The weather was so unseasonably glorious that Charles asked Joanna to meet him in the city to go out to dinner. Joanna took SEPTA in, suddenly feeling giddy and golden. When had she and Charles last gone out to dinner—a real dinner, not the local pizza joint or the Chinese place in the strip mall? Maybe it signified a change, all their petty tension washing away.
She got off at Market East and walked to the restaurant in Old City. It was a Friday; the bar was packed and Charles hadn’t yet arrived. Joanna flagged down the bartender and ordered a glass of pinot noir, settling into her stool and looking idly around at the dramatic purple curtains against the walls and the chefs that fluttered about in the open kitchen at the back. Other guests flitted around her, ordering drinks, swilling them back, thrusting their fingers into the bowls of mixed nuts at the bar. There were men and women who came straight from work, a couple talking about their apartment in Fishtown, a woman with a daughter of about eleven or twelve, the girl gazing off disinterestedly at the passing cars on the street. Joanna suddenly realized how much she missed Philadelphia. She missed the crowds and the smells and the anonymity. She missed sitting in a bar without everyone staring at her pityingly, wondering why she was alone.
Joanna was almost halfway through her wine when she suddenly saw Charles waving at her from across the bar. Hey, he mouthed. He held a palm to the air as if to say, What are you doing all the way over there? He was standing with two other people, an almost-empty gin and tonic in his hand. The two people turned and looked, too. It was Nadine and Rob, two of Charles’s friends from Swithin who had gotten married. They lived in the city, though Joanna wasn’t sure where. Nadine wore bright red lipstick and was clutching a glass of water. She was hugely pregnant, cupping one hand over the base of her belly.
Joanna looked down, gripped with panic, wishing Charles hadn’t seen her. She didn’t want to talk to Swithin people. Not tonight. She wanted to remain on this side of the bar, safe and alone. But she picked up her glass and walked over.
“How long have you been here?” Charles asked when she reached him. His face was already pink from the gin.
“Um, twenty minutes maybe?” she answered, squeezing in beside him. There were no available stools on this side of the bar. Only Nadine was sitting.
“And you didn’t see us? I got here at six. I ran straight into these two. We’ve been here the whole time.”
“You didn’t see me, either,” Joanna said bitingly, though her words were absorbed by the din of the crowd.
“Well, now that you’re here, I can tell the hostess we’re ready,” Charles said. He considered his old friends. Rob still had his handsome, well-balanced features, but his once-thick, longish hair was starting to thin. Nadine was as pale as ever, even her eyelashes. Her diamond ring kept throwing prismatic shapes all over the room. “You guys must join us,” Charles decided.
Nadine waved her hand. “It’s okay,” she said. “You guys don’t live here. Joanna probably came into the city so you could have a nice, romantic dinner by yourselves.”
“Nah, we’d love to have you,” Charles insisted. “It’ll be ages before we see you again. Right, Joanna?”
And then they were all looking at her. Joanna had no control over the muscles of her face. And now that this mood had settled around her, she couldn’t just untangle herself from it so fast. She didn’t want them joining their table. She didn’t want to struggle to make conversation. She thought of her comfy stool across the bar. She thought of her cozy couch at home. She could have stayed there and made pudding, watched television.
“Really,” she managed. “I don’t mind.”
And that was good enough for them. Nadine and Rob followed behind Charles and Joanna to a four-top at the back of the restaurant. Nadine struggled to sit down, Rob spotting her back. Diners at nearby tables glanced over and smiled. They both put their napkins on their laps and said that yes, sparkling water would be lovely. Charles gave Joanna an inquisitive look, a little eyebrow raise that seemed so say, Is everything okay? But he should know what wasn’t okay, shouldn’t he? Joanna smiled at him icily, and then turned back to her glass of wine, swilling back the rest of it fast.
They started talking about Rob’s boss—he worked at WXPN, Penn’s radio station, doing something for one of the show producers. “He made me babysit this band last week,” Rob was saying. “They were about nineteen years old but really sweet, came from some little town in Wales. What they wanted most was to see an authentic Philadelphia crime. They wanted to see guys in low-riders carjacking someone or, like, a shoot-out. They begged me to drive them into the worst neighborhood so we could see some action.” He rolled his eyes and then paused. Everyone laughed.