I shifted to get under the blanket with him. “I hate that show.”
Dave shook his head confidently. “You only think you hate it until you watch it, and then you’re telling me how you could survive in the wilderness because you read My Side of the Mountain and you know how to identify mushrooms.”
“I don’t want to watch TV.” I rolled over and rubbed my cheek against his shoulder. “I want to kiss you.”
Dave raised his eyebrows. “What kind of kiss?”
“A full-on high-school make-out session,” I said. “I want to put a hickey on your neck.”
He laughed. “Everyone at work will make fun of me for being fourteen.”
My heart seized. “Too bad.” I climbed into his lap and put my arms around his neck. “I’m your wife, and that’s what I want.”
He tilted his chin up, and I leaned down to press my lips to his. He tasted like rum, and something else, slightly tangy.
“We need to be doing this in a movie theater,” he mumbled against my mouth. “For realism. Go get your toe ring and chew some bubble gum.”
I wrinkled my nose. “What do you do with the gum? Do you pass it back and forth?”
Dave snorted. “What a goody-goody. You were studying while I was gaining all this knowledge. No, you stick it on your finger so you can chew it after you’re done.”
“That’s disgusting,” I breathed.
“It’s conserving resources.” He pulled me back in. We kissed until I forgot about the bubble gum and reached for him, stroking his face.
“I love you,” I said without meaning to.
Something about my expression must have been off. He tilted his head. “I love you too, baby,” he said. “What’s wrong?”
I opened my mouth and said nothing, as I always did, as I’d been doing for months and months. I took a deep breath. “Sorry. I’m just tired. Robin’s not home yet. I don’t know where she went.” I untangled myself from Dave and reached for my phone. Where are you? I texted again.
Sunset grille & bar makin lots of friendsss, she texted back instantly.
“Is that her?” Dave peered over my shoulder.
“She always does this,” I said. “I have to—I have to go get her. I’ll be back soon.”
“Are you okay?”
“Yeah.” I pushed my hair off my face and got out of bed. “I’m fine. She just needs a ride. She’s all the way across town. Stay here with the monitor, okay?” She was going to fuck everything up.
“I could go get her if you want,” Dave offered. “You’re tired.”
“No,” I said. “You’ve been out all evening. You don’t need to go out again.”
He didn’t answer. I watched him reach for the remote.
* * *
—
I’d never been to Sunset before. It was on Lomas, near the Downs, with one of those plain white signs on the façade. $2.50 Michelob. There was an older bald man in a denim jacket standing beside the front door, thumbing through his phone. He gave me a once-over as I passed him.
The Sunset’s ceiling hung low over a collection of red vinyl seats and tabletops. The middle of the room had been cleared for dancing, but no one danced. A carpeted stage, full of amps and wires, with a screen and a mic for karaoke, overlooked the bar, and a woman with round-brush bangs presided, belting “Last Night I Didn’t Get to Sleep at All” to a group of friends leaning against the pool table. I scanned the room for Mary’s blond head and spotted her down by the L-shaped bar at the far end of the room, where several old men in ball caps shifted on their black barstools. She and a man with broad shoulders and a ponytail were bent over one of the nearby tabletops, holding hands.
I had to walk across the dance floor to reach them, and my heeled loafers made it sound like there were a dozen of me. The women by the pool table stared, but Mary didn’t seem to notice me.
“Okay, so see this joint, and how long it is? That means you’re really logical, and you need to be careful to listen to your emotions more.” She said this last part gravely. She was reading the man’s palm, I realized.
“Mary?”
They looked up. Mary was still holding his hand, and she squeezed it when she saw me. “Leslie! You got my text!”
“I sent you a dozen texts,” I said as calmly as I could. “You weren’t answering. You said you’d be back for dinner.”
“Oh, I ate,” she told me. “You don’t have to worry about me. Come sit with us! Amos, Leslie. Leslie, Amos. Amos, can you get my sister a drink too?”
Amos’s shoulder jerked, and then he grinned. “Nice to meet you, Leslie. What’ll it be?”
Mary jumped in. “She wants what I got. Two more.”
“I need my hand back for that,” Amos said.
Mary laughed and released him to the bar, then patted the vinyl seat beside her as the woman on the makeshift stage fitted the microphone back in its stand with a crackle of feedback.
I shook my head. “Let’s just go home.”
“Aw, you don’t want to go home.” Mary shook her head at me. “I can see it in your face. You want to stay here with me and have a gin and tonic on Amos. Rough day?”
The bar was briefly quiet while the next woman got up on the stage and adjusted the karaoke screen. I hesitated, then pulled out the chair with a scrape, and sat down. Mary gave a little hoot of approval. “What are you doing here? With…Amos?” I asked quietly, my gaze drifting toward the ponytail bending over the bar, trying to get the bartender’s attention.
“He paid me to read his palm,” Mary said. “I charge twenty bucks per. Guess how much I made today.” She grabbed my wrist and pushed my hand into her purse, sitting on the chair beside me. My fingers felt a crumpled nest of bills. I pulled my hand away.
“I—” The next song started, something I didn’t know, classic rock. Mary looked at me. She was red-cheeked, her light hair fluffy at the ends, lips chapped and free of lipstick. She smelled a little sour, like she’d been out in the rain. “I don’t know if I can do this,” I said, instead of telling her she shouldn’t read people’s palms at a bar, which had been my first instinct. It seemed like such an intimate thing to do for a stranger. But she had read my palm too, when we’d met. And I had been a stranger then. It wasn’t even what I had come here to be upset about.
“Do what?” Mary asked, sucking on the dregs of her old gin and tonic. Several soggy citrus slices sagged at the bottom of the drink. She dug one out and picked off a little string of lime flesh.