Free Between Friends by Kristy Kiernan

fresh air will do you good,” she said. And, as usual, she was right. It took well over an hour, and by the time we’d worked our way around the house cranking the rolling shutters up into their cases, I’d worked up a fine sheen of sweat. It exhausted me, but it felt good, too.
    Granted, Ali was doing most of the work, physically and emotionally. She’d kept up a constant stream of chatter, and I hung on every word. She told me about Letty, how she was getting used to high school, how her grades had slipped a little, but that was to be expected with the tougher classes.
    Letty was going to be fifteen in a couple of weeks. My God. Fifteen.
    “She says she doesn’t want a party, can you believe that? She says she’s too old for a party. The girl who had to have pony rides at seven, a bounce house at eight, all those ridiculous theme parties we threw every year with all those screaming girls?”
    I did remember. I’d been there for a few of them and had always thought they were the most absurd waste of money. I thought they were spoiling her, but I kept my opinion to myself, of course. They kept her limbs intact and air pumping through her lungs, and what more could you ask, really?
    “So, will you be here for her birthday?” Ali asked, and if I wasn’t mistaken, there was a slight edge to her voice that I couldn’t readily explain.
    “I might,” I said. “What’s the plan if there’s no party?”
    “Well, dinner out, I guess, and we’ll go ahead and start looking for a car—”
    “What? I thought she was fifteen?”
    “She is,” she said, sounding surprised. “But we thought it would be good to have her learn to drive on the car she’d actually be driving. Besides, we’re just starting to look; it’s not like it’s going to be sitting in the driveway with a big red bow on it. We’ll get it during the year and make it low-key; you know, we don’t want it to look like we’re spoiling her.”
    I gaped at her.
    “What?” she demanded, hands on her hips. “That’s not that unusual, you know. You don’t have kids; you don’t know how it is now.”
    “Oh, come on,” I protested. “You and I both had to work for our cars. What’s Letty doing?”
    “Letty is being a kid—”
    “Kids don’t have cars,” I pointed out. “Young adults have cars, and young adults work, and pay for their insurance and their gas—”
    “Cora!” Ali interrupted me. “Look, yes, we did all that, but things are different now. You have no idea how much work these kids do at school, how crazy and busy their lives are. And I don’t want Letty to have to work yet. We can afford to get her a car, a good, safe car so we don’t have to worry about her breaking down on the side of the road.”
    I started laughing. “Remember when your Fiat lost half its gears and we had to drive home from the beach in first gear the whole way?”
    I thought she’d laugh over the shared memory, but she frowned.
    “That’s exactly what I’m talking about,” she said. “Do you know how dangerous that was? What were we even doing out that late at night? Anything could have happened, and we’d have been able to go all of twelve miles an hour to get to safety. I don’t want Letty in any situation like that.”
    “Well, we managed to live through it,” I said, turning back to the shutter on the front window, the final one. Ali was still standing in the driveway looking at me with her arms crossed over her chest. “And I don’t think we turned out too badly. Do you?”
    I didn’t know why I was pushing this. I didn’t want to fight with Ali.
    “It was a different time,” she said, narrowing her eyes at me. “And I have no idea what my parents were thinking, letting me stay out so late, letting us do some of the stuff we did.”
    “Wow, I think that’s pretty harsh.”
    I was truly surprised. Ali’s parents had been great, ideal parents as far as I had been concerned, and after my mother, foster homes, and then Barbara, I