Best Friends Forever by Jennifer Weiner

coconut flakes and whatever else we could scrounge from the pantry, or we’d go to the basement and take turns doing laps with my old pair of rol er skates while listening to Val’s favorite (and as far as I could tel , only) record, a 45 of Kenny Rogers’s “The Gambler.” Sometimes my father would sing along.
    One Saturday morning, Val gave her usual knock at our door, then, as had become her habit on the weekends, pushed it open and presented herself at the kitchen table. “Hey, Addie, can you come over? My mom and I are going to paint my room.”
    I looked at my parents. My father was scrambling eggs. My mother stood at the sink, rins-ing juice glasses and humming to herself. “It’s fine with me,” she said. “Do you girls want some breakfast first?”
    Valerie did. Perched on the edge of her seat at the kitchen table, al skinny legs and scabbed elbows, she polished off a plateful of eggs and French toast and bacon, then squirmed impatiently as my mother rejected the first two outfits I tried on, final y okaying an old pair of shorts and a ripped T-shirt previously destined for the rag pile. Val and I ran out the front door, dashed across my lawn, grabbed each other’s hands, and sprinted across the street.
    After her parents had died, Mrs. Adler had inherited the house on Crescent Drive. Her brother, Val’s uncle who lived in Sheboygan, had gotten al of the furniture, and so far, Mrs.
    Adler hadn’t bought anything new. There was a folding table and two metal chairs in the kitchen, a television set that stood on four orange milk crates in the living room, and in front of it, the DiMeos’ old couch, a hulking antique made of red velvet and carved dark wood that I guessed the uncle either hadn’t wanted or couldn’t fit through the door.
    When the DiMeos had lived there, the bedroom at the top of the stairs was crowded with a queen-size bed, two side tables, and a squat club chair covered in cabbage-rose print fabric. Now the room was almost empty, and the yel ow carpet
    —pristine in spots where the bed and club chair had stood, sun-faded and stained everywhere else—was covered by a sheet of plastic. No, not a sheet. There were actual y multiple sheets of Saran Wrap lining the carpet, and someone—either Valerie or Mrs.
    Adler—had
    Scotch-taped
    them
    together. Bare light switches jutted out of the wal s, and strips of tape lined the edges where the wal met the ceiling and the floor. A third strip of tape split the wal in half. Two alu-minum pie tins, one fil ed with pink paint, the other with green, sat on the Saran Wrap. Val’s flimsy wooden dresser and single bed in its metal frame had been pushed into the center of the room. Lying on the bed, propped on one elbow, was Mrs. Adler.
    “Good morning, Addie,” she said, in her drawling voice. Her running shorts—navyblue cotton with white piping—were as brief as the ones Daisy Duke wore on The Dukes of Hazzard reruns, and she didn’t have a bra on underneath her white cotton T-shirt. She smel ed like mentholated cigarettes and Breck shampoo, and looked more like a teenager than like a regular mother, barefoot with her hair pul ed back in a blue bandanna and a thin gold chain around her neck.
    “What does your mother do al day?” I’d asked Val once, when we were at the Kresse Park pool, treading water in the deep end (I stayed close enough to the wal to grab it if I had to). Al of the mothers I knew were busy. They complained about it al the time—“I’m frantic,”
    they’d say, or “I’m exhausted!” They drove carpools and led scout meetings and taught Sunday school; they shopped and gardened and cooked and cleaned. Some of them had part-time or ful -time jobs in doctors’ offices or banks or shops. Then there was poor Mrs.
    Shea at the corner of Crescent Drive, who had eleven children and spent al of her days doing laundry, or going to the grocery store to pick up her daily five gal ons of milk. But Mrs. Adler didn’t seem to do