The Better Liar(64)

“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 fa?ade. $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.

“The whole thing,” I said. “Dinner with Albert…I didn’t know it would take this long.”

Mary slipped the lime flesh into her mouth and licked her lips. “It was your idea.”

“I know. But not like this. I didn’t know where you were today.”

“So are you—”

Amos set two highball glasses in front of us. “That took forever.”

Mary grinned at him. “Amos, you owe me twenty dollars, please.”

“I thought the reading came free with the purchase of drinks,” he suggested.

She shook her head. “I figured that was just your generous nature, right?”

He stared at her, and then decided to laugh, digging a couple of tens out of his wallet. “I’m trying to keep listening to my emotions,” he told her. “Like you said.” He leaned across the table as Mary stuffed the bills into her purse and zipped it up.

“Oh, I’m so glad you heard me, Amos,” she told him, leaning back in her seat. “I could feel it when we were holding hands, that you were really listening to me. Now I need to talk to my sister. She’s having a personal moment. Could you give us some time?”