She knew she had only about three dollars and change left, but Ginny had never passed through a drive-thru window without wrangling free food. People were always tossing in something extra for Ginny, making it a baker’s dozen, giving her an extension on her paper or the benefit of the doubt that she was, in fact, thirty-one-year-old Raquel Schuler from Alachua, Florida, as the fake I.D. in her hand indicated. She’d flirt with the pimply Little Caesars employee in exchange for a free pizza as a kind of exercise, a small social experiment. There was always a spare Nachos BellGrande to be had when Ginny was around.
“So, who is this Louise friend I’ve never heard of?” Ginny asked.
“Not her real name, by the way. I only sort of knew Not-Louise from Armando’s. Not Louise—the other one. Oh God, anyway, it doesn’t matter because I do not remember their names.” Betsy had a habit of drawing out the last syllable of any sentence whenever she’d had too much to drink: “I can’t find my shoes,” “I lost my keys,” “What is your problem?”
“So you had two-for-one drinks with strangers, at Diggers, starting at 3:00.”
“Four-for-two, technically, and yes. I did.”
Ginny laughed and shook her head, which made Betsy weirdly proud, in a perverse kind of way, that she could still surprise her best friend. Betsy leaned back against the headrest and noticed that the day was almost tolerable now since the sun was starting to dip beneath the tree line. The light was fading, casting a golden, nearly amber glow on everything around them, including Ginny, which made her dark eyes glow hazel.
BACK IN MAY, Betsy heard the Sundays for the first time and dug into her emergency cash fund to buy Ginny the tape. Ginny had only two cassettes in her car. One was the Violent Femmes, which someone in her high school car pool left in the deck. The other was her favorite, ’Til Tuesday. Both of them were warped and distorted from overuse. So Betsy convinced Ginny that the eleven dollars she should have spent on something else was actually an investment in her own sanity, since she spent nearly as much time in that car as Ginny did. But it was more than that. Something about the layered, angelic songs about breakups and the miserably cold, cloudy weather of a distant place felt like the soundtrack to being young in the spring of 1990 with a best friend to whom she felt she owed the world, and “Here’s Where the Story Ends” became their theme song. The two of them spent nearly every night driving around, rewinding and replaying it, singing loudest at the end, shouting “Surprise . . .” over and over again, their voices trailing behind them in the wind.
The memories made Betsy ache with a weird longing for that simpler time, just a couple of months ago. That evening, still woozy from the rum and Schnapps, Betsy kept her head from spinning by looking up at the coral pink clouds as “Hideous Towns” filled the air around them.
“Oh, Bets, I completely forgot: Your mom called earlier. She was looking for you,” Ginny said.
Ginny and Caroline’s number was the only one Kathy had written in her address book in ink. Her most persistent complaint about her daughter, and at that point in time there were many, was that she lived like a “gypsy.” Kathy never knew where to find her and threatened, more than once, to look under “Bars” in the Gainesville Yellow Pages and call every number on the list, beginning with the A’s. But Betsy suspected that the real reason Kathy called the apartment was because she liked talking to Ginny. In fact, the only thing Betsy didn’t like about Ginny was that Kathy clearly adored her.
“Did she ask you to keep tabs on me again? Keep me on the straight and narrow? Emphasis on the narrow?”
“She’s a mom. She called because she loves you. And because she worries about you,” said Ginny. “Did it ever occur to you that she likes to talk to me because I’m nice to her? You should try it.”
“Ha!” Betsy scoffed. “She likes to talk to you because she thinks you’re a good Christian girl who can keep me out of the bars. She doesn’t see that you’re playing the long con. And besides, she has to start being nice to me first.”
When they circled around the parking lot to order into the drive-thru speaker, Betsy shouted from the passenger seat.
“We’ll take two of everything that costs ninety-nine cents, and three of everything that costs seventy-nine cents.”
“Oh Christ, Betsy, will you shut up?”
“I’m sorry . . . Welcome to Taco Bell . . . Could you repeat that order, please?”
“Let me handle this, Betsy. I promise you’re not as funny as you think you are right now.”
“Oh Dorothy, you are absolutely no fuunn.” Even sober, Betsy’s Blanche Devereaux was awful. They had been on a Golden Girls watching spree that summer, and Betsy, who memorized every episode, quoted the show with alarming frequency. Ginny rolled her eyes.
“Fine,” she said, pretending to be exasperated, though Betsy could tell that she was secretly thrilled. “Uh, sorry about that, sweetheart, scratch that first order. What we really want is three of everything that costs seventy-nine cents. And two of everything that costs ninety-nine cents.”
“Excuse me?”
“You heard the lady,” said Betsy, peering ahead at the guy leaning out of the glass enclosure to see who was taunting him, straining the cord attached to his headset. “My mistake. I thought that since you look like Yoda you were also wise.”
“Enough,” Ginny said, in a pleading whisper. “He is obviously not a fan.”
“Next window, please.”