Excerpt: You're a Good Man, Charlie Stokes (aka Everything is Fine Until It Isn't, Part II)

I stared glumly out the window as Neil pulled away from the curb and drove down the street, the taxi chugging along like it was on its dying breath, but intent upon not giving up on the ghost until it could see the farm just one last time.
“So,” said Neil when we’d gotten safely away from Lisa’s apartment building and—hopefully—any crazy girlfriends that might be lurking in the vicinity thereof. “I’m starved. Wanna get some breakfast?”
Covering my eyes with my hands, I slunk down even farther in my sleet. “Just take me to work, Neil.”
“Sure, sure,” said Neil. He was silent for a moment, even though I could hear the thoughts percolating in his brain like a drip coffee-maker. “So that’s a ‘no’ on breakfast, then?”
I didn’t dignify that with a response, and fifteen minutes later, I was getting out of the cab at the office. As the car squealed away, the opening strains of Rush’s ‘Tom Sawyer’ resonated outwards, like ripples in a pond, causing several nearby windows to vibrate precariously. If I could have ducked my head any more, I would have been a turtle sticking it in back into his shell.
Foregoing the stairs for the luxury of elevator, I made my way into the office and to my desk, just around the time I’d normally arrive for work. Anton was leaning against the wall of Jim’s half cube, cradling a coffee mug in his hands. He raised his eyebrows as I plopped down in my chair and fired up my computer.
“Still showing up for work, Charles?” He shook his head. “You’re a better man than I.”
I stared at my computer as it ticked away at the boot sequence. “Sadly enough, I have nowhere better to be.”
Jim leaned back in his chair, toying with a pencil. “That’s actually pretty sad.”
I spun a forefinger in the air. “It’s just a goddamn party in here every day.”
Anton gave a nervous glance over his shoulder, like the gestapo—or worse, François himself—was about to leap out of the supply closet. “I hear they still want you to finish the forum project.”
To the program’s credit, the desk they’d given me was actually quite nice: a wood finish over metal chassis. It would be a shame to dent the wood by bashing my head into it.
“Yeah,” I said. “Guess I’m just lucky they didn’t ask me to solve world hunger while I was at it.” My stomach turned over as I thought about the work of the day before me and I felt like a deep-sea diver who’s just realized he’s literally in over his head. I’d gotten to work five minutes ago, and already I couldn’t take another second of being there.
“I need a cup of coffee,” I said, jumping up from the chair and pulling my coat back on. “Be right back.”
Anton pointed to his mug. “You know we have coffee here, right?”
“Only if you’re being terribly, horribly literal about it,” I pointed out as I left the room.
Pushing the door to the hallway open, I nearly collided with a bundled-up figure entering: Annette.
“Morning, Charlie,” she said as she unwound a long scarf, her cheeks still glowing red from the temperature outdoors. She touched my arm, her expression concerned. “About last night,” she started.
I waved a hand. “No biggie,” I said, my mouth running on autopilot as my brain struggled to catch up. “Everything’s fine. I just had somewhere I needed to be.” I realized as I was talking that I was still walking, though I’d turned backwards to face her, as she held the door open.
Annette looked confused, an expression that on her was only marginally less fetching than outright perplexity, and she opened her mouth to say something else, which I waved off with a hand as I backed into the elevator. “Really, don’t worry about it.”
“But, I—” Whatever she’d been about to say was lost to me as the elevator chimed and the door slid closed on her. It’d probably been something about as pleasantly ambiguous as always: how she wished I’d stayed longer, or how her cad of a boyfriend had been too busy paying attention to the game on the television. Regardless, I felt pretty much the same about that that I did about work: I’d had it up to here and, in the words of Paddy Chayefsky, I wasn’t going to take it any more. That was my life there, and I didn’t want it anymore—didn’t want to be there anymore.
The elevator hit the ground floor and I strode—purposefully, if I may be allowed to qualify—out the door, up the street, and into the Filler-Up, luxuriating briefly in the blast of hot, humid air that hit me as I strode in.
The customer ahead of me was just leaving, so I sidled up to the counter where Li, May’s husband, was filing some bills away in the register. He looked up and grinned. “Charlie Chan,” he said—for some reason, he and May found that nickname hilarious. “How’s it going?”
Li couldn’t be more May’s opposite: where she was short and plump, he was tall and slender—a former high school basketball player who’d found the love of his life and his life’s work, as well as producing two adorable children. He was also pretty good-looking—or at least so May and my other female acquaintances assured me—and, most infuriating of all, a genuinely nice guy. He drew me a tall to-go cup of my usual and set it down on the counter.
“May told me about your situation,” he said. “Any ideas?”
I sighed. “Your wife is great, but she can be a pain in the ass.”
“Tell me about it,” said Li. “She’s got this annoying habit of being right about everything. Drives me nuts.” He threw up his hands in mock frustration.
The steam rose out of the coffee in front of me, undulating in hypnotic waves that seemed to somehow pulse in time with the smell wafting my way. “I don’t even like my job,” I muttered. “Why is this such a big deal?”
Li shrugged. “Change is never fun when it’s not on your terms.”
Brown eyes that were home to all the hurt in the world stared accusingly at me through a pair of glasses. Even when it was on your terms, change wasn’t fun.
“I had a dream about running a café the other night,” I said, blatantly changing the subject.
“Yeah?” said Li. “You’d drink yourself out of business.”
I pulled out my wallet and passed Li a five. “Probably. I don’t know—it was more vivid than a dream, somehow.”
“Ah,” said Li, making a knowing look. “The culture of my homeland would tell you that it was a premonition of your future.”
“You grew up in New Jersey,” I pointed out.
“I did,” said Li. “Where I watched a whole lot of really cheesy movies that would agree with me that what you saw was the future.”
“I’m going to run a café?” I said, looking around disbelievingly. It seemed like a pretty daunting task to me.
“Well, maybe not literally,” said Li, as he handed me my change. “How did you feel?”
I thought back, even though the dream itself had deteriorated into flashes and fantasy in the intervening time, but it wasn’t hard to remember how I’d felt. It was the one thing that still stuck with me, even if it had faded a bit, like one of those old Polaroid photographs from my youth.
“Happy.”
Li looked at me significantly, a glance that said ‘see?’
“Yeah, yeah,” I said, waving at him. “It was just a dream.”
But even as I said it, something was resonating far more deeply with me. Dreams were meaningful, and not just in the current psychological understanding of their relationship to the subconscious and your hopes and desires, but also narratively significant. In the vocabulary of stories, dreams were premonitions, warnings, hints of what was to come. That none of mine had ever served in that capacity for me did little to dispel the thought that one someday might.
Leaning his elbow on the counter, Li rested his chin on his hand and stared at the window. Outside, a woman pushed an empty baby stroller past as a child cavorted in her wake, snatching at an errant leaf, dancing like flame on the wind.
There’d been a kid in that dream, too. With an anonymous mother, the very thought of whom caused my heart to thump loudly in my chest. Did she even exist? If so, how was I supposed to find her when I had nothing more to go on than a vague feeling of contentment. Would a name and address have been too much to ask? I’d have taken an e-mail or phone number.
I lifted the cup of coffee to my mouth absently and took a swig, grimacing as it burned my tongue. “Geez, Li,” I said, fanning my mouth. “Stick an ice cube in there next time.”
“Take it outside,” Li suggested. “That’ll cool it down real quick.”
I was about to fire back a witty retort—I had a half dozen chambered and ready to go, I assure you—when my pocket started to buzz, meaning I’d either accidentally picked up a defibrillator that morning, or, far more likely, my cell phone wanted my attention. I nodded to Li and pulled it out, then grimaced.
It was a text message from Rachel, and it was brief. ‘Lunch, 1PM, Sugar Snap.’
It didn’t exactly leave a lot of things open for interpretation, more’s the pity. Even a question mark would have given me some leverage. I sighed and punched out a response, something to the effect that I’d be there and that wild dogs could not have prevented me.
Of course, the reason wild dogs couldn’t have prevented me was mainly because if Rachel was pissed off, not showing up for lunch would have been way more dangerous than facing a pack of wild dogs.

I went back to the office and pretended to work until lunch. Instead, I surfed the web and watched YouTube videos until my eyes felt like they were bugging out of my head. In those brief moments of downtime in between five minute clips of cats playing the piano and kids re-enacting their favorite fight scenes, I mainly concentrated on how much I hated the project and counted the days before I could get out of this dump.
A little before one, I slid back from my desk and made for the door, without much of a word to anybody. I was halfway out of the office when a voice called my name.
“Charlie!”
I craned my neck over my shoulder. Annette again. She was standing down the hallway, her hands practically wringing each other like a manual washing machine.
Now, my fascination with stories has made me quite the connoisseur of psychology—not clinical, mind you, but casual. Usually, I’ve got a pretty good idea of what people are thinking from contexts and cues, or at least their mood. This one, though, had me stumped. She was clearly concerned about something, but I couldn’t for the life of me guess what it might be.
“What’s up?”
“Are you going to lunch?” she said, nodding at the door.
“Yeah.”
“Oh.” She sounded disappointed. “I thought I would see if you were going.”
Any other day, I would have waded through a crowd of ‘roided-up brusiers with pipes and brass kunckles to have lunch with Annette—but the consequences of missing Rachel, especially after the havoc I’d apparently wreaked, still frightened me more.
“Uh. Well.Yeah, I am. But I’ve got to meet someone.”
“Okay,” she said. “Another time?”
“Sure,” I said. “We’ll raincheck.” I glanced at the clock in the hall and waved abruptly. “Sorry, I gotta run.”
Dashing out the door and down the stairs, I hit the street and power-walked to the restaurant.
Sugar Snap was a Thai place about half a mile from my office which, coincidentally, was about half a mile from Rachel’s office in the other direction. It made a natural meeting place, and we’d often grabbed lunch there, sometimes with Sim when he had an afternoon class.
Today, though, it was just going to be the two of us. I saw her seated at a table by herself when I walked past the window, stirring a small teacup, so I nodded to the hostess and found my way to the table.
Rachel looked up as I pulled out the chair; the bags under her eyes were heavy enough that flight attendants would have made you check them through.
“Hi,” I said, as I pulled off my coat, as smoothly as possible, unable to entirely dismiss the possibility she might take advantage of my momentary vulnerability to head-butt me or punch me in the stomach. But whatever tendencies towards hooliganism she might have felt, she refrained, just gave me a look like reheated leftover death, with a cold side of maiming.
“Charles,” she said, slightly drawing out the sibilance of the last letter in a manner that would have seemed drunk on anybody else, but just sounded menacing instead.
I scratched the back of my head, painfully aware I wasn’t sitting against a wall.
“How’s it going?” I said, as I reached for the menu.
“Not well,” she said, her eyes still on my face. “Not well at all.”
Clearing my throat, I nodded and flipped through the yellow pages of the menu, even though I knew it by heart. “Sorry to hear that?” I offered.
She picked up the teacup with both hands, and leveled a stare at me over the menu. When she spoke, it was in a quiet and even tone that you had to pay hard attention just to make it out. “I’m glad to hear that you’re sorry, Charles. Now, I take it that you already know the situation, because given that I asked Sim to leave last night, there’s only one place that he’d go and that’s to your house.”
“That would be accurate.”
“So,” she said, and no doubt would have said more had our peppy waitress not showed up at that exact moment. She was short, blond, and fairly attractive if you like them short and blond.
“Hi!” she chirped. “Can I tell you today’s specials?”
“Vegetable soup,” said Rachel, her eyes not leaving mine. “Pad thai with crispy chicken.”
“Uh,” said our waitress, clearly thrown wildly off her stride. She tried to find the track from which she’d been derailed. “Our specials are—”
“I’d just write down her order,” I said, with my best apologetic smile. “She’s a little under the weather.”
Rachel’s stare sparked at me like tinfoil in the microwave.
“I’ll have the pad-see-ew with tofu,” I said, snapping the menu shut and handing it to our waitress, who had upgraded from derailed to distraught.
She fumbled. “Our spec—”
“Enough with the specials,” snapped Rachel, garnering the attention of several of the other restaurant patrons. She pointed to herself. “Vegetable soup and pad thai with crispy chicken.” Then the finger turned back to me. “Pad-see-ew with tofu. Thank you.”
Wide-eyed, the waitress nodded and bustled off.
“Easy, Rach,” I said. “No need to bite her head off.”
“You’re right. I should be biting your head off, Stokes, for sticking it where it doesn’t belong.”
“Really?” I said. “All I did was tell him to tell you! Don’t shoot the messenger!”
For the first time, her carefully hardened and double-reinforced exterior showed a crack.
“You weren’t messenger, Charlie,” she said, shaking her head. “You were the instigator.”
I sighed, and leaned back in the chair, rubbing at my face, then put my elbows down on the glass tabletop. “Look, you would have found out anyway when his defense didn’t roll around, right?”
“Maybe he would have finished by then, and I wouldn’t even have known!”
I paused. “Uh huh, sure. He’s going to magically whip a multi-hundred page paper out of fairy dust and pink unicorns. Then, when he’s done, he’ll settle the controversy in the Middle East and bake you a soufflé.”
“I’m not sure he could spell soufflé,” she muttered under her breath, but I could tell I was eroding her carefully planned offensive.
“He is terrible in the kitchen.”
“You don’t live with him,” she pointed out.
“Well, I sorta do right now.”
Her face softened. “How is he?”
I flushed, thinking back to our argument that morning. The last thing I’d said to him was something along the lines of “fuck you.” Not exactly classic parting words.
“Erm, he’s having a rough time,” I offered.
Again, there was a brief hole in her mask, and a ray of concern peered through, but it was quickly banished as the dark storm clouds gathered again.
“Good,” was all she said, and she crossed her arms over her chest.
“So I don’t suppose you’re planning on letting him come back any time soon?”
She sat there, impassively staring at me, then gave a long sigh that sounded like it should be accompanying a hot air balloon drifting back to earth. “I can’t,” she said, her voice broken. “You have to understand, Charlie. If I let him back in, it means giving up everything.”
“He loves you.”
“I love him, too,” she snapped, then took a deep breath. “But I’ve put my life on hold for him for years, and I’m running out of time to do the things I want to do with my life. I can’t put myself second for him anymore.”
I opened my mouth to say something—in truth, I’m not even sure what—when I was saved by our flustered waitress appearing again, looking if possible even more concerned than she had the first time around.
“I’m sorry,” she said, wincing. “I, uh, mixed up your orders. I put in the crispy duck and the drunken noodles and the tofu soup, and—it’s my first day…” She looked like she was about to burst into tears.
Rachel shook her head and shrugged. “I don’t even care.”
“I’m really sorry!”
I turned to waitress and smiled. “It’s fine. Just bring us two vegetable soups and two pad thais, okay?”
She nodded, her eyes bright and shiny. “Got it. Thank you so much.”
I waved a hand, as if I made a habit of saving the day of waitresses everywhere and she headed back to the kitchen at a dead run.
“What the fuck,” said Rachel.
“She’s new!”
“Not her, Charlie. Sim. What the fuck am I going to do about Sim?”
“Well,” I said, “if you’re not going to take him back, then I guess you’re going to have to make good on doing what you said you’d do. It’s time to cut him loose.”
Now Rachel looked like she was about to cry. “I don’t want to break up with him.”
I looked down at the paper placemat in front of me, absurdly covered with the symbols of the Chinese zodiac, despite the fact we we were in a Thai restaurant. Maybe they’d gotten a deal or something. I couldn’t understand why I’d started to think about that until a moment later when I realized it was better than thinking about Dee and just how much this reminded me of her.
“I know,” I said. “Believe me. Sometimes we have to do things we don’t want to, insane as it seems. But maybe it’s for a reason.”
She threw up her hands. “I hope you haven’t gone born-again on me, Charlie Stokes. The last thing I need right now is a calming talk on accepting Jesus Christ as my personal savior.”
With a feeble grin, I rubbed the stubble on my cheek. “I don’t think you have anything to worry about on that score, my dear. As we both know, the only reason I’d ever join a church is to get myself a bag of those communion wafers. Delicious.”
“Or to score with a Christian chick,” Rachel said, an eyebrow raised.
“There are exceptions to every rule,” I agreed.
We lapsed into a depressed silence, as Rachel contemplated a future without Sim, and I contemplated my likelihood of actually hooking up with a Christian chick. Needless to say, things looked bleak in both eventualities.
Somewhere in the middle of our detente, the blond waitress returned, bearing hot steaming dishes of our order—or, at least, I hoped it was our order. One of our orders, anyway. To be honest, at that point, my belly was rumbling enough that I would have settled for someone else’s order, just as long as it was edible and, preferably, Thai food.
We had indeed ended up with two dishes of pad thai, which was much relief both for ourselves as well as our waitress, who was sweating like she’d just crossed the finish line at the New York Marathon, only to find herself being targeted by a firing squad.
“Enjoy your dinner,” she squeaked—I shit you not, she squeaked—then scampered off towards the kitchen, no doubt to take part in another series of unlikely verbs.
“So,” I said, as I snapped apart the chopsticks and stropped them against each other to pare away any errant splinters. “What’s the plan?”
Rachel poked at her food unenthusiastically. “Oh, I don’t want to talk about it anymore. Let’s talk about you—told the office to stuff it yet?”
“‘Fraid not. I’ve decided to take the passive-aggressive route of doing as little work as possible.”
“Quelle surprise,” said Rachel dryly. “Why fight back when you can fight back by taking no action at all? You’re a marvel of inaction, Stokes.”
“Years of no practice.”
In resignation, Rachel snapped her own chopsticks apart and dug into the steaming noodle dish. Halfway through the first bite, she must have realized how hungry she was, for I barely got another word out of her until she paused to take a drink.
“I must be good at something—besides not doing anything,” I said reasonably. “Damned if I can figure out what it is.”
“Well,” said Rachel, putting her water glass back down, “there must be some element of your job you enjoy.”
I thought about it. Given no impediment, I would likely spend my day chatting away with the rest of the staff. News, politics, sports—which I knew almost nothing about, even philosophy if it was getting late on a Friday.
“I like interacting with people,” I said. “Is there a job where I can just talk to folks for the day?”
“I think it takes more training than you’re likely to get to be a psychiatrist,” said Rachel. “And otherwise, I think that’s primarily called ‘bugging other people who are trying to get work done.’” She raised her glass to take another sip.
My dream flashed before my eyes again. “Maybe I could open a café.”
Rachel almost spit a mouthful of water across the table. As it was, she barely managed to swallow it without choking, leading to a fit of coughing that had the waitstaff ready to speed-dial paramedics. She raised a hand and waved off our attentive blonde server, who had materialized at her shoulder concerned that something in the meal had gone horribly awry.
“Run a café?” said Rachel, once the hubbub had died down. “Charlie, you don’t know the first thing about running a café.”
“Well, who knows then: maybe I’d be a natural.”
“I’m pretty sure that’s not how it works. Besides, it’s a lot of work starting a place like that, and most of them fail before they get off the ground.”
“Maybe it’s my destiny, though.”
Rachel rolled her eyes. “Sure. Why didn’t I think of that?” she deadpanned.
“Because of your lack of vision?”
“Even a blind man’s right twice a day.” We’d started trying to come up with the best mix-and-match aphorisms a few years ago and that was one of my favorites, alongside “don’t count your chickens before the iron’s hot” and “people in glass houses shouldn’t kill two birds in a bush.”
Okay, that last one needed a little work.
We slurped down the rest of our dinner, and I picked up the check, lest Rachel be tempted to stiff our earnest if somewhat inefficient waitress on the tip. Not that Rach is a bad person, or routinely mean, but sometimes she lacks impulse control.
Said waitress smiled broadly at me as we packed up our stuff and left, and I gave her a wink.
We walked back towards the square, still talking idle chit-chat about the weather, which was slightly less frigid than yesterday, and how her work was going—well, for the most part. Stopping at the corner, I gave her a hug, which she returned, and we waved goodbye.
I zoned out on my walk back to the office and, before I knew it, I was sitting down in front of my desk, my jacket still on, without really remembering how I’d gotten there. I stared at the screen, still sleeping in darkness. Like a dozing child, I didn’t really have the heart to wake it up and insist that it follow my whims. Regretfully, I reached for the mouse.
My office phone rang.
Nobody ever calls my office phone. Pretty much ever. Okay, once in a while, someone at either end of the office decides that it’s faster to call me than walk down the hall, and once in a while there’s a wrong number, or a call from human resources or something, but it probably rings about once a week. Maximum.
I cleared my throat and picked it up. “Charlie Stokes.”
There was fumbling on the other end of the line, followed by an unfamiliar woman’s voice. “Mr. Stokes, this is Lauren Thomas.”
“Hi. Look, this is my work phone, so I don’t really take solicitations,” I began.
“Oh, no. No, I’m calling from your credit card company, Mr. Stokes. BankUSA?”
I frowned. “Oh. Hello.”
“We’re calling because we noticed some unusual charges on your credit card yesterday. Did you happen to charge $2000 to New England Veterinary Clinic?”
Two thousand dollars? My mouth gaped open at the figure proportional to the amount of money which I hadn’t spent, which wiped any subsequent part of her question out of my mind before I responded.
“Erm, I don’t believe I—”
I paused. New England Veterinary Clinic? Unless I missed my guess—and rather widely at that—I was pretty sure it would turn out to be the animal hospital that we’d taken Wigglesworth to. How exactly my credit card had ended up being the one footing the bill, I didn’t know, but I did have an idea, which went by the name of Neil Alison Stokes—oh, it was full-name time, all right.
“Mr. Stokes, are you still there? Do you want me to deny the charges?”
“Uh. Can I get back to you—Lauren, was it?”
“Well, it’s not really our policy to—”
“I just need to make a quick phone call. Can I reach you at this number?” I glanced at the caller ID on my desk phone.
“Call our main number,” she said. “Extension 4358.”
“Thanks very much.” I hung up and pulled out my cell phone, then speed-dialed Neil as I jumped up from my desk and strode over to the supply closet, with which I was becoming intimately acquainted in the past few days. I’d never noticed how much versatility there was in a space—though it could have used a wall hanging or something to really bring the whole ensemble togeth—
“Raoul’s Taxi and Transport,” said Neil’s voice after the seventh ring. “We’ll get you there in one piece.”
“Okay, first, that is a terrible slogan. Second—and, I don’t hesitate to say, far more important—did you take my fucking credit card?”
“Erm,” said Neil after a moment. “I may have borrowed it. Briefly.”
“Briefly enough that you might have charged, say, two thousand dollars to it?”
“Well, someone had to pay for Wigglesworth’s surgery, and the casts, and then there were fees…”
“Missing the point, Neil. I hope Raoul’s upped your pay recently, because if you don’t pay me back before my credit card bill is due, then Carrie’s going to get the whole story.”
“Whoa, hey,” said Neil. “Don’t do anything rash!”
“Rash, let me think, what would constitute rash—how about charging two grand on your brother’s credit card without his knowledge? Compared to that, I’m prepared to call my idea ‘painstakingly thought out.’”
“Okay, yes, I may have been rash. But you’re better than I am, right? Don’t stoop to my level.”
I stared at the white painted wall of the supply closet, then leaned my head against it. If there was a weakness in my psyche, it was the overdeveloped superego—appealing to my better nature, my rational side. The part of me that told the id not to Hulk out and start smashing things left and right unless I was sure they could be easily and cheaply replaced.
“Neil, where the hell are you going to get two thousand dollars?”
“No problem. Raoul said he’s got a job I can do that pays half that and will only take about an hour.”
Blinking, I processed that statement and what I knew of Raoul, who was a greasy fat dude that smelled like sweat and trouble. And I’d only met him once.
“You sure that’s a good idea?”
“Positively,” said Neil cheerfully. “What could possibly go wrong?”
A long list of suggestions came to mind that sounded a bit like a clause in my insurance policy: death, dismemberment, maiming, war, terrorism, rebellion, insurrection, invasion, riot, civil commotion, illegal activities—the list went on. On the whole, I wanted my two thousand dollars, but I also wanted my brother intact. So then I said something stupid.
“Look, maybe I should come with you.”
“Really?” said Neil, his voice suspicious. “Why?”
“Just sounds like you might need a hand.”
“I’m sure I’ll be fine.”
“Looks, it’s my investment, so I’d feel better if I was there, too.”
Neil sighed, and I swore I heard the sound of him honking the cab’s horn. “Fine,” he said, “but I’m not cutting you in on the deal.”
“Uh, you already owe me two thousand dollars.”
“Fair point. Still.”
“Look, just promise me you won’t charge anything else to the account, okay?”
“Yeah, yeah,” he said. “Oh. There’s also a $10 charge for some socks. I’ll pay that back too.”
I rolled my eyes. “No worries. See you later.”
“Bye.” There was a click, and then I was holding the silent cell phone to my ear as the whole import of what I’d just done came crashing down. Not only was I probably not getting my $2000 back, but I was helping my brother out with something that was probably illegal, immoral, unethical, or some combination of the three. And just for good measure, fattening too, I bet.
Family, right?
“Charlie?”
The voice came from so close behind me, I nearly tipped out of my chair. “Jesus,” I said, craning my next backward. “Did you major in ninjitsu or something?”
Annette laughed politely, but I could tell she more nervous than amused.
“What’s up?”
“I just wondered if I could talk to you for a minute,” she said. She looked around at the office meaningfully. “In private?”
I nodded. “Sure, let’s go into my office.”
One slender eyebrow raised, and I stifled a wistful sigh. To be able to raise that eyebrow on a nightly basis. That led to other, far more private thoughts, which I squirreled away, deep within a lockbox in my mind. We adjourned to my favorite new supply cupboard, where I hopped up to sit on one of the counters, and gave her an expectant look.
“I don’t really know where to start,” said Annette, slowly. “Last night, I think I realized something—something I think I’ve known for a long time, even if I didn’t want to admit it.”
My heart was beating harder now too—not faster, really, more just like it was the thumping bass drum that resonated deep in your chest. My mind flipped through a catalog of what I was going to say—after all, she was going to tell me she was in love with me, right? Why else would she have dragged me into a supply closet in private?
“It’s about Van,” she said. “I think I’ve…outgrown him.”
I paused, waiting for the other shoe to drop. Or to be removed from the other foot, at least. But if there was something else, she didn’t seem to have any inclination to divulge it at the present time. Instead, she was watching me for some sort of reaction.
When it became clear that I was going to have to partake in this conversation as well, I let a long breath hiss out of me.
“Well, what makes you say that?”
She shrugged helplessly, which did charming things to her figure. I cleared my throat and did my best to focus on things that were not in the least enticing: cold, cold snow; frostbite; amputati—okay, that was getting a bit dark.
“We don’t ever seem to talk anymore, you know? Real conversations, not just ones about who’s turn it is to do the washing up or what the weather’s like.”
“But that’s what relationships are like when they’re not new any more, isn’t it?” I said. “Sometimes you just don’t have things to talk about.” Or at least, sometimes it seemed that way, but the more I thought about what she was saying, the more I realized she was right; my version of things sounded downright depressing. Who’d want to be in a relationship where all you talked about was the menial and the mundane? What was even the point, then?
While I’d been following that conversational side-track, Annette had still been talking. Of course, I only noticed this when I lapsed out of my detour.
“…you know?”
“Uh huh,” I said quickly. “I know. Boy do I know. That is one thing I know like nobody else.”
Her mouth curled wryly. “You weren’t listening, were you?”
“I was listening,” I protested. “But I was also thinking, and I can only do one thing at a time.”
“And here I thought you were Mr. Multitasking.”
“Please,” I said, “my friends just call me Charlie.”
She smiled, then sighed. “What am I going to do? Should I break up with him? We’ve been together for four years. That’s a long time; I shouldn’t just throw things away because we’re going through a boring patch, right?”
I opened my mouth to say something about how we shouldn’t settle for what we have when there’s a possibility that we could find something even better, how we should all strive to find that other perfect soulmate, and that all our unhappiness was just prelude to the biggest happiness we’d ever known.
And then she looked at me.
I mean looked.
In a second, all of those thoughts had melted away, thawed by that one look. Because it wasn’t the kind of look that made me want to lock the door, peel off our clothes, and do unspeakable things to the photocopier. Or even the look that was telling me to be serious, and give her a response that wasn’t just a witty piece of repartee.
It was the look that said, ‘you are my friend, and I trust you to tell me what’s right.”
In case you’re not familiar with that look, imagine the plaintive puppy dog crossed with the your parents telling you they’re disappointed with something you’ve done.
Yeah, I know.
And I realized I couldn’t tell her all those things, no matter how much it would make me feel good, no matter how much it seemed like the sort of thing I should say. It was the kind of thing that I’d thought occasionally when I was with Dee, and it was the thought I clung to, like a piece of driftwood, in the tidal wave of our break-up. A piece of driftwood that was starting to rot and come apart in my hands, leaving me with nothing but the cold water of reality and the temptingly warm prospect of drowning.
There was a good chance I’d ruined my own life with that sort of thinking, and the last thing I wanted to do—the last thing I would do—was ruin somebody else’s. Our lives might be a story, but that didn’t mean they conformed to the story of your crappy stereotypical sitcom.
More like a drama. Dramedy, maybe. Black comedy?
So I said the only thing I could say under the circumstances, no matter how cliché it might have been, no matter how worn the trope. I said it because it needed to be said, because in the end, it would be the only thing that matters.
“Do you love him?”
She didn’t answer, just looked at me with a funny expression. But I didn’t even need an answer, really, because tears had gathered, shimmering and filmy in her eyes, causing them to sparkle like liberally bedazzled jeans.
“Look, relationships are hard sometimes,” I said. “They’ve got ups and downs—everybody tells you that—but nobody ever talks about the plateaus. Sometimes things just stay the same for a while, you know? You can’t let that get to you, especially if it’s someone you love. That’s how you know what matters.”
The corner of her mouth curled up into a smile. “Yeah,” she said. She rubbed at her eyes with the back of one hand, then reached out to hug me, a task I accepted gratefully, if not without some degree of bittersweet regret. I patted her on the back gently, all the while trying to ignore the smell and touch of her so close. She pulled back, then leaned forward to kiss me on the cheek.
“You’re a good man, Charlie Stokes,” she said.
“The name of my forthcoming Christmas special.”
That she did laugh at. Then, with another dab at her eyes, she glanced at the watch on her wrist. “I’d better get back to work. Thanks, though.”
“Sure,” I said. “What are friends for?” Apparently, they are for making you cry in supply cabinets, I wanted to add.
She slipped out, leaving me alone with my thoughts, which was not entirely charitable of her, given that at this point, they were ready to gang up on me like a bunch of thugs in an alley.
I’d had her right where I’d wanted her, one part argued, and then I’d let her slip right through my fingers.
The other part quickly pointed out that that was exactly what your average run-of-the-mill villain would say, and did I really want to be using that as a template for my behavior?
The first part thought about that and acknowledged that was a legitimate point, even if villains did have a way of getting things done.
A third part of my brain was meanwhile trying to reconstruct exactly what I’d said to Annette, because shit that was good stuff. And if I could basically replay that scene on Rachel and Sim, everything would end happily ever after, right?
The door to the supply cabinet swung open suddenly, and Anton lumbered in, then stopped short when he saw me.
“Hey, Charlie.”
“Hey,” I said, acknowledging him with a bob of my chin.
“Er,” he paused. “Whatcha doin’ in here?”
“Oh, just thinkin’.”
He shrugged. “All right, well, sorry to disturb you. Just needed a couple pads of paper.”
“Sure.”
He shifted his weight awkwardly from foot to foot. “Actually, they’re behind you—do you mind/”
“Oh. No, not at all.” I turned to the shelf. “You want letter or legal?”
“Legal, if you’ve got it.”
“How’s yellow suit you?”
“Um, suits me fine.”
“Great.” I snagged three or four pads and handed them over.
He gave me a mock salute. “Much obliged.”
“No problem.”
And with another quizzical look, he maneuvered his bulk back out the door.
Come to think of it, what was I still doing in the supply closet at this point? I ran a hand through my hair, exhaled, and then gave myself a nod. I’d done my good deed for the day. Actually, come to think of it, I’d done at least two, if you counted saving Neil from his crazy sort-of girlfriend. Though, then again, that had been in the service of him hooking up with my ex-girlfriend’s sister, so maybe that one was more of a wash.
I let myself back out into the hallway, and headed back to my cube, where I found Deb waiting for me, talking to Jim.
“There you are,” she said nervously, as I walked up. “François wants an update on the status of the project, so I was looking for you two.”
Jim shot me a look that said he knew precisely how much time I’d been spending on this oh-so-important project, and that it was inversely proportional to the amount of time I’d spend out of the office in the last few days. I, for my part, know that he spent most of his day playing go on the Internet, and that meant that we had your classic Mutually Assured Destruction scenario. As neither of us was willing to go down that path—though it was clear that I had much less to use—that left only one other option.
Lie.
“Sure,” I said. “Though right now might not be the best of days.”
Deb looked back and forth between us. “Can I ask why?”
“We’re in the process of refactoring the code,” Jim supplied.
Good. That sounded professional—and it could easily be true. Even better.
“How long will that take?” Deb asked, her forehead creasing like a well-worn book spine.
“Oh,” I jumped in, “probably a day or two, at least.”
Deb drummed her fingers against the half cube wall. “We’re starting to run up against, uh,” her eyes darted to me, “other constraints.”
“Thanks for the reminder,” I said. “I’d almost forgotten I’d been fired.”
“Laid off,” said Deb. “There’s a difference.”
“From where I’m standing, not much of one.”
“If we had the money, we’d keep you on, Charlie. There’s no question of that.”
“Well, that’s great. When I move to New Hypotheticalville I guess I’ll have a job.”
She looked down at Jim, who was studiously ignoring us and staring at the computer in front of him. “Look, if you want to discuss this with me in private, I’d be happy to…”
“Don’t worry about it,” I said. “It’ll be fine. We’ll have the precious project ready to show François by the end of the week.”
Apparently satisfied with that random deadline, Deb nodded to us and then walked off. Jim waited until she was gone, then favored me with a pair of raised eyebrows.
“You know as well as I do that we can’t build the entire site by the end of the week.”
“Well, maybe not from scratch.”
“What’re you thinking: off the shelf?”
I shrugged. “We could get about 90 percent of the way there, and then fake the last 10 percent.”
Jim leaned back in his chair, scowling. “You know, I’m the one who has to take care of this when you’re gone.”
“But you’ll have plenty of time to rebuild the 10 percent after the pressure’s off. Besides, I’m the one who got fi—laid off, remember? At least you have a job to keep.”
“Some job,” muttered Jim. “I can’t see why you want to keep it so bad.”
“I guess I’m just sentimental,” I said, plopping down in my chair. I cracked my knuckles and started in on the work in earnest.

Three hours of silence later, I’d pretty much put together about a quarter of what we needed for the final project. I won’t bore you with the details—to most of you, it would just be a jumble of acronyms and jargon, and to those of you who do understand it, well, I’ll tell you this: you ain’t gonna be impressed. It wasn’t pretty, but it would get the job done and, most importantly, it would get the job done quick.
I flipped off my light as the computer shut down and looked over at Jim, who was wrapped up in his own world of, hopefully, the other part of our project. My mental breaking point had just been reached for the night, a fact I could easily deduce from the observation that I’d started giving variables cute names. Around the time I called a category iterator “meow,” I knew it was time to stop for the day.
“See you tomorrow,” I said to Jim as I gathered up my stuff. He gave me a grunt in return.
I bundled up against the cold outside, and headed for home; in my head, I was still slightly in the programming groove, so I let it cycle through some ideas while my body carried out the mindless task of walking home.
It was halfway home that my phone started going off, so I rolled my eyes and peeled off a glove—it was almost impossible to use the damn thing with one on. I glanced at the caller ID. Frannie? She didn’t usually call me, though I supposed that’s because usually I was just a flight of stairs away. I flipped it open.
“Hello.”
“Hey, Charlie.”
“What’s up?”
“I think I’ve got something that belongs to you.”
I racked my brain. Had I lent her something and forgotten about it? Couldn’t think of a thing, unless it was my Die Hard trilogy DVDs that I hadn’t been able to find—but why would she be calling me now?
“I give up,” I said. “Book? DVD? Kitchen utensil? Did I give you a cup with sugar in it? Because that seems like something I’d do.”
“None of the above,” said Frannie. “I’ll give you a hint: it’s currently lying on my couch, drunk and drooling, and moaning something about its girlfriend.”
I winced. “Sim?”
“You know, I wouldn’t have thought so at first, but upon closer inspection, it did appear to bear a surprising resemblance to a gentleman—and scholar—of our acquaintance. Though with an uncharacteristically pungent smell of whiskey.”
“Exactly how drunk is he?”
“On a scale of what, one to drunk? Eleven.”
“Look, I’m almost home. We’ll haul him upstairs.”
“Oh, I don’t mind if he stays on the sofa, as long as he doesn’t throw up on it. Then again, maybe that wouldn’t be so bad, since I probably should have replaced it a long time ago.”
“Fair enough. As long as you don’t take it out of my rent, because I’m already running a bit light thanks to a dog named Wigglesworth.”
There was a pause on the other end of the line. “Yeah, I’m not sure if I heard that correctly.”
“Oh, you did. I’ll be right there.” I hung up.
I double my pace on the way home, first because it was cold anyway, and second and more importantly, because I didn’t want Sim to cause Frannie any more trouble. We were friends, but she was also my landlord, and I didn’t want her thinking that that this kind of thing was common enough that she should expect my friends to show up drunk.
Fortunately, I was just a block from home by the time our conversation had concluded, so I made it in short order. Letting myself into the house, I rapped on Frannie’s door.
“It’s open!” I heard her call from inside.
Open it was, so I walked into the living room. Which, at first smell, I was fairly certain had been turned into some sort of speakeasy circa 1931, but without the cool sliding door and password. And mobsters with violin cases—surely they didn’t all carry machine guns in violin cases, right?
Frannie appeared into the doorway to the kitchen drying her hands on a red-checked dish towel. She nodded at the passed out figure on the couch, who’d collapsed face down into a pillow, one leg hanging off. There was a long rattling snore emanating from it that sounded like a car in dire need of a mechanic.
“He’s quieted down a bit, but he was babbling about being sorry earlier. You know what that’s about?”
I sighed and let my bag fall to the floor with a thump. “Yeah, I know what that’s about.”
She waved me towards the kitchen. “Just finishing up with dinner, come on.”
Stopping along the way, I lifted Sim’s errant foot up on the couch. He rolled over slightly, and grabbed my leg with his hand, hugging it to him. I rolled my eyes and carefully disengaged myself from his grasp, then followed Frannie into the kitchen.
She was crouching by the oven, peering through the window. “Take it easy,” she said. “I’m hoping my soufflés haven’t collapsed.”
“Soufflés huh?”
“Yeah,” she said. “I’m trying something new. What’s up with the professor?” she jerked her head towards the living room. “Fight with the missus?”
“Got it in one,” I said. “Turned out he was a leeeetle bit further away from finishing his dissertation than he thought.”
“Rachel didn’t like that, I’d bet.”
“Nope. Your couch makes the second he’s slept on in about twenty-four hours.”
“Oof,” she said, sitting down at the table. “Why’d he tell her if he was so far behind?”
“Uh. Yeah. That one might be on me.”
She raised an eyebrow. “You didn’t tell her, did you?”
“God, no. I wouldn’t do that. I may however have advised him to tell her.”
“Huh,” she said. “Well that wasn’t terribly smart of him to listen to you.”
“Hey!”
Frannie shrugged. “I call ‘em like I see ‘em. So now what?”
“Well, I’ve thought of two plans. Either I try to get the two of them back together…”
“Or?”
“Or we go on a cross-country road trip-slash-robbery spree, concluding with a dramatic jump into the Grand Canyon.”
“Great plan, Thelma. I’d suggest you try option A before you load up on guns and ammo, though.”
“It was an idea.”
“Not even.”
Frannie stood and walked over to the sink, where she flipped on the faucets and started washing her utensils. “And what about you?” she asked over the rushing water. “Any luck with your situation?”
“Well,” I said, “this afternoon, I told the girl I’ve had a crush on for five years that she shouldn’t give up on her boyfriend yet.”
“Jesus,” said Frannie, looking at me over her shoulder. “Did you fall out of a stupid tree and hit your head today or something?”
I frowned and considered the possibility. “Given that I also told my boss I’d have a project to show on Friday, which I only started after I told her that, it does seem possible.”
“You’re on a roll, Stokes. Don’t give up now.”
I threw off a jaunty salute and stood—slowly, so as not to disturb the soufflés—to wander around the kitchen, peering idly at the prints on the wall that were left from Frannie’s grandmother. “Say,” I said slowly as my mind trickled through a few memories, “you haven’t ever thought about opening a café, have you?”
“A café?” said Frannie. “Why, when I could set fire to money just as easily from the comfort of my own home?”
“It’s just an idea that occurred to me the other day,” I said.
“Was that before or after the incident with the stupid tree?”
“Firmly before, I should think.”
“Look,” said Frannie, putting down a wooden spoon and turning to face me. “Let’s go back to your job thing. Why are you even finishing this project for them? They fired you. Why do them any favors?”
“What am I going to do, just quit and leave them in the lurch?”
“Uh, yeah.”
“I can’t do that.”
“Really? Because I’m kind of sure that that’s what they just did to you.”
“I’m better than that, though—aren’t I?”
“Maybe,” said Frannie, going back to washing dishes. “Or maybe you’re just stupider than they are.”
“You’re kind of beating that horse today.”
“Well, I beat ‘em like I see ‘em.”
“Nice.”
“Seriously, though, Charlie. Nobody would blame you if you walked away from the damn project.”
“I’m actually pretty sure I know several people who would blame me. My boss, my boss’s boss, Jim—I could go on.”
“You’re never going to see most of these people again,” said Frannie. “And you don’t even want to be doing this anymore, anyway. Why put so much effort into something you don’t even want?”
I sighed and sat down in one of the wooden kitchen chairs. “I don’t know,” I said. “I guess I feel obligated. To myself more than anyone. I started this project—or, well, I was supposed to have started this project—and I don’t want to just run off without it done. People are counting on me to finish it.”
“You sure you’re not just playing the martyr?”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“C’mon, Charlie. Sometimes it seems you enjoy suffering a little too much.”
I shook my head. “You lost me.”
Flipping the water off, Frannie dried her hands on her apron and sat down across from me at the table. “I’m just saying, it’s not the first time I’ve seen you stick to something because you thought you needed to.”
“Such as?”
She gave me a pointed glance across the table. “Dee.”
Either I was sitting with my back to the oven or it had gotten unseasonably warm suddenly. “What are you talking about?”
Frannie’s eyes narrows. “You break up with a girl because you supposedly don’t love her. Well, if that’s the case, why’d you stay with her so long?”
“I don’t know,” I spluttered. “I was trying to figure out whether I loved her, I guess.”
“Oh come on. I know you take a long time to make up your mind sometimes, but a year? What was going to be the tipping point: when you found out that she put the roll of toilet paper on in the wrong direction?”
“What’s your point?” I said, crossing my arms. I felt a bit like Jack Nicholson on the stand in A Few Good Men. Well, or at least, the many many clips I’d seen of that scene.
“My point, Charles Evelyn Stokes—”
“My middle name is not Evelyn!”
“My point, Charles Not-Evelyn Stokes, is that of course you loved her, you flaming idiot. You don’t decide not to love somebody. You don’t get to choose who you fall in love with. And you don’t not love somebody because they snore, or because they don’t throw their laundry in the hamper, or for any of those stupid little niggling things. That would be patently ridiculous.”
Like it was riding a roller coaster, the color in my cheeks had reached a peek of red, then dove back down to earth, draining out of me on the way. I felt like I was holding my breath, except that I was pretty sure if I had been, I would have passed out by now.
“Fine, Ms. Know-it-all,” I said. “If I loved her so much why’d I break up with her?”
She leaned back in her chair. “Oh, geez. Ask a hard one, why don’t you? Two reasons.” Frannie raised one forefinger, waving it at me like it was the tip of a fencing blade. “One: It’s not that you’re afraid of commitment, precisely, but you are wary of it—because you know what it means. How important it is. You’re not the kind of guy to trifle with a woman’s affections—just like you’re not the kind of guy who’s going to give up on their work project lightly, when it means leaving other people in the lurch.”
“Okay,” I said. “You haven’t quite sold me yet.”
“Do I have to spell things out for you?”
“Apparently,” I said. “You’re the one playing Dr. Phil.”
“Okay, take that back.”
“Sorry, sorry. I take it back. You look nothing like a hirsute bumbling family psychologist.”
“Thank you. Where was I?”
“Vivisecting my psyche, I believe.”
“Right. So, reason one: you broke up with her because you loved her enough you didn’t want even the chance that you might make her unhappy down the road.”
“Uh, that sounds insane.”
Frannie shrugged. “Yeah, well, look in the mirror.”
Much as I would have liked to reject her assertion out of hand as a piece of two-plus-two-equals-five craziness, there was the slightest grain of truth in it. The kind of grain that gets stuck in your eye, and the more you rub at it, the more irritated your eye gets, until you can’t tell whether or not you even got the grain out. I didn’t even have a rejoinder to offer her, so I cleared my throat.
“You said you had two reasons?”
“What? Oh, yes. Reason two—and the more salient in these circumstances. You like to think your special. No crime in that, we all do. But for some reason, I don’t know if it’s guilt or what, but you feel that the specialness has to have a balance.”
“Well, things have to have balance,” I said. “That’s why superheroes always have a weakness, right? You can’t just have Superman without his kryptonite, or the Green Lantern without the color yellow, or Ant-Man without…you know, big things that might smush him. That would be totally boring.”
“Okay, nerdy,” Frannie conceded, “but, yes, you’ve kind of proved my point. Except for some reason your weakness if believing that you need to undergo Job-like levels of suffering before you can be happy.”
“That’s not true,” I said.
“Oh really? Why’d you tell that girl at your office to stay with her boyfriend?”
“That was different,” I argued. “It was the right thing to do. I told her that you can’t just go around ditching people at the first sign of trouble, that you’ve got to take the bad times with the good, because otherwise how will you know them apart.” I leaned back, in smug satisfaction, only to see a similar look mirrored on Frannie’s face. I felt that gratification slowly drain out of me, just like the color had left my face, as I reflected on exactly what I’d just said.
“Uh.”
“Yeah,” said Frannie. “Point number two proved for me. Perhaps I misspoke earlier—it’s not that you like to suffer, so much as you believe you have to, even if you don’t deserve it.”
I didn’t know if Frannie were a boxing aficionado, but she’d taken me apart as neatly as a prizefighter. The one-two punch to the psychic jaw had me reeling, and the best I could muster was lean back in the chair, stare into the air just above Frannie’s head, and say, “Huh.”
At that moment, a timer on the stove started an insistent beeping, and Frannie hopped out of her chair and went over to the oven, shooing me out of the way. She lowered the door, letting the steam drift out, accompanied by a smell so deliciously intense, that my mouth began to water like I’d been stuck in the desert for forty long days.
“Damn it,” she said, as she pulled out the baking sheet, covered with half a dozen ramekins—yes, ladies, I know what a ramekin is. “They didn’t rise.”
“They, er, smell really good,” I offered.
“Well, duh,” said Frannie, as she placed the sheet on the counter. “It’s chocolate, sugar, and eggs. If it didn’t smell good, then I’ve done something terribly wrong.”
A moan issued from the other room, so I got up and stuck my head through the doorway. Sim was half-awake, groaning. I headed over to the couch and sat down in the chair across from him.
“Sim?”
“Glarghr.”
“You’re going to have to try that one.”
His eyes fluttered open, and he smacked his lips, as though clearing out cobwebs from his mouth. “Chock uh lot?”
I raised my eyebrow. “Okay, one more time.”
He shot me an evil glare, then repeated himself, more slowly. “Chock-o-let.”
“Chocolate? Really? You’re six or seven sheets to the wind and you want chocolate.”
Frannie had stepped into the doorway. “That can’t be good for him in this state. And I won’t have him throwing up anywhere in this general area.” She mapped out the room with her hands. “And if he does, you are cleaning it up, Charlie Stokes.”
“I got it, I got it. Look, help me sit him up.”
The look Frannie gave me was dubious at best, but she walked over and between the two of us, we managed to get Sim more or less upright, even if his head was lolling back onto the sofa.
“He’s looked better,” said Frannie.
“Well, he’s looked human, if that’s what you mean. Let’s get him some water.”
We filled a tall cup—plastic, at Frannie’s insistence, and I couldn’t blame her—with water and slowly tried to give it to Sim without drowning him, which ended up being a little more challenging than we’d originally thought, since it require one of us making sure he kept his head upright. We managed to get about half the cup into him and about the other half on him, before we decided to let him try to sleep it off.
“We’re not going to be able to move him,” I said, as we dried him off. “He’s out for the count this time.”
Frannie sighed. “That’s fine. Not the first time I’ve ended up with a drunk guy sleeping on my couch and, sadly, I doubt it will be the last.”
“I gotta run upstairs,” I said, “but I’ll be back down in a bit to check on him.”
“Sure,” said Frannie. “Meanwhile, I gotta cook something I can actually eat for dinner.”
“Three or four chocolate soufflés not quite going to cut it, huh?”
“I am not a pig, buddy.”
I gathered up my coat and bag and headed to the door.
“Charlie,” said Frannie, as I was opening the door. I glanced over my shoulder at her.
“Yeah?”
“That stuff I said before. It doesn’t make you a bad person, you know. In fact, to all outward appearances, it makes you kind of sweet. But at the end of the day, you’re still hurting yourself.”
I shrugged and smiled ruefully. “Better me than someone else, I guess.”
“Maybe,” said Frannie, “but one of these days you’re going to have to figure out how to be happy.”
I turned the doorknob. “Sure.” It just wasn’t going to be today, it seemed. Or probably any day this week. But that’s the way it was. I gave Frannie a wave and closed the door behind me, then climbed the stairs to our apartment.
Noise was blaring from Alan’s living room already; he had the TV up high. I walked into the kitchen and found Leigh sitting there, eating a bowl of soup and staring at the cat.
“Hey,” she said, without looking up. “Did we lose Sim?”
“Erm, not lost. He’s downstairs at Frannie’s right now.”
“Oh,” she said. “How’d he end up there?”
“Well, drunk by all appearances.”
“Yikes,” said Leigh, looking up from Psycho Kitty, who took the opportunity to groom one paw fastidiously, claiming victory in what appeared to have been some sort of staring contest. Never have a staring contest with a cat—this I have learned from experience. It’s an exercise in frustration, like trying to thread a needle with gloves on or talk reason into my brother when’s got an idea in his head. “It’s only five thirty,” Leigh pointed out. “How’d he get that drunk?”
“My guess? Ingesting a whole lot of alcohol in a fairly short period of time without the benefit of food or water.”
“Well, yes. But why?”
I scratched at my head. “We may have had words earlier today.”
“Oh,” she said.
“Yeah.”
“I take it Rachel’s still mad?”
“I had lunch with her today,” I said. “I’m not sure she’s mad so much as she’s just at her wits end by this point.”
“I can imagine,” said Leigh. She went back to her soup thoughtfully.
“How was your day?” I asked, as I got a can of Coke out of the fridge and popped the tab.
“Oh, the usual,” she said. “People demanding things they can’t have; and getting things they don’t remotely want.”
“Sounds a lot like my day,” I muttered.
“That’s life, I guess,” she said philosophically, as she drained the last of her soup and walk over to the sink to rinse out her bowl. “What are you going to about Sim?”
“I’ve considered slapping him with a herring until he comes around.”
“Where are you going to get a herring?”
“On short notice? Good question. Is there a fishmarket handy?”
The cat leapt down from the table, threaded herself deftly between my legs and scooted out of the room at a run, as though there were an invisible foe chasing her. That, too, was about par for the course with her.
“All right, I think I’m going to follow her example,” I said, hoisting my bag again. “Geez, I feel like I spend three quarters of my day just lugging this thing from one spot to another.”
“You need a purse,” said Leigh. “Preferably a shiny one with sparkles.”
“Tell me about it.” I climbed upstairs, dumped my stuff in my room—checked to make sure Neil wasn’t lurking—then went back down to Frannie’s. Sim had progressed from sitting up on the couch to slumping against one of the pillows. Fortunately, he seemed to have foregone drooling this time, which was a net positive.
I sat down on the couch next to him and gave him a poke. “Sim. Sim. Simon.”
“Whaaaaa?” he slurred. “Sleeeepin’.”
His ability to lengthen vowels while drunk was impressive. I tried to pull him upright, but gravity seemed to be winning that battle.
I sighed. “What’re we going to do with you, buddy? You certainly aren’t going to be able to finish your dissertation if you’re going to get rip-roaring drunk every night and moan about Rachel. And if you don’t finish the dissertation, you’re never going to get Rachel back. Catch 22.”
Man, relationships were hard. I’d never been under the illusion that they were easy, but I’d always kind of relished the idea of that kind of hard work. Part of me just thought that I’d be good at it for some reason. Probably because I liked people and I felt good at fixing problem. But I was starting to realize that the problems that came up could be solved by swapping out a piece of faulty hardware or restarting the system. And sometimes it meant that you ran into a problem where there was some sort of logical conundrum that prevented the whole thing from resolving into a solvable problem in the first place.
I didn’t like that much, I had to say. Especially in light of the harsh truths Frannie had been dishing out earlier. According to her, I’d let go of Dee because I loved her too much to cause her pain, but if I’d loved her so much, why hadn’t I stayed with her? It was enough to spin your head in circles without the benefit of alcohol. Add a couple tequila slammers in the mix and you might as well give up and go back to bed