Best Friends Forever Part 3

"And a toothbrus.h.!.+ Pack your toothbrus.h.!.+"

"Is there gas in the car? Do you have money for gas?"

"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'll need a bathing suit and pajamas." She opened up her closet-my quick glimpse revealed that it was surprisingly empty-and pulled out a pink backpack and a sleeping bag that was ripped along one seam. Then she looked down the hallway 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, 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 finally made a friend that they would have let me go to the moon with Valerie Adler). My mother gave me thirty dollars, which I folded carefully 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 still remember every detail of that trip: the sticky crosshatched vinyl of the Bug's bucket seat branding 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 rolled down, Mrs. Adler's elbow c.o.c.ked on the windowsill 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 pulled 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 pulled 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 followed Val's example, carrying my backpack into the bathroom, where we used the facilities, washed our faces, brushed our teeth, and pulled on our pajamas. Then Val pulled 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, pus.h.i.+ng the pa.s.senger's seat backward until it was almost flat. I was actually thrilled. This, far and away, was the best adventure I'd ever been on.

"Goodnight to the back!" Mrs. Adler called.

"Goodnight to the front," Val muttered a little grudgingly. I wanted to tell 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 allowed the car to fill with whirring, 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, rolling 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, twenty-four hours after we'd left Pleasant Ridge, we were whizzing past a red-and-white painted poster of a beach scene, with an umbrella 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 called 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 belly her bikini left bare, then borrowed sunscreen from the plump, red-cheeked mother underneath the next umbrella 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 Illinois. Peanut b.u.t.ter 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 umbrellas, shaking sand from their towels, and calling their kids out of the water. Mrs. Adler pulled on her faded pink tank top and a long white cotton skirt that fell 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-s.h.i.+ngled square building with a yellow-and-white striped awning and the mouthwatering smell 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 wallet out of her purse, reached inside, and frowned as she studied what she'd found in there: three crumpled dollar bills and a receipt from the gas we'd bought that morning.

"Oh, jeez," Val muttered, and kicked at the clamsh.e.l.ls that made up the parking lot.

"Don't worry. Wait over here." Mrs. Adler tossed her wallet back into her purse and pointed to a bench across from the counter, where a row of sunburned men in baseball 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, all of them in white T-s.h.i.+rts 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 called "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 brus.h.i.+ng 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, pulling out the twelve dollars that were all that was left of the money my mother had given me (I'd paid at Burger King and for some of the tolls), plus the eight dollars and change I'd collected 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 sh.e.l.ls 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 still 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 wallet?"

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 s.h.i.+rt, 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 her back, like a shy little girl. "I was just telling this nice young man that I seem to have misplaced my wallet, and I've got two hungry girls here. We came all the way from Chicago. I promised them lobster, and I hate to disappoint them."

Valerie snorted. "Maybe I could call 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 called. She had a toddler on her hip and another little boy tugging at the hem of her s.h.i.+rt. And then, miracle of miracles, the man in the uniform pulled out some bills folded into a silver money clip and handed a few of them to the boy behind the counter. "Allow 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 sh.e.l.lfish 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 filled with gray clams that Val and her mother called steamers. There was coleslaw and French fries and a tangled mound of thin, crispy onion rings, tall wax paper cups br.i.m.m.i.n.g with ice and soda, and little plastic dishes filled with melted b.u.t.ter. A dozen oysters lolled slick in their sh.e.l.ls 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 sh.e.l.lfish 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 c.o.c.ktail 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 college. Maybe even still in college 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 sh.e.l.ls, dunking them in a dish of water to clean the grit off, then dipping them in b.u.t.ter 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 belly, 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, b.u.t.tery taste exploded over my tongue. "These are so good!"

Mrs. Adler laughed, and the sh.e.l.lfish constable actually clapped. "Enjoy," he said. I ate a whole bagful of steamers and an ear of corn drizzled with b.u.t.ter and sprinkled with grainy sea salt. I squeezed lemon onto a raw oyster and then, following Mrs. Adler's example, tipped the rough edge of the sh.e.l.l 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-and-white flesh out of the lobster claws and dousing them with b.u.t.ter, too, amazed at the taste of the meat, light and rich and sweet.

The sh.e.l.lfish 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 pa.s.sengers 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 s.h.i.+ny with b.u.t.ter 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 gla.s.s bottles, setting the empties down next to the trays littered with clam sh.e.l.ls, straw wrappers, shreds of cole slaw, and puddles of lobster juice. Finally, Mrs. Adler turned sideways on the bench. She pulled up her skirt, crossed her long, tanned legs, and slipped a cigarette between her lips. Chris the sh.e.l.lfish constable hurried to pull out a book of matches and light it.

"I'm stuffed," she p.r.o.nounced. The breeze was picking up, raising goose b.u.mps on my bare arms and legs, bringing fall to mind. I thought of how it would feel to hurry home from school in October, with the sky getting dark and the wind at my back and Val at my side, talking about the Thanksgiving feast the sixth-graders prepared, and what we wanted for Christmas... what it would be like, for the first time in my life, to move through the school year and the concerts and the holidays with a friend at my side.

"Anyone for coffee?" the constable asked. He carried two cups back to the table, then handed Valerie a five-dollar bill. "Why don't you girls get some ice cream?" We bought cones from a window on the other side of the restaurant-vanilla for me, something called Moose Tracks for Val-and we ate them leaning against the sun-warmed curve of the Bug's hood while Mrs. Adler and the sh.e.l.lfish constable drank their coffee. She'd moved so that she was sitting next to him instead of across from him. Her hands fluttered in the air, lighting on his forearms, then his shoulders. I watched her rest her head on his chest as he slung his arm around her and pulled her close.

"We should leave soon," said Valerie. "Poppy goes to bed early."

"Who's Poppy?" I asked.

"My grandfather. My father's father. We used to come here every summer and stay with him." She licked her ice cream, catching a brown dribble as it slid down the side of the cone. "We haven't talked to him for a really long time. Probably he doesn't even know we're coming." I worried about that while Val nibbled her cone and stared out at the sky. "I wish I still lived in California," she said. "I wish I could live with my dad."

An icy finger prodded my heart. "You can't leave," I told her. "School's starting next week."

Val licked at her arm again. "Maybe we can both go there," she said. "It's way better than Chicago. It's warm all the time. We could go to the beach."

I nodded, enchanted and unsettled. I could never leave my parents, but I was, I secretly admitted, thrilled with the idea that Val would want me to, that she liked me enough to want me with her.

At the picnic table, Mrs. Adler bent down to murmur into Chris Jeffries's ear, then rose to her feet, peering through the twilight. "Come on, girls," she called. "Time to go."

Val and I got into the car, our hands and faces b.u.t.ter slick and ice-cream sticky. Valerie ignored her seat belt, curled up like a kitten in the backseat, and shut her eyes. I leaned forward, eyes on the road as we drove, first east, then south, as the Cape curved in on itself and headlights-the constable's, I thought-flashed and bobbed in the rearview mirror. The wheels hummed over the pavement, and when I opened my eyes it was dark, and Mrs. Adler was shaking my shoulders, whispering, "Addie, wake up."

I stumbled out of the car. We were parked on the lawn in front of a big, dark house that seemed to start at the top of a hill and spread out in every direction: up, and out, and sideways. I could hear the suck and rumble of water nearby. Mrs. Adler pulled Valerie out of the car and propped her up beside me. "Wait here," she said. I squinted through the darkness, watching as she slipped off her shoes and trotted to the front door, then opened it and beckoned us both inside.

I saw the darkened house in s.n.a.t.c.hes as Mrs. Adler padded over the wide-planked floors, leading us to the staircase: the fancy, patterned rugs, a long, oval table in what must have been a dining room, a fireplace big enough for a kid to stand in. She led us up two flights to a small white-painted room under the eaves, where there were two twin beds draped in white chenille bedspreads. "Go to sleep," she whispered. Her hair had come loose from its bun and curled in tendrils around her face. I set my backpack down, suddenly so tired that it was all I could do to wriggle out of my sneakers and crawl into bed.

"I need to go to the bathroom," Val said in a draggy, babyish voice.

"Fine," her mother snapped, "just don't flush."

I lay down, trying to make sense of that-in my house, we always flushed. My eyes slipped shut. A few minutes later, or so it seemed, Mrs. Adler was shaking my shoulders again. "Addie," she whispered. "Wake up. The tide's going out."

I sat up, yawning. Lovely rosy light, a color I'd never seen, never even imagined, filtered through the window, and yellow-and-white gingham curtains blew in the breeze. In the bed beside mine, Val was still in her clothes, lying stiffly on top of the covers, as if she was still sulking in her sleep. At the foot of the beds was a dollhouse, and in a bookcase against the wall was an entire set of faded Bobbsey Twins and Nancy Drew books. Mrs. Adler followed my gaze. "Help yourself," she said, and pointed at a door. "The bathroom's in there. Remember: no flus.h.i.+ng. We need to be quiet."

The bathroom floor was hexagonal black-and-white tiles, some of them cracked, and the toilet was an old-fas.h.i.+oned kind with a pull cord dangling from the ceiling. A tarnish-fogged mirror hung over the sink. I splashed cold water on my face and had just pulled my toothpaste out of my backpack when Valerie knocked on the door, then breezed inside.

"I can't believe we're here!" Her shorts and s.h.i.+rt were rumpled, her face pillow-creased, but she was smiling, closer to being the Valerie I knew.

"This is a really nice house." I suspected that this wasn't really a house: that it was instead a mansion, a thing I'd only ever read about. Through the half-moon-shaped bathroom window, I could see the bright green rectangle of a tennis court and, beyond that, grayish-gold sand and the foaming edge of the ocean. When we got back into the bedroom, Mrs. Adler, in flip-flops and the same faded pink tank top and her blue cotton running shorts, was making our beds, plumping the pillows, running her hands over the coverlets to smooth them. She looked at us, then down at the beds, and whispered, "Be as quiet as you can."

Val grabbed three of the old books from the bookcase. We picked up our backpacks and crept down the stairs. The clock hanging over the giant table said that it was five in the morning, and the sky was streaked with amazing shades of pink and gold. "Don't slam the doors," said Mrs. Adler. At the door, she murmured something to Val, who ran down the steps, reached underneath the porch, and pulled out two big mesh buckets and a short-handled rake.

I crawled into the backseat of the Bug. Val sat in front, holding the buckets in one hand and the door open with the other. Mrs. Adler got behind the wheel, put the car in neutral, and steered one-handed as we coasted down the road. I watched the house receding in the rearview mirror and saw a light go on through one of the second-floor windows. A minute later, a white-haired man in pajama bottoms and no s.h.i.+rt flung the front door open and stood on the porch, shouting words I couldn't hear. Mrs. Adler popped the clutch and the motor roared into life.

"Who was that?" I asked as Val and her mother closed their doors. Mrs. Adler turned on the radio, then pulled a cigarette out of the crushed pack she'd tucked into the visor. Val stuck her thumb in her mouth and started chewing, with her face set in tense lines, gazing straight ahead. "Poppy," Mrs. Adler said.

I sat back, not knowing what to make of this, and watched the road slip by. Twenty minutes later we pulled into the parking lot of a small supermarket. Mrs. Adler got out. Val sat as still as if she'd been carved, staring straight ahead with her jaw clenched, looking furious.

"Hey, Val?" I whispered.

She didn't turn around. "She wouldn't even let me say hi to him," she said in a furious whisper. "My own grandfather, and I couldn't even say..." She snapped her mouth shut and crossed her arms over her chest as Mrs. Adler came out of the market with two brown paper bags. I wondered how she'd paid for breakfast as she pulled out doughnuts and bananas and a giant cup of coffee. Had she taken Val's grandfather's money? I ate two bananas and a doughnut as Mrs. Adler drove down Route 6, then turned onto a narrow, sandy lane that ended in an unpaved parking lot with wooden racks of wide-bellied metal and wooden canoes along one end. The sun was s.h.i.+ning, the air warming up. Half a dozen rowboats and motorboats bobbed in the water as gulls wheeled and cried overhead. "This is it, girls," Mrs. Adler said.

Val and I wriggled into our bathing suits in the backseat, taking turns holding a towel up over the rear window, even though the parking lot was empty. Mrs. Adler loaded her Tab cooler with bags and bottles from the market. She supervised us as we smeared our arms and legs and faces with the sunscreen she pulled from the grocery bag, and she sprayed us with bug repellent. Then she squinted at the racks of canoes, finally pointing at a metal one, which we lifted down and set on the sand. Mrs. Adler put the buckets and the rake in the center of the boat, along with the cooler, and Val and I dragged it down to the edge of the water (not a lake, Val told me, as I'd thought, but a salt marsh, which emptied out into the ocean).

Val and I sat in the middle of the canoe. Mrs. Adler pulled off her tank top to reveal a blue bikini top. She pushed us into the shallow water until the waves lapped at the hem of her shorts, then hopped into the boat and began to paddle, propelling us past sandbars thick with bright-green sawgra.s.s and cattails, heading out to where the marsh gave way to the rippling dark-blue sea.

The sun sparkled off the water. Wavelets like tiny hands patted the metal sides of the canoe. Val scooted until she was sitting in front of me, then leaned her back against my knees. Mrs. Adler steered us toward a sandbar, and when the prow of the canoe nosed the sand, she hopped out and pulled the boat up onto the sh.o.r.e. "Come on, Addie," said Val.

We knelt down, and Val showed me how to look for bubbles and, when I'd found some, how to dig with the rake, then slide my fingers sideways until I felt the edges of a clamsh.e.l.l. It took us a few minutes to get started, and then Val squealed as she pulled her first clam out of the sand. "Here," she called, "there's tons of them!" I hurried over and knelt beside her, her bony shoulder against my round, tanned one as we worked our hands down into the sand, me in my blue one-piece, Valerie in a red-and-pink-striped bikini that kept riding up over her flat chest and drooping down her skinny hips. We dug out fistfuls of clams, laughing as they squirted us and tossing them in the mesh bucket we'd left standing in the water.

The sun climbed higher in the sky. We filled the first bucket and started in on the second, taking breaks to suck at our fingertips, which were laced with tiny cuts from the clamsh.e.l.ls. Every few minutes, Val would pause to stand up and peer at the sh.o.r.e.

"What's wrong?" I asked after the third or fourth time.

"You need a permit to take clams," she said.

"Do we have one?"

"I don't know." She shook her head. "I don't think so. Probably not."

"I've still got my money," I told Val. "We'll just say we came all the way from Illinois and we don't know the rules." This earned me a thin smile, before Val plopped back down and started digging again. For lunch, Mrs. Adler gave us turkey-and-cheese sandwiches, potato chips, and warm apple juice from the cooler. We ate sitting cross-legged at the edge of the sh.o.r.e, slapping at the greenhead flies that landed on our arms and legs, then rinsed our hands and went back to clamming. When the second bucket was full, Valerie and I lay side by side at the edge of the sh.o.r.e and let the incoming tide push the water over our toes... then our knees... then our hips, our waists, our chests. Finally, we floated, our hair waving in the current, hips and hands b.u.mping as the waves lifted us and let us down, until Mrs. Adler pushed the canoe into the water and told us it was time to go.

We clambered back into the boat and paddled back to sh.o.r.e. The buckets of clams floated beside us, tied to the canoe with Mrs. Adler's bandanna, our hair drying, salt-stiff, against our bug-bitten shoulders. My fingers itched for my watercolors and the pastel crayons I had at home when I looked out over the blue of the water, the green gra.s.s and silvery sand, the layered gray-blue and apricot of the sky. I held my breath as we approached the beach, worried that there would be trouble, that the family whose canoe we'd taken would be there, that our clams would be confiscated, that we'd be arrested. The parking lot was full, but the sh.o.r.e was empty, quiet except for the sound of the waves and the gulls. We helped Mrs. Adler wrestle the canoe back onto the struts, and watched as she wrapped the clam buckets in the paper grocery bags and set them in the backseat.

"Awesome," said Val dreamily as she climbed into the car. She said it exactly the same way the sh.e.l.lfish constable had.

"Vomit," I said back. Vahhhwmit. Val laughed and laughed.

I can remember how my nose was itchy with sunburn, the way my fingernails were ragged and torn, how my thighs were dotted with bug bites. I can remember stopping at convenience stores off the highway, buying cigarettes and Tab and black coffee for Mrs. Adler, Sprite for Val, and juice for me, garbage bags and ten-pound bags of ice for the clams.

We made it back home late Monday afternoon, after spending another night asleep in a rest stop (Goodnight to the back! Goodnight to the front!). My mother took one look at me and hustled me into the bathtub, pinching my dirty clothes between her fingertips before depositing them in the hamper. She made me soak, then scrub my nails with a brush she'd extracted from the depths of a vanity drawer, and wash my hair twice. After Mrs. Adler's repeated a.s.surances that the clams could not possibly have gone bad, my mother opened her Joy of Cooking and made us linguine with clam sauce, with white wine and lots of garlic, flecked with fresh parsley, served with salad and crusty French bread. I remember the six of us-me and my parents and my brother, Valerie and her mom-gathered around our kitchen table, devouring plate after plate of pasta, soaking crusts of bread with the garlic-and-wine sauce. I remember the feeling of floating in the water with my best friend beside me, underneath that beautiful sky. It was the best time of my life.

EIGHT.

"Home sweet home," Jordan Novick announced, unlocking his front door and letting himself inside. n.o.body answered. Not terribly surprising, given that he lived alone.

He tossed his coat in the direction of the closet, kicked off his boots and left them standing in the hall, then shoved a box of food into the microwave and pulled off his jacket and his tie. The TiVo had recorded a new episode of The Nighty-Night Show, he saw with his usual queasy mixture of shame and satisfaction. When the microwave beeped, he peeled the plastic film off his dinner, popped the top off a beer, and parked himself in a folding camp chair in front of the television set.

The food-it was some kind of pot pie-tasted terrible, the crust a sodden, gummy mess, the interior icy in sections, scalding in others, and gluey the whole way through. Jordan drained his beer, took the empty bottle back into the kitchen, and inspected the box... which, of course, said in very large hard-to-miss letters, microwave not recommended. "Well, s.h.i.+t," Jordan said, and frowned at the oven, which had a heavy-duty childproof lock on its handle, a lock that only his ex-wife had ever been able to figure out how to work.

The locks had actually been one of the house's major selling points. "We're all set for a young couple," the seller had announced when they'd come through with their real estate agent, beaming as he displaying the locks on the stove's controls, the gates at the top and bottom of the staircase, and the p.r.o.nged plastic caps plugged into every electrical outlet. "You'll just need to supply the baby!" He'd laughed. Patti and Jordan had laughed. The agent had chuckled, too. They'd bought the house, and when Patti had gotten pregnant for the first time in 2004, there was nothing to do and not much to buy (Patti's sister, a mother of three, had gladly handed over a crib and a changing table and a mysterious plastic pail known as a Diaper Genie). With the house prepared, Jordan and Patti had marked the occasion by programming their TiVo to record children's shows: Blue's Clues and Barney & Friends, Max and Ruby and The Nighty-Night Show.

The joke was on him. Now he was alone, no baby and no wife; alone in a house that defied him-how many hours had he wasted struggling with the doork.n.o.b guards or the lock the previous owners had installed over the toilet tank? He'd canceled his season pa.s.ses for the children's shows, but there was no way to tell the computer chip that lived inside of the TiVo that there were no children here and never would be, so the machine continued to record scores of programs for the five-and-under set, including The Nighty-Night Show, which was hosted by the Nighty-Night Lady, a friendly brunette who wore V-necked ribbed sweaters while she sang lullabies and told short, sanitized versions of fairy tales. The Nighty-Night Lady was, in Jordan's opinion, smoking hot. It made no sense. He'd even considered writing a letter to the network, asking why they'd hire a babe like that to appear on a show for three-year-olds. He wondered if he was the only man who tuned in, hoping she'd bend over to pick up one of her props-the Styrofoam castle, the felt princess crown, feeling ashamed of himself even though he knew that n.o.body would show up to say Hey, what are you watching, or Isn't that for kids? or, simply, Pervert!

It didn't matter now that he was alone. He could indulge himself any way he chose, whether that meant eating a diet based on deep-fried foods, or furnis.h.i.+ng his living room with metal-and-canvas fold-up camp chairs from the end-of-season sale at Target, or whacking off to a woman who wore a snail puppet on her hand. Ain't n.o.body's business if I do.

NINE.

The Lakeview Country Club was a white clapboard building with six tennis courts off to one side, a swimming pool on the other, and a golf course stretched out behind it. At two in the morning, the club's windows were dark, the parking lot was deserted. I could hear the faint hum of a generator as I killed the Jaguar's engine.

"Over there," said Valerie, pointing. "Next to the Dumpster."

I unfastened my seat belt and opened my door. When the dome lights came on, I looked at Valerie. "Come on."

She wiped her face, then shook her head. "I can't."

"What do you mean you can't?"

"I can't," she repeated. "You know how I am with this stuff. You go. You look. I'll just wait here, with my cell phone, and if you wave at me, I'll call 911."

"We're both going," I said, but even before the word "both" had left my mouth, Valerie was shaking her head.