“Well, it was nothing compared to having kids. You don’t know tired until you’ve had kids.”
Couldn’t thirty-nine-year-olds just be old and tired and not talk about it constantly? Having children didn’t feel like something she had to start thinking about for a long time—maybe ever. She was rarely around kids—every so often she’d see some in her neighborhood, either teenagers causing trouble or well-dressed toddlers who looked like miniature versions of their parents, wearing Converse sneakers and Fleetwood Mac T-shirts. She was hardly ever even around parents, come to think of it, except for Dan, who was not exactly positive about the effect that children had on one’s life.
“I wouldn’t know, I guess,” she said.
“Look, I love my kids, but…let’s just say, try not to have any before you’re at least thirty-five.”
“Noted,” Katya said. Thirty-five seemed about as far off as fifty, or a hundred. She would die if she was still working at TechScene when she was thirty-five. Actually, if she was still working at TechScene when she turned twenty-six, then something was probably wrong.
“One drink,” Dan said. “I don’t really feel like going home yet, to be perfectly honest.”
Katya took one last long drag of her cigarette and ground it into the sidewalk with her boot and ignored Dan’s second comment. “Okay,” she said. “One drink. I know I don’t have kids, but I really am tired.” That was suddenly true; maybe it was all the talk of kids and getting old that just made her want to go home and lie down on the couch. “Hold on, let me just text Victor.”
She took out her phone and typed out: gonna grab a drink w work ppl. A few seconds later, a text came back: cool.
Dan looked relieved. “Let’s go to Old Town,” he said, and so they walked south on Broadway for three blocks until they got to Eighteenth Street, where they took a left. The neon Old Town sign was lit; inside, even though smoking had been banned in bars in New York since 2003—right around the time Katya had had her first cigarette, a Newport she stole out of her mother’s purse—Old Town still felt like a smokers’ bar, and it kind of smelled like one too. Maybe it was the smoke from all the people taking smoke breaks outside, or maybe the scent had just permeated the walls and floorboards.
The crowd at the bar was already two-deep by the time Katya and Dan showed up. They walked all the way to the back room, saw that it was also packed, and they had just turned around to take another lap of the room when two people got up from stools in front of the ancient dumbwaiter behind the bar, which was still used to transport food from the kitchen. Katya had come here a few times when she was at NYU; it was a favorite of some of the more pretentious guys who worked on the school paper. There was also an upstairs seating area, but it didn’t have the same energy. Downstairs was where everything happened.
“What do you want to drink?” Dan asked, a little too loudly. It was crowded, so he was sitting close to her. Their knees were practically touching.
“Vodka soda, please,” she said. Dan ordered a vodka soda for her, gin and tonic for himself, and told the bartender to run a tab. “You’re opening a tab?” she asked. “I said one drink! I really do have to go home.”
“I’m not expecting you to keep up with me.” Dan grinned but his eyes seemed sad. The bartender set their drinks down, and as if to demonstrate he meant what he’d just said, Dan took a big swig of his gin and tonic, downing practically half of it in one gulp.
“Okay, then,” Katya said, taking a much smaller sip.
“Crazy day, huh?” Dan said.
“I guess?” Katya said. “Was it any crazier than any other day?”
“I mean the leaderboard,” he said.