When he saw them, his fleshy face pleated into clownlike folds. “Hello, girls. I’m Officer Dan Myers.”
“What did she do this time?” Tully asked.
“There was a spotted owl protest up by Lake Quinault that got out of hand yesterday. Your mother and several others staged a sit-in that cost Weyerhaeuser a full day’s work. Worse, someone dropped a cigarette in the woods.” He paused. “They just got the fire under control.”
“Let me guess: she’s going to jail.”
“Her lawyer is seeking voluntary treatment for drug addiction. If she’s lucky, she’ll be in the hospital for a while. If not . . .” He let the sentence trail off.
“Has someone called my grandmother?”
The officer nodded. “She’s expecting you. Do you need help packing?”
Kate didn’t understand what was happening. She turned to her friend. “Tully?”
There was a terrible blankness in Tully’s brown eyes, and Kate knew that this was big, whatever it was. “I have to go back to my grandma’s,” Tully said, then she walked past Kate and went into her bedroom.
Kate ran after her. “You can’t go!”
Tully pulled a suitcase out of the closet and flipped it open. “I don’t have any choice.”
“I’ll make your mother come back. I’ll tell her—”
Tully paused in her packing and looked at Kate. “You can’t fix this,” she said softly, sounding like a grown-up, tired and broken. For the first time, Kate understood the stories about Tully’s loser mom. They’d laughed about Cloud, made jokes about her drug use and her fashion sense and her various stories, but it wasn’t funny. And Tully had known this would happen.
“Promise me,” Tully said, her voice cracking, “that we’ll always be best friends.”
“Always,” was all Kate could say.
Tully finished packing and locked up her suitcase. Saying nothing, she headed back to the living room. On the radio “American Pie” was playing, and Kate wondered if she’d ever be able to listen to that song again without remembering this moment. The day the music died. She followed Tully out to the driveway. There, they clung to each other until Officer Dan gently pulled Tully away.
Kate couldn’t even wave goodbye. She just stood there in the driveway, numb, with tears streaming down her cheeks, watching her best friend leave.
CHAPTER
SIX
For the next three years, they wrote letters faithfully back and forth. It became more than a tradition and something of a lifeline. Every Sunday evening, Tully sat down at the white desk in her lavender and pink little-girl’s room and spilled her thoughts and dreams and worries and frustrations onto a sheet of notebook paper. Sometimes she wrote about things that didn’t matter—the Farrah Fawcett haircut she’d gotten that made her look foxy or the Gunny Sax dress she wore to the junior prom—but every now and then she went deeper and told Katie about the times she couldn’t sleep or the way she dreamed of her mother coming back and saying she was proud of her. When her grandfather died, it was Kate to whom Tully turned. She hadn’t cried for him until she got the phone call from her best friend that began with, “Oh, Tul, I’m so sorry.” For the first time in her life, Tully didn’t lie or embellish (well, not too much); she was mostly just herself, and that was good enough for Kate.