Best Friends Forever by Jennifer Weiner Page A

anything. She was always home, curled up on the couch watching soap operas, or lying on a towel in the backyard, wearing a white crocheted bikini, listening to the little boom box that she kept plugged in on the porch.
    “She gets alimony,” Val had told me, explaining that alimony was money her explaining that alimony was money her father paid her mother so that her mother could take care of herself and Valerie.
    “But what does she do al day?” I’d asked again.
    Val had shrugged under the water. “I guess she waits,” she said. “She waits for it to be night.”
    In Val’s room, I ducked my head shyly as I said hel o. Mrs. Adler made me nervous. It wasn’t just that she looked like a teenager. She behaved like one, too. She cursed, and smoked, and sat in the corner of the kitchen having long, tense conversations on the telephone with a boyfriend back in California. She did not believe in balanced meals, and thought that popcorn and Lipton’s Cup-a-Soup was a decent dinner, even a decent breakfast in a pinch. Sometimes she’d let Val go days between showers—if she’d been swimming, she said, that was close enough. Val had no official bedtime. She got to watch whatever she wanted on TV, even movies and Tales from
    the Crypt on HBO, whereas Jon and I were always getting herded into the bathroom to wash our hands or upstairs to do our homework, and we didn’t even have premium cable. Mrs.
    Adler, who was always saying Cal me Naomi, seemed sometimes like an impatient babysitter, waiting for Valerie’s real parents to come home and relieve her of her duties so that she could go live her actual life.
    That morning she’d been lying on Val’s bed with her torso curved around a clamshel that she’d been using for an ashtray. “My daughter”—she indicated Val with a cocked elbow—“wants a pink-andgreen room.”
    “It’s pretty,” said Val.
    “What should I do?” I couldn’t wait to kick off my shoes and tie back my hair in a borrowed bandanna, to baptize myself in pink and green paint.
    “Grab a rol er.” Mrs. Adler yawned, then fished a mother-of-pearl lighter and a box of Salem Lights from her pocket.
    “Ugh. Ma!” Val coughed. “Remember? Lung cancer?”
    Mrs. Adler flicked her fingers at her daughter cheerful y. “We’re al gonna go sometime.” I watched, entranced, as she extracted a cigarette from the crushed pack, tapped it against the crinkled plastic, lit it, and sucked in the smoke.
    “She’s disgusting,” Val announced. I waited for the reprimand, for the don’t-you-talk-to-your-mother-that-way that surely would have fol owed such a remark in my house. It never came. Mrs. Adler gave me a sly, pleased look— That Valerie! Isn’t she something? She blew twin plumes of smoke out of her nostrils, then tapped the ash on the lip of the clamshel .
    I crossed the room, my bare feet sticking to the Saran Wrap, and picked up a rol er, aware that Mrs. Adler was watching me and looking amused. “Addie Downs,” she said (talking about me like I wasn’t even there was one of Mrs. Adler’s favorite things).
    “The good influence.”
    I bobbed my head affirmatively and dabbed pink paint on the wal . Valerie, meanwhile, was slathering green on the bottom half of her section in speedy strokes, splashing droplets on the plastic, like she couldn’t get the wal paper to disappear quickly enough. I watched her, my forehead scrunched, as the paint pooled and beaded up on top of the wal paper.
    “Um,” I said. Mrs. Adler raised her eyebrows. “Aren’t you supposed to take the wal paper off before you paint?”
    Mrs. Adler looked at me, then at the wal .
    “Huh.”
    Valerie threw her rol er onto the SaranWrapped floor, leaving a big blotch of mint.
    “MOM!” she yel ed. I tensed, waiting for Mrs. Adler to tel Valerie not to raise her voice, but Mrs. Adler just shrugged.
    “Honey, I never said I was an expert,” she said, and ground out her cigarette in the clamshel .
    “We could ask my