My Best Friend's Exorcism(95)

“I can’t believe it,” Abby said. “You’ve been saving it?”

“Merry Christmas,” Gretchen said, and popped the top.

It gave a crisp hiss and she poured it into two glasses, raising hers in a toast.

“To 1982,” she said.

Abby picked up her glass and they clinked them together. She took a sip and was a little disappointed. She’d expected it to taste like magic, but it only tasted like Coke.

“Sometimes I wonder what keeps us together,” said Gretchen, considering her glass. “Do you? Like when it got hard, there were times we didn’t talk, and I always wondered why we kept on trying.”

Abby took a long sip from her glass. She didn’t want to say anything, but she had thought the same thing, too.

“I think for me,” Gretchen said, “it’s Max.”

Her comment caught Abby off guard.

“The dog?” she asked. “Good Dog Max?”

“Max is still what hurts most,” Gretchen said. “Isn’t that crazy? He was just a dog, and not even a very smart one—and I’ve been engaged, almost had a baby, I’ve had friends die, and the few times I’ve run into Margaret, she’s made it pretty clear that we’re never going to be okay again. But I actually have dreams about Max, and you’re the only person who knows that wasn’t me. Everyone else thinks I killed my dog, even my parents, and the one person who knows I didn’t do it is you.”

Abby thought for a moment. “That’s why I don’t go back to Charleston,” she said. “Everybody remembers me as the devil worshipper who stole the fetus from the medical university. I didn’t tell Devin about it, and I don’t know if I’ll ever tell Mary.”

They were quiet for a few minutes, watching the lights change on the Christmas tree.

“Halley’s Comet is coming around again in forty-six years,” Gretchen said. “Do you think we’ll still be friends?”

Abby watched the red lights fade to green to yellow to blue.

“We’ll be almost ninety years old,” she said. “I can’t think that far ahead.”

Because in her heart, Abby didn’t want to give the real answer. She loved Gretchen, but what really lasted? Nothing was strong enough to stand against the passage of time.

But Abby was wrong.

When she died at the age of eighty-four, there was one person holding her hand. There was one person who sat with her every day. Who made Glee leave when she got too loud and who made Devin, Abby’s ex-husband, visit even though he hated sickness with a phobic intensity. There was one person who read to her when she could no longer see the pages of her book, who fed her pumpkin soup when she got too weak to feed herself, who held up a glass of apple juice when she could no longer raise it to her mouth, and who moistened her lips with a sponge when she lost the ability to swallow. There was one person who stayed by her side even after Mary got too upset and had to leave the room. There was one person with her, all the way down the line.

Abby Rivers and Gretchen Lang were best friends, on and off, for seventy-five years, and there aren’t many people who can say that. They weren’t perfect. They didn’t always get along. They screwed up. They acted like assholes. They fought, they fell out, they patched things up, they drove each other crazy, and they didn’t make it to Halley’s Comet.

But they tried.