Mrs. Fletcher(49)

She’s okay, he texted back. Except that she gave birth to a raging asshole *

The bar wasn’t all that crowded on a Tuesday night, but it was pretty noisy, with classic rock blasting in the background, songs that Eve remembered from high school—Aerosmith and Led Zeppelin and “Little Pink Houses”—more than a few of which inspired Barry and Russ to trade high fives or break out their air guitars. Eve hated most of those songs—cock rock, her college friends used to call it—but the lyrics were permanently engraved in her memory, courtesy of every boyfriend she’d ever had.

Snot running down his nose! Greasy fingers smearing shabby clo-hoes!

That awful Jethro Tull song came on while Professor Fairchild told Eve about her mother’s death, which happened just a few months after Margo—they were on a first-name basis now—had completed her transition. It was one of those freak things, a stubborn cold that somehow turned into drug-resistant pneumonia. Her mother went to the emergency room, complaining of a nagging cough and shortness of breath, and twelve hours later she was on a ventilator, unable to speak, drifting in and out of consciousness. She rallied a little right before she died, just long enough to scribble a final message to the daughter who had once been a son.

You are confused, she wrote, in a weak and trembling hand. You need to wake up and smell the coffee!

“Those were her dying words.” Margo tried to smile, but couldn’t complete the mission. “Right after I told her how much I loved her. You need to wake up and smell the coffee! I’ll never forgive her for that.”

“You should try,” Eve told her. “It’s unhealthy to resent the dead.”

Margo knew this was true. “I wish I could talk to her one more time. Just to make her understand that this is me. Not that sad little boy living inside the wrong body. But she’d probably just hurt my feelings all over again. She used to say such horrible things.”

“I know how that goes,” Eve said. “I work with older people. You wouldn’t believe the stuff that comes out of their mouths.”

“Oh, I believe it,” Margo said. “But my mother was a schoolteacher. She was not an ignorant woman. She just refused to accept my experience and acknowledge my pain.”

“She loved her little boy.” It was strange how clear this was to Eve, though she’d never even met the woman. “She didn’t know how to think about you any other way.”

Margo drank the last sip of wine in her glass.

“She never really knew me. My own mother. Isn’t that terrible?”

Margo buried her face in her hands. After a moment of hesitation, Eve reached out and began rubbing the professor’s shoulder, aware as she did so that everyone else at the table was watching them with a mixture of concern and discomfort.

“Something wrong?” asked Dumell.

Eve shrugged—of course something was wrong—but Margo raised her head and told him that she was fine.

“Don’t mind me,” she said, wiping her eyes and mustering an embarrassed smile. “I just get emotional when I drink.”

“There’s only one cure for that.” Barry waved his hand, signaling to the bartender. “Yo, Ralphie! Another round for my friends.”

*

Russ had switched to Diet Coke, and everyone else at the table was drinking wine or hard liquor—trying to get the most bang from Barry’s buck—so Julian had the second pitcher all to himself. It was a lot of beer for one person, but he was approaching a level of intoxication where finishing it on his own seemed like a matter of personal honor. To make it official, he texted a pic to Ethan before he poured the first glass: the sweaty plastic vessel filled to the brim, his own liquid Mount Everest.

60 oz bro wish me luck!!!

“You texting or listening?” Dumell asked.

“Both,” said Julian, but he put down his phone and turned his full attention back to his real-life companion, who was telling him about Iraq, which was not a subject Julian got to hear about every day, at least not from someone who’d actually been there.

Not that it was all that exciting, apparently. Dumell said it was mostly boring as shit, due to the fact that he was an auto mechanic, not a combat soldier. He spent most of his tour sweating in a repair shop, changing oil and brake pads, replacing spark plugs and rotating tires, the same routine tasks he now performed every day at Warren Reddy Subaru in Elmville. Every once in a while, though, he got sent out in a tow truck to pick up a disabled vehicle that had been hit by an IED or an RPG.

“That’s when shit got real,” he said. “You’re driving through that desert, totally fucking exposed, just waiting for something to explode. Every pothole feels like the end of the world, know what I’m saying?”

Weirdly, Julian thought he did, though he’d never been near a war zone, and had never seen anything blow up that was bigger than a firecracker, except on a screen.

“Anything bad happen?”

“Not to me. Just did my job and came home.”

“Must’ve been a relief.”

“You would think so. But I didn’t . . . readjust too good. Couldn’t sleep, couldn’t hold a job. Marriage fell apart. Scared all the time. Like I was still out in the desert, driving through a minefield.”

“That sucks.”

“PTSD,” Dumell explained. “That’s what the doctors say. But it doesn’t make any sense. I was lucky. Came home in one piece. Ain’t got shit to complain about.”