On a dramatic wail, Bruce buried his face in his hands.
“He seems really attached to those wigs,” Ryan observed.
The theater was deathly silent for five whole seconds before the rumblings started.
“I’ve got a spare kidney we could sell,” someone offered.
“What about a bake sale?” Charisma Carpenter shouted.
“What if we kidnap the auditor—”
“No! There will be no kidnapping or abducting or organ harvesting,” Beckett said into the microphone.
He handed Bruce over to a very annoyed-looking Rainbow Berkowicz, who patted the sobbing man on the head and looked at her watch.
Fitz, in a cropped wooly sweater that showed an unfortunate amount of belly hair, jumped up from his seat. “Does this mean the apocalypse is back on?”
“That guy has a bunker,” Ryan whispered to Sammy.
“He also terrorizes bachelorette parties as an exotic dancer. How do you know all this?” she asked.
He shrugged and helped himself to more of her popcorn. “I get around.”
“No,” Beckett announced into the microphone. “The apocalypse is not back on.”
“What apocalypse?” Ryan asked.
“We had a teeny tiny issue with Uranus in October,” she told him.
He frowned. “Whose anus?”
“I wore Gene Simmons Kiss makeup to my wedding,” Mason interjected.
“Joey got bangs. Eva got pregnant. Half the town ended up incarcerated in the high school gym,” Sammy said. “It was a whole thing.”
Ryan leaned in closer this time. His knee pressing firmly against hers, lips just a millimeter from the tender skin of her ear lobe. She went from mildly concerned about current events to frantically concerned with the thrumming pulse that had started between her thighs. “You’re fucking with me aren’t you?” he whispered against her ear.
“You wish,” she shot back.
21
Ryan couldn’t decide if she was joking or not. Then decided it didn’t matter because in Blue Moon, anything was possible. But he liked the way the topic made her eyes light up, her lips curve.
Great. Now he was thinking about her mouth again. Which made him think about their kiss yesterday. Which made him think of what else they could have been doing in addition to more kissing. Which made him hard. Again.
“What does all this mean?” called a tall man with an Afro in the back.
“Yeah. Are our kids really gonna be toothless?” asked a woman in a tie-dye onesie from the second row.
“Explain like we’re five,” the teenager next to Gia suggested.
“Good call, Evan,” Beckett said, pointing at the kid. He stalked over to the whiteboard and picked up a marker. “This is Blue Moon,” he said, drawing a circle.
A man with a fanny pack and camera with a telephoto lens jumped up onto the stage and started blasting Beckett with blinding flashes.
“That don’t look like the town limits,” someone yelled from the balcony.
“Pretend,” Beckett said dryly. He ignored the paparazzo and drew a second, bigger circle. “This is the state.”
“How’s come Blue Moon isn’t in the state?” a guy in a straw hat and a Grateful Dead sweatshirt asked.
“Just go with it,” Beckett suggested with what Ryan felt was unwarranted patience. “Every year, the state gives our town money to help fund things like our schools, fire department, police, public buildings.”
The photographer shoved his camera into Beckett’s face and snapped half a dozen shots in rapid succession.
“Like an allowance,” the big, bearded guy on Sammy’s right supplied.
Carter Pierce. Ryan recalled seeing him from a distance… on the back of a horse yesterday.
“Exactly like an allowance,” Beckett said, blinking rapidly. He reached out blindly for the whiteboard, accidentally swiping his dry-erase marker over the camera lens and photographer’s face.
“Hey! Freedom of the press!” the guy yelled.
“That’s Anthony Berkowicz,” Sammy said, leaning in to his side. Her hair smelled like cinnamon. “He’s Rainbow and Gordon’s son and editor of The Monthly Moon.”
“The what?” Ryan knew exactly what The Monthly Moon was, but he liked how it felt to have her leaning against him.
“Town newspaper,” she whispered back.
“I vote that we use our allowance to install heated sidewalks,” a skinny teenager with pink hair and wearing a Nirvana shirt called out.
“I second the motion!”
“That’s not how this works,” Beckett said in exasperation. “The state tells us how we’re allowed to spend our allowance.”
“That doesn’t seem fair,” shouted a woman from the far side of the theater. “I’m tired of shoveling. I vote for heated sidewalks.”
With an exaggerated sigh, Gia stood up and handed Sammy her wiggly toddler. “Hold this, please,” she said, then climbed onto her seat. She stuck her fingers in her mouth and whistled shrilly.
The crowd quieted.
“Listen up, people!” Gia addressed the crowd. “Heated sidewalks mean no school district. No fire trucks. No public library or town parks. So if you want to put all the teachers and support staff out of jobs, drive around potholes that can swallow your Volkswagen, and put out your own fires, by all means, demand heated sidewalks.”
“This is like a soap opera,” Ryan said, leaning in to catch another whiff of Sammy’s hair.
“Yeah, but like a telenovela,” she said, jiggling the kid on her knee. The baby or toddler—Ryan wasn’t sure what the age cutoff was—giggled.
“Do you still want heated sidewalks?” Gia yelled.
“I guess we can go back to shoveling,” someone said.
“Good. Then let’s take a deep, cleansing breath together,” Gia insisted.
“Yoga teacher,” Sammy whispered.
Around them, the audience inhaled noisily and then exhaled, creating an indoor gale-force wind. Blue Moon had an impressive collective lung capacity.
“Good,” Gia said, giving them a curt nod. “Now let’s sit down, shut our faces, and listen to my very handsome husband as he tells us what this means and how he’s going to get us out of it.”
There was scattered applause as Gia regained her seat. Someone in the sound booth played a few bars of “Respect” by Aretha Franklin.
“Hang in there with me for just another minute, folks,” Beckett begged. “The state is sending an auditor to Blue Moon.” He drew a stick figure.
“How come the auditor has three legs?”
“Maybe that’s not a leg.”
Beckett erased the third leg and soldiered on. “If we can’t prove that we spent our allowance in the places the state said we could, we will lose all of that funding for next year and we may be responsible for paying this year’s funding back to the state.”
“That sounds bad,” someone called.
“Yes. It is very, very, very bad,” Beckett verified. He drew a big frowny face on the whiteboard.
“Mama, that’s just like the sticker I get at school for talking too much,” Aurora whisper-yelled to Gia.