baby oil on her arms and legs and the bel y her bikini left bare, then borrowed sunscreen from the plump, red-cheeked mother underneath the next umbrel a and smeared it on our cheeks and underneath our swimsuit straps on our backs, where we couldn’t reach.

“Have fun, girls,” she said, and stretched out on the sheet for a nap. Valerie showed me how to walk along the sand and lie on my back in the water so that the current could carry us around the bend of the beach out toward the open water. When the sun was high in the sky and other families were digging into their coolers, I shyly offered the bag of sandwiches I’d made back in Il inois. Peanut butter and raspberry jam on soft white bread tasted even more delicious if you ate it with salt-watery fingers and polished it off with warm Tab.

By five o’clock the other mothers were folding their umbrel as, shaking sand from their towels, and cal ing their kids out of the water. Mrs. Adler pul ed on her faded pink tank top and a long white cotton skirt that fel almost to her ankles, and piled her hair into a loose knot on top of her head. She packed us back into the car and drove to a place Val identified as a

“clam shack,” a single-story gray-shingled square building with a yel ow-and-white striped awning and the mouthwatering smel of deep-fried foods hanging over it like a fog. A line of vacationers snaked out the door and down toward the parking lot.

“Who wants lobster?” Mrs. Adler asked. Her nose and cheeks were pink from the sun, her blue eyes and blond hair vivid against them. She took her wal et out of her purse, reached inside, and frowned as she studied what she’d found in there: three crumpled dol ar bil s and a receipt from the gas we’d bought that morning.

“Oh, jeez,” Val muttered, and kicked at the clamshel s that made up the parking lot.

“Don’t worry. Wait over here.” Mrs. Adler tossed her wal et back into her purse and pointed to a bench across from the counter, where a row of sunburned men in basebal caps and

shorts

with

tiny

whales

embroidered on them were sitting, waiting to pick up their food. Valerie groaned softly but sat, legs jiggling up and down, fingers scratching at a bug bite on her forearm. As I slid onto the bench beside Val, Mrs. Adler smoothed her hair, checked her reflection in the mirror, and joined the line. There were three workers behind the counter, two teenage girls and a teenage boy, al of them in white T-shirts with lobsters on the front. It took twenty minutes for Mrs. Adler to reach the front of the line, but when one of the girls cal ed “Who’s next?” Mrs. Adler waved a family in front of her, and waited until the boy was free. When he beckoned her to his register, I couldn’t hear what she was saying, but I saw how her lips curved, how she bent close to him so that his nose was almost brushing her cheek.

“I hate when she does this,” Val whispered. She’d scratched her arm so hard it was bleeding. I took a napkin from the dispenser on the counter and handed it over.

“Does what?” I wasn’t sure what was happening. Mrs. Adler laughed, a high, glittery sound. One finger toyed with her gold necklace. The boy behind the counter said something.

Mrs. Adler shook her head.

“She is trying,” Valerie said coldly, “to get that boy to give us free lobsters.”

My eyes went to the menu posted above the counter. Lobsters were $8.99 a pound. “I have some money,” I said, pul ing out the twelve dol ars that were al that was left of the money my mother had given me (I’d paid at Burger King and for some of the tol s), plus the eight dol ars and change I’d col ected from my piggy bank. “Maybe we could get two pounds of lobsters?”

She shook her head. “It doesn’t work that way. You have to pay for the whole lobster, even the parts you don’t eat.”

I looked at the lobsters scuttling around the bottom of the big green tank next to the cash registers. Their shel s were greenish black; their claws were rubber-banded shut. I couldn’t imagine eating one. “Don’t worry,” I said. “I’ve got a bunch more sandwiches. They’re squished, but they’re stil okay. We don’t need lobster…” I looked at the menu.

“We could get hot dogs or fried clams…” But even as I was saying it, the boy behind the counter was setting two trays loaded with food in front of Mrs. Adler, who was making a show of searching her purse, then her pockets. She turned to Val. “Honey, have you seen my wal et?”

Val shook her head wordlessly. Her face was tight. I sucked in my breath. Mrs. Adler reached across the counter and put her hand on the boy’s forearm. Valerie got to her feet.

“Get ready.”

“Is there a problem here?”

A man from farther down in the line stepped up to the counter. He wore a khaki uniform, pants and a matching shirt, with a dark-brown belt and a patch sewn on his chest. Mrs. Adler turned and gave him a dazzling smile, her hands clasped behind dazzling smile, her hands clasped behind her back, like a shy little girl. “I was just tel ing this nice young man that I seem to have misplaced my wal et, and I’ve got two hungry girls here. We came al the way from Chicago. I promised them lobster, and I hate to disappoint them.”

Valerie snorted. “Maybe I could cal my parents,” I whispered as Mrs. Adler kept talking to the man. Val shook her head. The man in the uniform was laughing at something Valerie’s mother had said.

“Excuse me. Can we get some service, please?” one of the women in line behind them cal ed. She had a toddler on her hip and another little boy tugging at the hem of her shirt. And then, miracle of miracles, the man in the uniform pul ed out some bil s folded into a silver money clip and handed a few of them to the boy behind the counter.

“Al ow me,” he said.

Mrs. Adler beamed at him, patting her hands together in delighted applause.

“Thank you,” she said. Beside me, I felt Val’s body uncoil, heard her breath gusting out as she exhaled.

Chris Jeffries, the shel fish constable—for that was what he was, not a policeman, as I’d first thought—had paid for a feast. There was corn on the cob and clam chowder and red plastic net bags fil ed with gray clams that Val and her mother cal ed steamers. There was coleslaw and French fries and a tangled mound of thin, crispy onion rings, tal wax paper cups brimming with ice and soda, and little plastic dishes fil ed with melted butter. A dozen oysters lol ed slick in their shel s on a bed of crushed ice, and two giant lobsters sprawled over oval-shaped plates, leaking steaming pale-pink water. I watched as Mrs. Adler opened a plastic bag of oyster crackers and sprinkled them into her soup.

“Mmm,” she sighed, swirling her spoon in the thick, creamy broth. She took a sip, closed her eyes, and sighed happily as the shel fish constable watched her. “You know what this tastes like? Summer. Doesn’t it taste just like summer to you?”

Val didn’t answer. Chris Jeffries spooned cocktail sauce and horseradish onto the oysters. He had thick features and close-set brown eyes and was tanned the color of leather.

I wasn’t very good at guessing grown-ups’ ages, but I thought he was younger than Mrs.

Adler, maybe just out of col ege. Maybe even stil in col ege and doing this as a summer job, which made me wonder how he’d had the money to pay for our dinner. “I never thought of it like that,”

he said.

Valerie tucked her head down like a turtle, tore open one of the bags of steamers, and started nimbly plucking clams from their shel s, dunking them in a dish of water to clean the grit off, then dipping them in butter and popping them into her mouth. “Want one?” she asked.

“They’re good.” She speared a clam on a red plastic fork, dipped it, and handed it to me. “Just eat the bel y, not the foot,” she said, indicating the part of the clam that looked like a thick, wormy tail. I slipped the grayish clam gingerly into my mouth, bracing for the fishy taste and the slimy feel I was sure were coming. The only seafood I’d ever had was frozen fish sticks that my mother heated in the toaster oven. I closed my eyes and chewed, wincing at first at the slimy texture, then opening my eyes as the sweet, briny, buttery taste exploded over my tongue. “These are so good!”

Mrs. Adler laughed, and the shel fish constable actual y clapped. “Enjoy,” he said. I ate a whole bagful of steamers and an ear of corn drizzled with butter and sprinkled with grainy sea salt. I squeezed lemon onto a raw oyster and then, fol owing Mrs. Adler’s example, tipped the rough edge of the shel to my lips and slurped out the liquor and the meat. After my first few clumsy tries, I got the hang of the metal nutcrackers and the tiny three-tined fork, prying chunks of pink-andwhite flesh out of the lobster claws and dousing them with butter, too, amazed at the taste of the meat, light and rich and sweet. The shel fish constable told us how he and his brother had taken his brother’s girlfriend, visiting from Minnesota, on a whale watch in Provincetown. The seas had gotten rough, the passengers had gotten sick, and the whale-watch workers had spent the whole trip running up and down the length of the boat, handing out Dramamine and then plastic bags. “I’d never seen so much vomit,” he said, and Val and I laughed at the way he said the word

— vahhhw-mit. “It was awesome.”

“Awesome,” I repeated. My fingertips and face were shiny with butter and clam juice. I wiped them until the napkin turned translucent, then added it to the pile that was growing in the center of the table, as Mrs. Adler and Chris Jeffries talked about their favorite beaches and the best places in Provincetown to watch the sunset. Valerie and I had sodas, and the grown-ups drank beer from green glass bottles, setting the empties down next to the trays littered with clam shel s, straw wrappers, shreds of cole slaw, and puddles of lobster juice. Final y, Mrs. Adler turned sideways on the bench. She pul ed up her skirt, crossed her long, tanned legs, and slipped a cigarette between her lips. Chris the shel fish constable hurried to pul out a book of matches and light it.