The Better Liar(65)

    “We weren’t done,” Amos said. “You only did one of my hands.”

“They match, honey,” she said. “We’re bilaterally symmetric, like moths.”

“I want my drink back, then,” he said, and reached for the highball glass. Mary leaned over and spat in it.

“What are you—?”

Mary slid my glass over to her and spat in that one too.

“I’m leaving,” Amos said, and scraped his chair back, adjusted his ponytail, and flung himself toward the bar.

Mary pushed my gin and tonic back across the table and motioned for me to drink it. I stared at her. “I’m not sick,” she said. “Don’t worry.”

I left the glass where it was. “What was that for?”

She stuck the straw in her mouth. “I got you a drink. For free. He’s a drip, he won’t be back.” She chewed her straw and regarded me cautiously. “I did it all the time when I used to go out in Vegas.”

“Albuquerque isn’t Vegas.”

Mary seemed to relax. “I know. I’ve barely even thought about Sam or Paul since I came here.”

“You don’t think Sam would come after you, do you?” I asked, feeling myself soften. I remembered Mary’s face as she’d been crushed to his chest outside the restaurant.

“He misses this,” she said, unzipping her purse and pulling out a handful of cash, then letting it flutter back inside. A few men at the bar, including a red-faced Amos, watched her do it. Mary propped her chin on her palm. “Otherwise, there’s nobody in the world who would notice if I disappeared right now. Except you. You came all the way out to the bar to look for me. You could have just texted me ‘Get your ass back home, young lady.’?”

“I was worried about you,” I said. “You never tell me where you’re going.”

Mary gave me a brilliant smile and downed the rest of her drink in one long effort. “Last week no one was worried about me. And last week no one knew you were deep in some shit you couldn’t talk about. So we’re both a little better off than we were, huh?”

    “Don’t disappear,” I said. “Not until after the dinner.”

Mary reached for my gin and tonic. “Then don’t chicken out. Deal?”

I nodded.

She rested her slightly damp head on my shoulder and reached up to touch my earlobe. “What happened to those earrings you had on?”

I opened my mouth to reply but was drowned out by the bartender’s voice over the sound system saying, “Uh, ‘Careless Whisper’?”

“That’s me!” Mary announced, and bounced up from the table, jostling the remaining glasses with a clatter. “I’ll be right back.” I touched my ear uncomfortably.

She crossed the blond-wood dance floor, shuffling a little in her Adidas. When she got onstage, the knot of women by the pool table stopped their game to watch her adjust her polo dress and bend to tie her fluffy hair up into a topknot. “Okay, I’m ready,” she said into the mic, over the opening saxophone.

She caught on to the beat a little late, closing her eyes and swaying, forgetting to open them again until the second line had scrolled over the karaoke screen, throwing blue-and-white light across the planes of her face. The woman who’d been singing when I arrived shouted the first line to her, too late; Mary laughed and started in the middle, stumbling until she caught up with the verse. She had a decent voice, a little scratchy, higher than I would have predicted. But her face was the reason to watch her. I’d never seen her on a stage before, and even the weak light of the karaoke screen picked out her features in a way that seemed to spotlight her on purpose. She wanted my attention, leaned toward it; when the chorus hit she opened her eyes wide and pointed at me, motioning for me to sing along.

I thought: She reminds me of…, groping for an actress, and then recalled what she’d told me in the hotel room, how people always did that to her, comparing her to all the other beautiful people whose faces began to run together. I never reminded people of anybody but myself. I wondered if it was better to look like what you were. I felt glass-faced, transparent; it was only because nobody looked at me that no one had seen through me yet.

    I didn’t sing along. I couldn’t. The rest of the room joined in, and Mary turned away from me, soaking it up, pink spreading across her cheekbones. She opened her arms as if to embrace them.

A door opened and closed behind me, barely audible over George Michael. I glanced over my shoulder and saw the man in the denim jacket from outside talking with an older man behind the bar who must have been the manager. Amos hovered at his elbow. We made brief eye contact.

As Mary hit the second chorus, the man in the denim jacket strode across the dance floor and onto the stage. “Hi there,” Mary said into the mic.

He ducked his head and tried to speak into her ear, but she shimmied away from him, pulling the mic from its stand. “Guilty feet have got no rhythm,” she sang to him playfully.

I clenched my jaw as his face darkened, reaching for my phone instinctively. But who did I think I was going to call? Amos approached the stage, brushing past me. Mary saw him coming and dragged the mic down the stage steps, darting behind one of the women at the pool table. She motioned for me to leave in the split second that Amos and the bouncer couldn’t see her. Her purse with the money in it was still sitting on the table in front of me, and I stumbled to my feet, trying to zip it closed.