In place of a dozen comebacks, a shiver of exhaustion rippled through me.
This was my life these days. This.
I left the kitchen. “Best of luck, Brandon.” Halfway down the stairs, I stopped. “By the way, Dominique’s not coming.” I turned back toward the top of the stairs and leaned my elbow on the railing. “And, oh yeah, her name’s not Dominique.”
His flip-flops made a sloppy-wet-kiss noise as he crossed the floorboards and appeared in the doorway above me. “How do you know?”
“Because she works for me, dumbass.”
Chapter Two
After I left Brandon, I met Dominique at the Neptune Oyster in the North End.
When I sat down, she said, “That was fun,” her eyes a bit wider than usual. “Tell me everything that happened when you got to his house.”
“Can we order first?”
“Drinks are already on their way. Dish, dish.”
I told her. Our drinks came, and we found time to scan the menu and decide on lobster rolls. She drank a light beer. I drank sparkling water. I reminded myself it was better for me than beer, particularly in the afternoon. But part of me still felt like a sellout. What I was selling out was less clear to me, but I felt it all the same.
When I finished recounting the tale of my encounter with Brandon Flip-Flops, she clapped her hands and said, “Did you really call him a moron?”
“Called him a few other things, too. Most weren’t complimentary.”
As our lobster rolls arrived, I removed my suit jacket, folded it, and laid it over the arm of the chair to my left.
“I’ll never get used to it,” she said. “You, all dressed up.”
“Yeah, well, it’s not like the old days.” I bit into my lobster roll. Maybe the best lobster roll in Boston, which made it, arguably, the best lobster roll in the world. “It’s not the dressing-up I have a hard time with. It’s the hair care.”
“It’s a nice suit, though.” She touched the sleeve. “Very nice.” She bit into her roll and appraised the rest of me. “Nice tie, too. Your mom pick it out?”
“My wife, actually.”
“That’s right, you’re married,” she said. “Shame.”
“Why’s it a shame?”
“Well, maybe not for you.”
“Or my wife.”
“Or your wife,” she acknowledged. “But some of us remember when you were a lot more, um, playful, Patrick. ’Member those days?”
“I do.”
“And?”
“They seem a lot more fun to remember than they were to live.”
“I don’t know.” She raised one soft eyebrow and took a sip of beer. “I remember you living them pretty well.”
I drank some water. Drained the glass, actually. I refilled it from the overpriced blue bottle they’d left on the table. Not for the first time, I wondered why it was socially acceptable to leave a bottle of water or wine on the table but not a bottle of whiskey or gin.
She said, “You’re not a very polished staller.”
“I wasn’t aware I was stalling.”
“Trust me, you were.”
It’s odd how fast a beautiful woman can turn a guy’s mind into lint storage. Just by being a beautiful woman.
I reached into the inside pocket of my suit jacket. I pulled out an envelope and handed it across the table. “Your payment. Duhamel-Standiford already took out taxes.”
“Thoughtful of them.” She placed it in her purse.
“I don’t know if it’s thoughtful. They’re sticklers for the rules, though.”
“You never were,” she said.
“Things change.”
She considered that and her dark eyes grew darker, sadder. Then her face lit up. She reached into her purse and pulled the check back out. She laid it on the table between us. “I have an idea.”
“No, you don’t.”
“Sure I do. Let’s flip a coin. Heads—you pay for lunch.”
“I’m already paying for lunch.”
“Tails . . .” She tapped a fingernail on the side of her pilsner glass. “Tails—I cash this check and we walk over to the Millennium, get a room, and blow the rest of the afternoon damaging the structural integrity of a box spring.”
I took another drink of water. “I don’t have any change.”
She frowned. “Me, either.”
“Oh, well.”
“Excuse me,” she said to our waiter. “Would you have a quarter we could borrow? Give it right back.”
He handed it to her, a tiny tremor in his fingers for a woman almost twice his age. She could do that, though, unsettle a guy of most any age.
When he walked away, she said, “He was kinda cute.”
“For a zygote.”
“Now now.” She perched the coin on her thumbnail and spring-loaded the thumb against the tip of her index finger. “Call it.”
“I’m not playing,” I said.
“Come on. Call it.”
“I have to get back to work.”
“Play hooky. They won’t know the difference.”
“I’ll know the difference.”
“Integrity,” she said. “How overrated.”
She flicked her thumb and the quarter tumbled toward the ceiling, then tumbled back to the table. It landed on the paycheck, equidistant between my water and her beer.
Heads.
“Shit,” she said.
When the waiter passed, I gave him his quarter back and asked for the check. While he rang up the bill, we didn’t say a word. She finished her light beer. I finished my water. The waiter ran my credit card and I did the math for a good tip. The next time he passed, I handed him the bill.
I looked across the table into her large, almond eyes. Her lips were parted; if you knew where to look you would see a small chip at the bottom of her upper left incisor.
“Let’s do it anyway,” I said.
“The room.”
“Yes.”
“The box spring.”
“Si.”
“Sheets so wrinkled they’ll never be ironed out.”
“Let’s not set the bar too high.”
She flipped open her cell and called the hotel. After a few moments, she said to me, “They have a room.”
“Book it.”
“This is so decadent.”
“It was your idea.”
My wife spoke into the phone. “We’ll take that one if it’s available now.” She gave me another giddy look, as if we were sixteen and borrowing her father’s car without his knowledge. She tilted her jaw back toward the phone. “Last name is Kenzie.” She spelled it out. “Yes. K as in ‘kangaroo.’ First name is Angie.”