Book of Night(17)

In the kitchen, Don argued with his girlfriend, Erin. They were a dramatic couple, prone to tears and shouting about which had been mean to the other first. Don was a bartender at Top Hat, a nice place, one of the first Charlie had been fired from.

She poured four fingers of Old Crow bourbon into a plastic cup and sidled past Don and Erin to get some ice from the freezer before she remembered there wasn’t any. She settled for a little cold water to cut the burn. Don bent his head to hide that he was wiping his eyes.

At least it wasn’t her crying in the kitchen this time.

“Charlie Hall!” José called. “Long time. You don’t like us anymore?”

He was standing in a little knot with Katelynn and Suzie Lambton, who had made that comment to Doreen about Charlie being like the devil.

“Have you heard from him?” José demanded as she approached them. He worked at a tiny gay bar called Malebox, where he’d met his ex, the one who’d moved to Los Angeles for a guy and stuck Charlie with double shifts.

Charlie shook her head. “But Odette might have an address to send his last check on file, if you want to send him a haunted object or something. Or there’s a service that ships packages filled with glitter to your enemies. They don’t call it the herpes of crafting for nothing.”

He gave her a wan smile but was clearly sunk in misery. “He’s probably basking in the sun, happy, eating avocados off the trees in his backyard, having sex with a hot surfer every night. Meanwhile, I will never find love.”

“I told you,” Katelynn said, “I’ll fix you up with my cousin.”

“Isn’t he the one who ate a dead moth off the bathroom floor?” José raised his eyebrows.

“As a child! You can’t hold that against him,” Katelynn protested.

“I should just get a gloom to cut my feelings right out of me,” José declared dramatically. “Maybe then I’d be happy.”

“You can’t be happy without feelings,” Katelynn said, pedantic to the end.

Charlie appeared to have arrived at the exact point in the night when everyone had drunk too much and become either belligerent or morose. She slung back the Old Crow. She’d better catch up.

“I heard Doreen was looking for you,” Suzie said as Katelynn and José continued to argue over whether a mouth tainted by a moth could ever be enjoyably kissed. Suzie had on a billowy-sleeved dress in a yellow pattern and a large, chunky necklace. Her dark hair was pulled up into a tortoiseshell clip. She wore the kind of thrift store finds that cost more than new clothes.

Some of the people at the party might have heard that Charlie had “fixed things” for someone in a jam, or had a vaguely criminal side gig, but were light on the details. They saw what they expected to see: Charlie Hall, perennial fuck-up, who had a hard time holding down a job and was willing to make out when she got really drunk.

Suzie Lambton knew a little more. When she was at Hampshire, a professor had tried to have her tossed out for plagiarizing a paper. Charlie found the way to change his mind.

She shrugged. “Adam’s in the wind. She wants me to find him for her. Convince him to go home.”

“If I were you, I wouldn’t get involved in his mess,” Suzie told her. “When people get to a certain age, either they change or they curdle. He’s pushing thirty and wants to live like he’s twenty. Wants to come into work drunk from the night before, gamble, that kind of shit. I’m going on a yoga retreat next weekend. You should come with me instead.”

“Too late,” Charlie said, lifting her plastic cup in a salute. “To wise advice and bad decisions.”

Suzie, who probably had plagiarized her paper, raised her glass.

Vince rolled up a half hour later, with orange juice and ice, having received Charlie’s text that the party was low on both.

She went over and hugged him, burying her face in the wool of his coat. It carried the scent of leaves and cold night air. A small smile lifted one corner of his mouth, and she felt a swell of strange, bittersweet longing for someone who was already hers.

Tina, who worked at the Hampshire Gazette and drank like a journalist in a movie, was loudly musing about getting her shadow altered to have a cat tail. “Guys love a tail,” Tina proclaimed, to protests by nearly everyone. Aimee thought Tina shouldn’t consider fetishes along a gender binary. Ian wanted it to be known that he thought it was disgusting, and that men did not want to molest animals. The artist agreed it was kind of hot, but his comic was about saucy mice.

Charlie told Tina that she had maybe misunderstood what “getting some tail” actually meant.

“Mermaids, right?” Vince asked, in such a clueless just-joined-the-conversation tone that it was hard to know if he was joking, or if he’d misheard the earlier part.

It didn’t matter. Everyone laughed. It was funny either way.

As Charlie poured more bourbon—with ice this time—she decided she was glad she’d come. She was just buzzed enough to feel an expansive warmth for the people in the room. See, she was fine being a normal person and doing normal-person things. She ate some cheese that Tina made from the milk of her own goats and which no one had the heart to tell her tasted weird, and smiled for absolutely no reason.

Then she heard Ian, speaking loudly enough to drown out the Sonos. “Hey, Vince. What’s the worst thing you’ve ever seen at that job of yours?” His tone made it into a challenge.