Free Best Friends by Martha Moody

“And guess what else she said? She said maybe it was for the best, since you were both so young.”
    Sally winced.
    â€œAnd she wonders why I don’t want to come home over Christmas.”
    â€œCome home with me,” Sally said. “Did you look in the paper? There’re always ads for people to drive cars cross-country. All you’d need is plane fare back. You could stay all January. We could both do our winter term out there.”
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    â€œ I REMEMBERED SOMETHING,” Sally said as we drove west. “I was about seven or eight, it was before Ben was born, and we went up to Lake Tahoe. Daddy took me swimming. We went to a store beside the lake for ice cream, and there was a tabloid paper in a rack on the floor. I read the headline and I thought I was going to die. I mean, it was awful. I couldn’t breathe, and I didn’t want Daddy to know I’d read it, and I was trying to get between him and the paper so he wouldn’t read it too.”
    â€œWhat was the headline?”
    Sally hesitated. “MAN FEEDS SON TO PIGS.”
    I recoiled. It was pretty horrific. Especially to a seven-year-old.
    â€œI used to lie awake in bed at night thinking of that headline. And I’d been excited to be able to read, but then . . . it scared me.” She hesitated, then started in a lower tone. “Please don’t tell Daddy how upset I am about Timbo.”
    My hands almost fell off the wheel. “Doesn’t he realize?”
    â€œDaddy doesn’t understand about me and Timbo. He thinks it was a”—out of the corner of my eye, I could see Sally’s mouth twist—“crush. That’s the word he used. And I don’t even want to say it, but I think he thinks how Timbo died was funny.”
    â€œIt was tragic. The fact that people think it was funny makes it more tragic.”
    â€œI know,” Sally whispered, her eyes glistening. She watched the road for a while. “I figure other people I love will die. I figure this is the worst of it, because it’s my first time.” She swirled her hand in the air in front of her, an un-characteristically chaotic gesture. “From now on, I’ll expect this grief.”
    I loved driving west. I loved the sky opening out and the land flattening, the very landscape an echo of my own widening horizons. I was going to California, California! It staggered me that my life, without my planning it, was leading me again to such a wondrous place. It must be fated that I should drive cross-country, in Stan Guardino’s dark blue BMW, a novelty car for 1975, a car that provoked all kinds of stares and honks. “You don’t need to drive,” my father had said. “I’ll buy you a plane ticket.” But no, I wanted to drive, to eat with my best friend at truck stops and stay at cheap motels with fake log walls and erratic heating and tepee-printed curtains.
    â€œL.A.,” Mr. Rose would say when I got there, “you look L.A.” And I did, I knew I did. Ben let me play with his pet snake, and Mrs. Rose fussed a little less in the kitchen; Patricia had had to go back to Mexico to help out her sick mother. I acted as a sort of shield between Sally and her father, and in gratitude she let me drive her little Kharmann Ghia. I drove up and down the canyons, took corners fast, drove all the way down Sunset from Olvera to Pacific with my sunglasses on and the Who on the car radio. I could drop Sally off downtown at her winter term project, working with a woman lawyer who specialized in estate planning and trusts, and have the car all day.
    My winter term project was to experience Los Angeles. I’d found a sponsor in the sociology department; I didn’t even have to write a paper. I saw Warren Beatty in a terrible rush. And Dennis Hopper, draped by two dissolute girls, playing what looked like hopscotch on the sidewalk.
    Mr. Rose liked to repeat that truism about youth