The Hopefuls(24)

“No,” he said, sadly, “I guess it won’t.”

Matt had even begun to think about what he wanted to do next, talking to people about different opportunities. This seemed a little crazy to me, since he’d just started his job, but I didn’t know then that this was just part of DC, that everyone was always looking ahead to the next step, peeking around to see what other people were doing, calculating the next move.

—

Every time I started to get up to go back to the kitchen, Ash would say, “Oh, just stay a few more minutes! We’re still filling up on the puffs.” Maybe she was trying to be friendly, or maybe she didn’t want to be left alone with Colleen, who was still grilling Jimmy. After a while, I didn’t even move when I said, “I should start the chicken.”

What we learned that night was that Jimmy was from Texas, but also sort of wasn’t. “I was born there,” he said, when Colleen pressed him. “In Houston. And I lived there until I was about eight and then we moved to a few different places before moving back.”

“Where?” Colleen asked.

“Well, we were in New York for a year and then we went to London because my dad opened up a branch of the firm out there. But we always kept the ranch in Johnson City and spent Thanksgiving and Christmas there each year. And then we moved back to Houston when I was in high school and my parents are still there.”

“So you went to high school in Houston?”

“No, I went to Choate.”

“Jesus Christ.” Colleen laughed. “You realize you’re basically W, right? You’re from Texas, but you’re not really from Texas.”

“I’m from Texas,” Jimmy said. For a second, I saw his eyes flicker with annoyance, but then he smiled. “Once you’re born there, that’s it. Texas forever.”

“How very Friday Night Lights of you,” Colleen said. She looked at him for a second, but then she decided to drop it and smiled too. “Speaking of which, if you ever run into Tim Riggins, call me immediately.”

—

You shouldn’t have a dinner party and not feed your guests for the first three hours. Lesson learned. By the time I went to the kitchen to cook the chicken, I’d lost count of how many drinks I’d had. I stood in front of the stove and closed one eye to concentrate and stop the pan from moving. I wondered if this ever happened to Ina Garten while she was waiting for Jeffrey to come home and decided it definitely did.

We ran out of vodka, so Matt went to the liquor store across the street to get a new bottle. I was a little appalled we’d gone through the whole thing, but Colleen kept saying, “Relax, it’s Friday night.” Matt came back to find me standing over the stove with one eye closed, and put his arm around my waist and kissed my neck, which is how I knew he was drunk too. I don’t have the faintest idea of what dinner tasted like. The last thing I remember is hugging Colleen good-bye, while we told each other how happy we were to be living in the same city again. Bruce was standing by the door, getting impatient, and he said, “Look at you two, you look like a couple of lesbians,” which made me realize he was also the kind of person who would get racist after a bottle of wine.

—

The next morning, I was drinking coffee and feeling out my hangover when Colleen called to talk about the dinner.

“What’s Jimmy’s deal?” she asked. “He’s so on all the time. I kept wanting to tell him to relax.”

“I like him,” I said.

“No, he’s nice. It’s just…there’s something about him, you know? Like his whole, ‘I’m a Texan’ thing. It feels a little over the top. He said something about a talking coon in a tree last night. Like, okay, we get it. You’re super-Texan.”

I tried not to laugh. What Jimmy had said was, “She could talk a coon out of a tree,” and he’d been referring to Colleen, who was going on and on about all the problems she saw with the healthcare law, talking over anyone who tried to interject.

“And her? Beth, she’s so weird. She seems like the kind of person who would be in a crafting group or really into scrapbooking or something like that. When you were in the kitchen, she told me how happy and blessed she was to have met you, and then she said, ‘Praise God.’?”

“Yeah, she’s really religious,” I said.

“Normal religious or religious like she’s in a cult? I’m guessing the cult.”

“Okay, I get your point. You didn’t like her, but remember you didn’t like me at first either.” Colleen and I were freshman-year roommates, but she barely paid any attention to me for the first month of school. She came to school knowing a few people from Long Island, and always had parties and bars to go to (she had a fake ID, I did not) and she never invited me. It wasn’t until she threw up in her bed one night, after returning home drunk, and I helped her that she even talked to me. I had to prop her up and change her sheets and she was disobedient and annoying, and I told her she was disgusting. The next morning, I woke up to her eating Cheerios on her bed (Colleen never got hungover), and she smiled at me. “You told me I was like a pig in slop last night,” she said. “You were,” I told her, and she laughed. “You’re funny,” she said, and after that we were somehow unexpectedly friends.

On the other end of the phone, Colleen sniffed. “That’s not true, I just didn’t know you. You barely talked when we first met. And even then, I knew you weren’t a total freak.”