Adele followed up gainful employment with a membership at the LadyFit Gym. There, she met a group of women who introduced her to the thrill of Latin dancersize and the rush of extreme coupon deals. By Christmas, she’d lost twelve pounds and found that the empty space in her two-car garage was the perfect place for eight aisles of utility shelving. In the years since, hours of online coupon swaps have created a stockpile of nonperishable goods that may prove handy if the rapture Rachel speaks of ever comes to pass.
Ben squints into the sky as if deliverance from the puzzle of his mother’s addiction might indeed be coming in the clouds. I touch his back lightly without looking at him. He lets out a slow sigh. “Looks like we’re filling the pool with Powerade,” he whispers.
“C’mon.” I take his hand and pull him behind me toward the back of the car. I used to drag him around like this when we were kids. Only now, I lace my fingers through his, brazen and bold. This is my answer to his earlier question. This is what friends are for.
“Let us help you with that, Mrs. Cody.”
Adele claps her palms together, holding back the tips of her bejeweled manicure. “Oh, bless your heart, Katie.” She jerks her chin at Ben. “This one just thinks I’m crazy.”
I wrinkle my nose. “Well, this one needs all the free deodorant you can bring home.”
Adele giggles as I slide a flat of Powerade out of her Explorer and plop it into Ben’s arms, then tell him to wait while I give him another one. The combined weight of forty-eight twenty-ounce bottles makes every muscle in his arms and shoulders pop while he lugs them over to the growing stack at the edge of the drive.
“Benny, do you think you can get these into the garage for me? I have to hurry.”
“Mom, we don’t have room for all this crap.”
“I cleared some space this morning,” Adele says, digging through an accordion file. It is filled with stacks of coupons thick as paperbacks clamped with binder clips. “The shelf under the ramen and over the Tapatío.”
Ben frowns. “But this is Powerade. P comes before R.”
Adele waves a hand as she finds the stack for her next conquest, then runs back to the driver’s seat. “S for ‘sports drink,’” she calls out. “If we land some Gatorade next week I don’t want it all on different shelves.”
We stand aside as she screeches out of the driveway, blowing kisses and honking. In the silence that follows, Ben contemplates the stack of Powerade. It’s the size of a small mastodon.
He groans. “Guess I’ll get the dolly.”
I stop him as he turns toward the garage. “Might as well take a couple with you.”
He frowns as I drop one flat into his arms and bend down to grab another. “Why do I have to take two?”
“Part of the Powerade workout,” I say with a smile.
“What are you gonna do while I haul these around?”
I want out of the friend zone and decide to go for broke. “Enjoy the view.”
I think he starts to blush. I’m not sure because he turns around pretty fast and lugs those drinks up to the garage in record time.
UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE
HarperCollins Publishers
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five
BEN OFFERS TO drive me back to my place.
“What if your mom needs help with the Right Guard?” I’m only sort of joking.
“Can’t handle the shame. Have to get out of here.” He says this with a grim finality. I understand what he’s talking about. He doesn’t mean get out of here today, right now, this afternoon.
He means get out of here.
Forever.
We’ve talked about this more than once since we started hanging out again.
It was an accident that I saw his garage last fall. I’d come over to study for a geology test and arrived a few minutes before he came home from practice. Adele greeted me at the door and asked if I wanted a Diet Coke or a Coke Zero. In her excitement to serve me the Coke Zero I requested, she pulled me down the stairs to the garage entrance off the rec room of their raised ranch. While I was standing in that doorway Ben arrived and discovered me, slack-jawed, watching his mother slide a twelve-pack off the shelf just beneath CHARMIN and right above DRāNO.
The first time I saw those perfectly packed shelves, I was seized by the urge to grab a canvas bag and do a supermarket sweep. From ballpoint pens and batteries to Post-its and Sticky Tack, Adele gave me the grand tour, tallying the money she’d saved and pointing out which products were the best deals. Most of the time, with double coupons and deals that “stack,” she actually got money back. She’d haul out a colossal pile of product for free, and because of her coupons and the way the deals worked, the store would also pay her. I stared up in wonder that first afternoon, laughing in amazement as she explained her system.