Charlie sure did.
Fifteen minutes later they pulled into the crowded driveway of an old farmhouse in the shadow of Mount Tom and backing into the Oxbow part of the Connecticut River. It had been in Aimee’s family and come to her after the death of a great-aunt. The place was sprawling, with the last significant updates having been done in the fifties. A finicky mustard-colored electric stove occupied a corner of the kitchen, and a burnt-orange shag rug ran through everywhere else, including the bathrooms.
They entered to music from a Sonos that at least three people were trying to control at the same time. The air smelled like ginger, fried onions, and pizza.
Aimee, in leggings and a tank that showed off tattoos of koi running down both her arms, half hiding behind butt-length brown hair, drifted over to kiss Barb. She whispered to Charlie that the drinks and food were in the dining room, and that they were out of ice.
Charlie thanked her and, deciding that she couldn’t follow Barb around like a duckling, wove through the main area toward the booze. She passed Angel and Ian on the rug, playing what appeared to be chess with a mix of snack food for the pieces. Ian had a vape pen hanging on one corner of his mouth as though it were an old-timey cigar. Both of them worked over at Cosmica, a diner-style restaurant that served buffalo-meat burgers and a lot of cocktails. When Ian noticed her, his mouth opened far enough for the vape pen to fall on the board and send a cheese puff rolling into a potato chip.
She and Ian had slept together late one night, when neither of them were making good decisions. She hoped that wasn’t going to make the evening awkward.
A guy was sitting on the couch, head buried in his sketchbook. She recognized him as a webcomic artist. He’d been creating a surprisingly explicit and sprawling story of a mouse warrior for years, but it had only recently started gaining a big readership. There was a rumor that he’d begun making serious money.
The long-haired man sitting next to him must have thought he was doing well, since he was trying to convince him to invest in a weed truck, like an ice cream truck but selling edibles and joints and creams. It would drive around neighborhoods and, Long Hair Man insisted, be really good for older people with mobility issues. There was some question from the people sitting nearby about whether this was legal, but the really heated debate was around which celebratory weed song the truck should play.
That led to the subject of rolling bliss, which several of them had done. “I went to this alterationist, Raven, out in Pittsfield,” Long Hair Man said. “And she got me so joyed up, I almost walked out in front of a semi. Worth it, though. It was like that feeling you get when you’re a kid and summer’s just started combined with all the optimism of first love.”
In the kitchen, Don argued with his girlfriend, Erin. They were a dramatic couple, prone to tears and shouting about which had been mean to the other first. Don was a bartender at Top Hat, a nice place, one of the first Charlie had been fired from.
She poured four fingers of Old Crow bourbon into a plastic cup and sidled past Don and Erin to get some ice from the freezer before she remembered there wasn’t any. She settled for a little cold water to cut the burn. Don bent his head to hide that he was wiping his eyes.
At least it wasn’t her crying in the kitchen this time.
“Charlie Hall!” José called. “Long time. You don’t like us anymore?”
He was standing in a little knot with Katelynn and Suzie Lambton, who had made that comment to Doreen about Charlie being like the devil.
“Have you heard from him?” José demanded as she approached them. He worked at a tiny gay bar called Malebox, where he’d met his ex, the one who’d moved to Los Angeles for a guy and stuck Charlie with double shifts.
Charlie shook her head. “But Odette might have an address to send his last check on file, if you want to send him a haunted object or something. Or there’s a service that ships packages filled with glitter to your enemies. They don’t call it the herpes of crafting for nothing.”
He gave her a wan smile but was clearly sunk in misery. “He’s probably basking in the sun, happy, eating avocados off the trees in his backyard, having sex with a hot surfer every night. Meanwhile, I will never find love.”
“I told you,” Katelynn said, “I’ll fix you up with my cousin.”
“Isn’t he the one who ate a dead moth off the bathroom floor?” José raised his eyebrows.
“As a child! You can’t hold that against him,” Katelynn protested.
“I should just get a gloom to cut my feelings right out of me,” José declared dramatically. “Maybe then I’d be happy.”
“You can’t be happy without feelings,” Katelynn said, pedantic to the end.
Charlie appeared to have arrived at the exact point in the night when everyone had drunk too much and become either belligerent or morose. She slung back the Old Crow. She’d better catch up.
“I heard Doreen was looking for you,” Suzie said as Katelynn and José continued to argue over whether a mouth tainted by a moth could ever be enjoyably kissed. Suzie had on a billowy-sleeved dress in a yellow pattern and a large, chunky necklace. Her dark hair was pulled up into a tortoiseshell clip. She wore the kind of thrift store finds that cost more than new clothes.
Some of the people at the party might have heard that Charlie had “fixed things” for someone in a jam, or had a vaguely criminal side gig, but were light on the details. They saw what they expected to see: Charlie Hall, perennial fuck-up, who had a hard time holding down a job and was willing to make out when she got really drunk.
Suzie Lambton knew a little more. When she was at Hampshire, a professor had tried to have her tossed out for plagiarizing a paper. Charlie found the way to change his mind.
She shrugged. “Adam’s in the wind. She wants me to find him for her. Convince him to go home.”
“If I were you, I wouldn’t get involved in his mess,” Suzie told her. “When people get to a certain age, either they change or they curdle. He’s pushing thirty and wants to live like he’s twenty. Wants to come into work drunk from the night before, gamble, that kind of shit. I’m going on a yoga retreat next weekend. You should come with me instead.”
“Too late,” Charlie said, lifting her plastic cup in a salute. “To wise advice and bad decisions.”
Suzie, who probably had plagiarized her paper, raised her glass.
Vince rolled up a half hour later, with orange juice and ice, having received Charlie’s text that the party was low on both.
She went over and hugged him, burying her face in the wool of his coat. It carried the scent of leaves and cold night air. A small smile lifted one corner of his mouth, and she felt a swell of strange, bittersweet longing for someone who was already hers.
Tina, who worked at the Hampshire Gazette and drank like a journalist in a movie, was loudly musing about getting her shadow altered to have a cat tail. “Guys love a tail,” Tina proclaimed, to protests by nearly everyone. Aimee thought Tina shouldn’t consider fetishes along a gender binary. Ian wanted it to be known that he thought it was disgusting, and that men did not want to molest animals. The artist agreed it was kind of hot, but his comic was about saucy mice.
Charlie told Tina that she had maybe misunderstood what “getting some tail” actually meant.
“Mermaids, right?” Vince asked, in such a clueless just-joined-the-conversation tone that it was hard to know if he was joking, or if he’d misheard the earlier part.