“Cool!” Mindy cried at the same time.
I smiled at them genuinely this time because really, if I got down to it, spending time with them, shopping at great shops, eating delicious buffalo burgers, snowmobiling, gazing at beautiful vistas, meeting Cotton and having him take my photo with Max, getting my head sorted about Niles which was a relief even if it was a sad one, my Colorado adventure might have started out terrible and was trundling along the road of deeply confusing but still, it wasn’t turning out half bad.
*
“Rat-arsed!” Arlene yelled through a guffaw. “That’s just screwy.”
“Well then, what does shitfaced really mean?” I returned.
She considered this, head tipped to the side then grinned somewhat crookedly and proclaimed, “You got me there.”
“Ha!” I cried and she and I both laughed.
I was right when we left the pizza place. My Colorado adventure wasn’t turning out half bad and it was getting better.
The Dog was fun. It was well off the main drag out in the middle of nowhere. You had to know it was there to find it which meant it was almost entirely populated by locals.
And it was populated. Even for a Thursday it was busy, nearly jam-packed. The music was loud and the beer was cold. It was great.
Arlene, my taxi nemesis, had hit Mindy and my table around forty-five minutes after we arrived. She introduced herself and without invitation sat herself down at a stool at our small, high, round table. She was older than me I guessed by about fifteen years or so. She was short, very round but had the daintiest feet and hands I’d ever seen. She had close cropped hair that looked permed and it was colored a peculiar shade of peach that I thought was supposed to be strawberry blonde but missed the mark by quite a bit.
And she was hilarious.
“What other words do they have?” Mindy asked, leaning into me.
I was educating them on English English versus American English, I’d been doing this awhile and they thought it was fascinating.
“Um…” I mumbled, sucking back more beer, of which I’d lost count how many I’d had, I swallowed, dropped my hand with bottle to the table and stated, “Rubbish.”
“Trash, you said that one already,” Arlene told me.
“Bunged up!” I cried.
“What?” Mindy giggled.
“Means you have a stuffy nose.”
“Love it! Bunged up!” Arlene said on a near shout.
“They also say ‘head full of cold’ when you’ve got a cold,” I shared and then carried on. “Pants are underwear, trousers are pants. Vests are called waistcoats, tank tops are called vests and robes are called dressing gowns!”
“We speak the same language at all?” Arlene asked and I smiled at her.
“Not much,” I answered. “But it works anyway, though never, but never, tell someone you were rear-ended. Ever,” I advised. “They don’t say that but what they think when you say it is very rude because they aren’t thinking of cars at all.”
We all laughed uproariously as if this was the height of comedy.
“I like you,” Arlene declared, grinning broadly. “Never thought I’d say this in my lifetime but I may even like you better than I liked Anna and she was a hoot.”
“Anna?” I asked, wiping a tear of laughter from under my eye.
“Max’s wife,” Arlene replied.
I stopped laughing, her words hitting me like I was a cartoon character standing at the bottom of the cliff and the anvil fell on my head.
I didn’t get the chance to crawl out from under because, shockingly, Mindy was suddenly yanked violently from the table.
“Hey!” Arlene exclaimed, hopping off her stool and I turned.
A tall, good-looking, dark-haired boy-man with scarily bulging biceps that did not look attractively powerful, just scary, had his fingers wrapped tight around Mindy’s upper arm.
“Big, bad Max moved you out today, did he?” he sneered in Mindy’s face, giving her a shake.
I hopped off my stool too as Arlene rounded on Mindy and the man.
“Damon, leave her be,” Arlene ordered.
“Fuck off, Arlene,” he clipped at Arlene and her upper body drew back in visible affront.
“You eat with that mouth, Damon Matthews?” she demanded to know.
“This ain’t your business.”
“Well,” I got up close to them and declared quietly, “it’s mine.”
He swung to me and gave me a head to toe. “Yeah? Who’re you?”
“I’m Nina Sheridan,” I announced like I was saying, “I’m SuperGirl.”
Damon was not impressed. “So?”
“She’s Max’s woman,” Arlene proclaimed and this wasn’t taken favorably by Damon.
“Fuck,” he muttered low, his eyes narrow and not leaving me. “That asshole gets all the sweet pieces.”
“What’s going on?” Becca arrived before anyone could say word one to his rude comment and Damon swung to her.
“You fuck off too, bitch.”
“Did you call me a bitch?” Becca shrieked, instantly beside herself with fury and I got closer in an effort to defuse the situation.