“Okay, then: where?”
Such a simple question. It demanded but a one-word answer. Two syllables. And yet she couldn’t bring herself to say it right now: it would be like waking in the middle of the night in a dark room and switching on klieg lights. “Berlin,” she lied. She was prepared to embellish the trip, if she had to. If it came to that. But it didn’t.
“And you still like the job?” he asked.
She rolled back her head, lolling in the heaviness that came with the fourth shot. Perhaps because she’d just lied, she felt an acute need to admit something—to give him something real. The need to confess was irresistible. “When you start as young as I did—right out of college—it’s usually because you’re running from something. You just have to get out. To get away. It wasn’t a career change for me. It wasn’t even a choice, in some ways. It was just a road somewhere.”
“An escape?”
“You could say that.”
“From?”
They were sitting down now and it was a quarter to one. They were on stools side by side at the bar, but they were facing each other. She reached over and hooked her fingers just inside the front pockets of his jeans, locking him gamically to her. His eyes had the fuzzy drunk stare she liked. She wouldn’t have been surprised if hers were a little loopy, too.
“There’s a town at the edge of the Cumberland Mountains in Kentucky called Grover’s Mill. Pretty quaint, right?”
“Whereabouts?”
She shook her head and purred, “Shhhh,” her voice the wind in the night. Then: “I’m Scheherazade.”
He nodded.
“It’s small and quiet,” she continued. “Not a lot happens there. Imagine a girl in sixth grade with strawberry blond hair. It’s up in a bun because she fancies herself a dancer and she does nothing in moderation. Never has and, alas, never will.”
“This is you.”
“So it would seem. And today is her birthday. And while Grover’s Mill doesn’t have much, it has a creamery that makes ice cream. Really good ice cream, at least this eleven-year-old thinks so. And so her mom has a big idea for her birthday, because they really can’t afford a whole lot in the way of presents and her birthday has fallen smack in the middle of the week, and so there sure as hell isn’t going to be a party. Of course, there probably wouldn’t have been a party even if her birthday had fallen on a Friday or a Saturday, because you just didn’t dare bring kids over to the house on the weekend, because that was usually when Dad was most likely to get seriously and impressively hammered. Anyway, Mom goes to the creamery and buys a tub of her daughter’s favorite flavor.”
“Rum raisin?”
“Cute. But, no. Chocolate chip cookie dough. And she buys her daughter a two-gallon tub. Do you how many pints that is? Sixteen. She stops by the creamery on her way home from work—she’s a receptionist at this creepy electrical wire factory in this otherwise forgotten ghost town next door to Grover’s Mill—and buys this restaurant-size two-gallon tub of ice cream. Just so you know, the girl’s birthday is in September and it was one freaking hot September that year. You can look it up.”
“I trust you.”
She dug her fingers a little deeper into his pants pockets, kneading the flesh of his thighs ever so slightly. “So Mom has all this ice cream in a bag, along with some groceries, in the trunk of her car. She’s going to get home just about the same time as her husband. Her eleven-year-old kid is already home, a kind of classic latchkey little despot. She has a kid sister who’s eight, but that day the kid sister was at her weekly Brownie meeting. Their father was picking her up on his way home from the high school where he was a P.E. coach and driver’s ed teacher. As Mom is nearing the street where her family lives, she sees a police car. It’s maybe a quarter mile from her house. It’s parked, but its lights are on. And then she sees her daughter.”
“You.” Even in that one syllable, she could hear the slight catch in his throat as she teased him through the thin strip of fabric that comprised the inside of his pants pocket.
“No, silly. That eleven-year-old is home, remember? She sees the eight-year-old. The child is still wearing her Brownie sash with all of these very colorful badges. And then she sees her husband’s crappy Dodge Colt. Robin’s-egg blue. A hatchback. And it’s wrapped around a telephone pole. She stops, absolutely terrified, her heart sinking. But thankfully no one’s injured. Her little girl is stunned, scared, but mostly fine. A couple of bruises on her arm. And her husband? He’s in the backseat of the police cruiser. Handcuffed. Drunk. So she follows the police car to the police station and uses all the money in their pathetic little savings account at their pathetic little bank to bail him out. This takes a while.”
“Of course it does.”
“And by the time she gets home with her drunk of a husband and their adorable Brownie of a daughter…by the time they pull into the driveway and pop the trunk…all that ice cream for the older girl’s birthday is gone.”
He reached down and lifted her fingers from his pockets and held them tenderly in his hands. “Someone stole the ice cream? At the police station?”
“Nope. It melted. It melted through the cardboard tub and then through the paper bag. Some of it seeped into the fabric of the trunk and some of it just sloshed around the back of the car like the fluid inside a snow globe.”
“God, that’s so sad.”
She raised an eyebrow. Sharing with him the moment hadn’t made her sad at all. It actually had made her rather happy. It was something to get off her chest. It was a memory from a place she’d never, ever see again. She looked at the other bartender, a young guy with a string of silver piercings the length of his ear on the other side of Buckley. She gazed at the neon signs for beer and the white lights over the ice trays behind the thick mahogany counter, and she found herself smiling.
“Nah,” she said to him. He was gently rubbing the part of her hand between her thumb and her index finger. “Sad is when the Easter Bunny comes on a Monday. That was way worse.”
“How is that possible?”
She hesitated. Just how much could she wallow in this before it really would ruin their buzz? But then she decided that she didn’t care and plowed ahead. “The Easter Bunny arriving the day after Easter? One year my grandfather had a stroke and my mom had to race to the hospital in Louisville. She was gone the Friday and Saturday before Easter, then Easter Sunday and Monday. And my dad just…just didn’t cope. The good news? With all the chocolate and jelly beans on sale the next day—you know, half and two-thirds off—he bought my sister and me a hell of a lot more candy than the Easter Bunny was ever going to bring.”
Buckley lifted her hands and kissed her fingertips.
“So,” she said. “Are we going to my place or yours?”
* * *
? ?
In the morning she awoke and saw a strip of the Empire State Building through the vertical blinds of her bedroom window. She sensed Buckley beside her in bed, and for a moment she held her breath to listen. She recalled initiating their retreat to his place or hers at the bar, viewing it as a dare of sorts: regardless of where they wound up, she wanted to see if she had become some sort of alcoholic assassin as forty neared, and suddenly she was killing the men with whom she slept. It had been a private challenge of sorts, a deliberate provocation of the soul.
He exhaled and she felt him move, and a little wave of relief left her momentarily giddy. He reached his arm across her hips and belly and pulled her against him.
“Good morning,” he murmured. “But don’t roll over. I have a feeling I have serious morning breath. Serious hangover breath.”
“I probably do, too,” she said, and rose to get them both Advil. She knew he was watching her.
“You’re beautiful naked,” he said.