The makeup alone took me more than an hour, and I didn’t even attempt half the things I found in the YouTube tutorials. The jewelry was pretty involved, too. I settled on a few striking pieces of gold and goldish things: dangly earrings, a layered necklace, bangle bracelets, one anklet, and—a reach for me—a faux nose ring. I trawled through half a dozen videos of women wrapping themselves in saris before I finally found one that I could follow with success.
The end result was worth the effort. The sari hugged my curves so that the folds of bright silk positively sashayed as I practiced in high heels, making the five-pace parade back and forth across Mahoney Brothers #45 under Bea’s skeptical gaze. I watched myself do a turn, and another, in the full mirror, my heart racing. I was gorgeous. I was going to make a stunning first impression. I was going to let Anup’s family see how much I wanted to be a part of his life—their lives.
Five o’clock rolled around, but Anup still hadn’t texted. Traffic down the Peninsula on a Saturday is unpredictable, and Cupertino’s a long haul. I called him.
“When are we planning to leave?” I asked.
“For what?” Anup said.
“The Lakshmi puja.”
“The what?”
“The Lakshmi puja. Tonight.”
“What are you... Where did you learn about Lakshmi puja?”
“Wikipedia.”
“Oh. Well, my family doesn’t really do Lakshmi puja.”
“All right. What do we do?”
“Um...” said Anup, “We... I...go down and pick up my sisters, and then we meet our folks at the temple.”
“All right,” I said again, and wondered why he was being so obtuse. “Time is wasting. Want me to come over to you, or are you picking me up here?”
“Jessie,” said Anup, “you’re not invited.”
It’s not easy to stun someone who cuts up dead bodies for a living. We see the very worst things that people do to one another. We have thick skins.
Why?
I didn’t say it. For the first time in the eight months of our progressively and steadily more intimate life together, I had stumbled across a question I was afraid to ask Anup.
He broke the silence. “I’m sorry, Jessie. I didn’t realize you... I should’ve been more clear. This is a stupid family obligation—for me. It isn’t anything you need to bother with. Let me tell you, you’re lucky you don’t have to go—every Diwali, my sisters do nothing but complain about the hours they’ve spent shopping, and having to get their hair done, and then getting all dressed up in their saris and stuff.”
I sat in my tiny house at the other end of the phone line, alone in my sari and stuff, and tried to sound worldly and blasé. “Sounds like a hassle for them. Yeah.”
“I can’t... It’s kind of out of my hands, you know? And it’s just for tonight. Tomorrow, I promise, we can spend the whole day together. We could go for another hike, maybe.”
“Sure,” I said.
“Okay. Thanks for understanding. I oughta get rolling.”
“Yeah, traffic. Have a good time.”
“Unlikely. Love you, bye.”
“I love you too, Anup,” I said. My voice was small.
My cell phone told me the call had ended. I sat there for a while, my head running circles around itself. Then I got up.
I unwrapped the sari off my body. I folded it carefully, and laid it back in the biohazard tub where I’d been hiding it. I went to the cable car’s tiny bathroom and dug through the medicine cabinet over the sink, looking for makeup wipes. I found them—but it’d been so long since I’d had any reason to use them that they’d gone dry. A little jar of cold cream crouched in the back, though. I grabbed it and swung the cabinet’s mirrored door closed.
There I was, staring back. The makeup regimen I’d worked on so hard for Anup, for his sisters and his parents, made my eyes pop and gave my lips way more flair than I usually managed, even for a special occasion. The jewelry added to it, amplifying without distracting. I uncapped the cold cream and scooped some.
My eyes returned to the mirror. I stood there over the sink and did nothing. Then I wiped the cold cream off my hand and put the jar away.
I went to my closet and raked through the hangers till I found a dress: navy blue and elegant, with a V-neck bodice trimmed in yellow lace that would work with the gold jewelry. I slipped it on and checked myself in the full mirror again. Then I speed-dialed a familiar number.
He answered.
“Tomasz,” I said to my brother, “it’s Saturday evening, so I’m guessing you’re at work.”
“Yup.”
“Here in the city?”
“Yup.”
“Wrap it up. We’re going out to dinner.”
I met Tommy at a Korean barbecue place on Geary Boulevard. Tommy eats like a machine and burns off the calories with massive daily brainwork, I guess. I don’t know how else he does it, because he doesn’t like exercise and he doesn’t do much else than sit in front of a computer and work. Work is always some top-secret tech start-up that he’s been called upon to rescue from the terrible coding skills of lesser beings. I hardly even bothered asking anymore. I never understood a damn word of what he said about any of these jobs, and he certainly didn’t like to hear shop talk from the ol’ autopsy suite, so we generally ate in silence unless we had something important to say.
After we had been seated and placed our order, Tommy found a question worth asking.
“Why you so dressed up?”
“Because, damn it, I look pretty.”
The waitress brought a draft beer for me and a root beer for teetotaler Tommy, and I told him all about the Diwali fiasco. Tommy was sympathetic to me, of course—but also wasn’t as hard on Anup as I wanted him to be.
“Pleasing parents from the old country can be challenging,” he said with grim irony.
“No shit.” I raised my beer. “Na zdrowie.”
“Sto lat.”
We clinked.
“I spoke to Mamusia yesterday,” I said.
“I know. She called to tell me.”
“Hold on—she called you to tell you that I’d called her?”
“That you’d finally called her. She’s been calling me every day since the quake to tell me you hadn’t called yet.”
“That’s not why she was calling you.”
“I know.”
“It was your reward for being a good boy.”
“Jessie, I know.”
“Did Mamusia tell you she broke her wrist?”
“She what—?”
“Yup. Splint and everything. She hasn’t been working.”
“Then how’s she buying groceries?”
“Tommy. You think I asked?”
He sighed. “No.”
“Because...?”
“She wouldn’t have told you.”
Our meal came in the nick of time—before I lost control of my temper and lit into my brother. He’d offer money to support Mamusia, sure. He made more than I did, lived frugally, and had no debt load. He could afford it. Tommy never offered our mother anything other than checks, though. He had left Lynn before I did. He ran off to California right out of high school, with nothing but his mad coding skills and a pile of chutzpah. He had never been back.
Part of me didn’t blame him and part of me hated him for his ability to shut our entire childhood into a box and lock it away. Somebody had to take care of Mamusia. She was going to be aged out of the workplace soon enough—or fall out of it, if she was injuring herself without telling anybody. She had one brother and two sisters in Poland. I’d never met those aunts and that uncle, and Mamusia had never met their kids. She was a US citizen and had been for decades, but she held no passport and had no interest in going back to visit the old country. Danuta Repczynska had left Poland as a young woman, landed herself an American husband, and never looked back, even after Arthur Teska started beating her. Beating us.
Tommy got it the worst. Mamusia never fought back. She never went to the cops, to the social workers at the hospitals where she worked, not even to the priest. Then, one day when he was barely fourteen, something in Tommy made him hit back—and once he started swinging, he didn’t stop. Dad went out the door, I changed the locks and arranged for the restraining order, and Arthur Teska, her husband, was out of Mamusia’s life.
But then her children left, too. Our mother was living alone in the middle floor of the three-decker on Pinkham Street in East Lynn where we’d grown up, her only loved ones thousands of miles away. I had been a Californian for more than ten years, Tommy for two or three years longer than that. I went back to Lynn every year around Christmas. Tommy? Not once. I had harangued him to go visit, but he made excuses, or just flat out refused. Sooner or later, we were going to go nose-to-nose about it. Sooner or later, somebody was going to have to go back to Lynn, and not just for a visit.
Sooner or later, I knew from professional experience, that old immigrant lady would likely die alone in her Lynn three-decker, and then Arthur Teska was going to come roaring back into the picture. He was out there somewhere. I knew he was, because I knew his Social Security number, and I have access to the federal Death Master File. I check it monthly. If he died first, no problem. But if his wife did—and, yes, Mamusia had let Tommy and me kick the sadistic bastard out of our lives, but she hadn’t divorced him—then we were going to have complications. I had seen those kinds of complications firsthand, at work. Happy, healthy families get into fistfights over real estate and the disposition of a loved one’s remains; I didn’t even want to think what would happen if our mother passed away and our father came back to Pinkham Street.
He would, too. That would be just like him, waiting for his chance to get back under our skin as soon as the danger of violating a permanent restraining order was lifted by the more lasting permanence of death.
“Mmm. Garlicky.”
I watched my brother Tomasz tuck away the barbecue. Which one’s the hollow leg, a neighbor’s mom used to ask, when he stayed for supper. My little brother is a slender man. He isn’t slight, though. Not in any way. He and I had always relied on each other. Tommy had put himself between me and the leather belt many times. I learned how to tell from Dad’s footsteps on the stairs how drunk he was—and how deep in the house we should hide. Tommy had lied to protect me and I had dressed his wounds. Most kids grow up, but we didn’t. We survived.
I ordered a fresh beer and lifted it. Tommy hoisted his own glass.
“A toast,” I said. “To playing dress-up.”
Tommy put down the soda without drinking. He pushed his food around, said nothing. I stopped before the beer reached my lips.
“What is it?”
“Nothing.”
“Come on.”
He went back to shoveling the food in silence, and I knew I was going to have to do the work for both of us, like I always do. It’s the way he’s been since he was a kid, keeping his trap shut, avoiding trouble—trouble with words, at least. My brother, my flip side.
“Don’t make me drag it out of you.”
He just shrugged. The routine was getting on my nerves, and I told him so.
He stabbed the fork into his bool kogi and left it there. “Who did you think you were fooling, playing dress-up in a sari?”
“That’s it? Lighten up. Bad joke, I take it back.”
“It’s no joke. That’s the problem. What did you figure would happen?”
“Happen...?”
“When you got done playing dress-up. What were you trying to show the Banerjees? How easy it is for somebody—anybody—to throw on the threads, toss on the jewelry, and join the club? You were going to fake your way into their temple...?”
My brother contemplated the bubbles in his root beer for a minute, while he tried to piece together words like he pieced together strings of code all day long.
“Let me ask you this, Czesława,” he said finally. “How many times have you had to spell out your name? C as in cat, Z as in zebra, E, S as in Sam, etcetera. How many dumb-Polack jokes can you repeat by heart? Do you remember trying to explain to your friends that it wasn’t really your birthday till it was your name day?”
“Gimme a break.”
“Imagine all the stupid hassle we’ve put up with all our lives—only in Anup’s skin, not yours. Anybody ever tell you to go back where you came from? Anybody ever spit on you and call you a terrorist? Did we take up a collection to hire security guards at St. Michael’s? I dare you to ask Anup. Gimme a break, she says. Give him a break. He’ll come around—as long as you let him, and you don’t do stupid shit.”
Easy for you to say, I thought. “That’s your advice?”
He tore into the beef again, and shrugged. “You asked.”
“Only because you were sitting there doing your silent but judgy routine.”
“Like I said, you asked.”
“My mistake.”
Tommy looked back up at me—and grinned. “You know I’m right, though.”
“Fuck off. It’s entrapment.”
“Admit it. I’m right.”
“You’re a głupek.”
“But I’m right.”
He had a piece of his dinner in his hair. I reached across the table and flicked it away. “You might be.”
He held up his root beer. “I’ll drink to that.”
I clinked it, and we drank. Tommy returned his attention to his meal. I pushed mine away.
“I was only trying to do the right thing, you know?”
Tommy nodded. “But it wasn’t the right way.”
“So now what?”
Tommy just shrugged. He was all out of deep thoughts.
“I don’t know if I can do it.”
“Do what?”
“Wait for Anup to come around.”
“Yeah,” my brother said, and speared a bit of food off my plate. “If I were in your shoes, I don’t know if I could, either. But you ought to try. He might be worth it.”
We got the check and returned to our customary silence for a little while. I drank my beer and Tommy tucked away every scrap of food on the table. He yawned.
“I better go,” he said.
“You’re kidding. It’s not even nine!”
“You know me, siostrzyczko.” He rose. “You want a ride home?”
“No,” I said. “I could use the walk.”
The cool salt air made its way up Geary Boulevard from Ocean Beach. I pulled off the high heels and went barefoot, concrete under my toes. I wasn’t ready to go home, to go to bed alone and lie there thinking about Anup.
After a couple of blocks, I found myself standing right outside Trad’r Sam, the battered tiki bar. I’d driven past the place a thousand times in my year and a half in San Francisco, but had never been inside. I don’t much like tiki bars, and this one looked especially dumpy—fake palm fronds over a Dutch barn door, a novelty sign boasting of Polynesian Drinks, a limp green awning keeping the gull shit off the clutch of scruffy smokers. I went in anyway.
It was squat and dim, with a handful of small booths, more fake palms, and a horseshoe bar lined in bamboo and trimmed with tiki heads. The bartender was a young dude in a backwards baseball cap who looked about as Polynesian as I am. I got a Mai Tai.
The TV over the bar had the local news on. It caught my attention when a mug shot of Samuel Urias emerged over the shoulder of the Botoxed anchor.
“New developments tonight in the investigation into last month’s death of prominent international architect Leopold Haring. San Francisco police have arrested a worker at the South of Market construction site where Haring was found crushed underneath building materials on October twenty-eighth. Samuel Urias, thirty-eight, has been charged with murder and other crimes, including special circumstance charges that sources say stem from an attempt to disguise the killing as an industrial accident. Our team will bring you special live coverage Monday morning from the Hall of Justice, as the trial enters its preliminary phase...”
I asked the bartender if he would please change the channel. He did, to college basketball. I tried to watch it and nearly succeeded. Anything—anything at all—to take my mind off the Hall of Justice. I watched and sipped and started to feel a little more relaxed as the game wore on and I reached the bottom of the Mai Tai.
“It is a small world, isn’t it, Dr. Teska?” said a voice behind me. It belonged to a man. With a brogue.
Denis Monaghan cleaned up nicely. He was in a houndstooth suit with a Savile Row cut, complete with peaked pocket square, and his hair was styled to match. He had one hand in a jacket pocket, slid flat up to the knuckles, with his thumb hooked just so. He looked like he ought to be appearing in black and white.
“It’s a small town, anyhow,” I said.
“May I join you?”
Old World chivalry again; he didn’t just plonk himself in the empty stool next to the lady without her permission. “Please do,” I said.
He sat, mindful of his pleated trousers. “If you don’t mind my saying so, Jessie—you look gorgeous.”
“I know. But thank you for noticing, Denis. You smell wonderful.”
Which was true. He beamed. “It’s not too much, like? The cologne?”
“Perfect. What’ll you drink?”
He seemed surprised. “You’re buying?”
“Why not?”
“What do you got there?”
“It’s a Mai Tai.” I shook the ice. “Was a Mai Tai.”
“Maybe just the one, then.”
I waved over the bartender, who indulged the dapper couple with a heavy pour.
“Fruity rum drinks are underrated,” I said.
Denis held up his. “To Trad’r Sam, whoever and wherever he be.”
“Cheers,” I said. We clinked our oversize cocktail glasses. “Why you dressed so fancy?”
“It’s my Twinning Day.”
“Your what?”
“I have a sister in Galway, you see...well, Tuam, now. I have a sister and three brothers, actually, but it’s me sister in Tuam’s birthday today, and—”
“You dress up for your sister’s birthday? That’s the sweetest thing I’ve ever heard!”
“It’s not altogether for her. It’s for me, too. I’m a twin now.”
“Is that a riddle?”
“She turns forty-two today. I’m forty-two. I turn forty-three next month, on December sixteenth. So, for the next month, I’m...”
“A twin!”
“No flies on you, Doctor.”
“Back in Boston we have a term for your condition. We call it Irish twins.”
“Funny,” Denis said. “In Ireland we have a term for it, too.”
He waited. So did I. He won; I just had to know.
“Well...?”
“We call ’em Yankee scamps.”
It wasn’t a terribly good joke—in fact, it was a terribly bad joke—but I was just tipsy enough to find it uproarious. I lifted my fruity drink.
“To your sister. Na zdrowie!”
“Sláinte.”
Denis had turned glum all of a sudden. I recognized the look. I’d seen it on my mother, after she’d hung up the phone with one of her sisters back in Poland.
“Tell me about Galway,” I said. It was the right call; Denis sat up and brightened. He told me about his sister’s house in Tuam, a cathedral town of tight brick fronts and stone pavers. They weren’t from there. They had grown up on a farm in the middle of nowhere, a crossroads with a church and a pub and a war memorial and not much else.
“My brother Rory, the eldest, he got the farm. The rest of us had to fend for ourselves. Mick to London, Sean to Dublin, myself here to America, and our sister Kate, who married a fella from Tuam.”
“Your twin sister Kate.”
“Today she is.”
He went on for a while, waxing nostalgic about the west of Ireland. I enjoyed hearing it. I’d heard it before, growing up, from some of the Ould Sod neighbors.
“Tell me about Boston,” Denis said.
“Lynn. Outside of Boston. Outside of Boston...story of my life.” Lynn had been on my mind, after my unexpectedly deep dinner with Tommy. “It’s a tribal place. Parochial. Like, literally. I come from St. Joseph’s parish in East Lynn, but we went to St. Michael the Archangel in West Lynn, ’cause we’re Polacks and that’s the Polack parish. The Italians had their parish, and the Puerto Ricans theirs, and the Irish, of course. The Cambodians and the Haitians shared a church, but alternated Masses on Sunday. Nobody mixed, except in school. Where I come from you are defined by the color of your skin, the town you grew up in, and your religion, in that order.”
Anup might be worth it, Tommy had said. But Anup had shut me out. He had shut me out for the same nearsighted, small-minded reasons I thought I had left behind. All I had wanted was to show him I wasn’t an outsider, or I didn’t have to be one. I wanted to impress his family. I wanted to join his parish. But Anup didn’t want me there—? Not tonight, not for Diwali he sure didn’t.
Then again, I reminded myself, Tommy really was right about my little stunt. I had bought the sari, the bangles, the makeup, without talking to Anup about it. A few YouTube tutorials later, I was ready to crash the party. It was careless—thoughtless. It was all about me. I’d wanted to play dress-up and surprise him.
Mission accomplished, Czesława.
“Ah, the hell with it,” I said to Denis, apropos of nothing, as far as he knew. I rattled my empty Mai Tai. “It’s your round, Monaghan. And I’ve had enough of this fruity shit.”
“Whiskey, then.”
“Fine idea. Which whiskey, though?”
“An Irish whiskey, of course.”
“Of course.”
“Jameson is the cliché, but I drink Paddy’s.”
“An Irish whiskey called Paddy’s isn’t a cliché?”
“Not if you’re drinking it with a bog-bred culchie.”
The bartender had a bottle of Paddy’s. He poured us shots. I lifted mine. “Sto lat!”
Denis lifted his glass. “Who’s that, when he’s at home?”
“It means, May you live to a hundred.”
“Ah...! Saol fada!”
“What?”
“Drink up and I’ll tell you. One drink per toast. Hard and fast rule here at Trad’r Sam’s.”
“Aye, aye, cap’n!”
Hard and fast indeed. Monaghan was no dummy. But I didn’t want to go home—and if I felt like getting plastered with a handsome man in a sharp suit on a Saturday night, then, goddamn it, I would. We knocked back the whiskey.
“God, that’s awful!” I yelped.
“’Tis,” said Denis.
I begged the barkeep for peanuts. “What was that thing you said?”
“Saol fada? A short toast to a long life, in Irish. The whole thing goes, May you have a long life, a wet beak, and die in Ireland.”
“Man,” I said. “It’s not often that I’m on the delivery end of this sentiment—but you’re kind of a downer, Denis.”
He did look down, genuinely. “Not for me,” he said. “No death in Ireland for this man.”
“Don’t tell me you’re a sad drunk.”
He forced a cheery face. “So, then.”
“Think the rain’ll ruin the rhubarb?”
“Not if it’s in cans,” he shot back, without missing a beat. Denis was sharp. Sharp, funny, and just uninhibited enough for my liking.
We got into shop talk, comparing notes—what’s it like to be a contractor versus a medical examiner—and discovered that, in terms of workflow, it’s much the same. Denis explained that he’s always juggling multiple projects, in different phases of completion. I described how I’d do an autopsy in the morning, talk to the family the same day and maybe the police the next, if it’s a criminal case—but then would wait weeks for toxicology and lab results, all while starting new autopsies, new cases.
“So it’s the same for me,” I said. “Only I’m not building anything.”
“No. You’re in demo.”
“Demo...?”
“Demolition, my dear Doctor.”
Denis explained that he was now a general contractor, but had spent years doing subcontracts—like fixing the climate control at the OCME—on different buildings all over the San Francisco Bay Area. “Jack-of-all-trades. I’ve done drywall, electrical, big demos, small rebuilds, from foundation on up to the roof cladding. Whatever the city, in her wisdom, throws my way.”
“What’s your favorite type of job?”
“Them old clay chimney pipes in the houses here in the Avenues. You go down in the basement, whack the yoke with a sledge, and watch it drop into the cellar in a million clinking smithereens and a massive cloud of dust.”
“Sounds messy.”
“That’s half the fun! How about you? What’s your favorite type of autopsy, dare I ask?”
“I like really complex hospital cases, the ones the other doctors can’t figure out. I have to be a jack-of-all-trades, too, you see—I have to have a working knowledge of every branch of medicine, plus what kills people, and the changes the body undergoes after death... Ugh. Sorry. Never fails—talk to me long enough, and I’ll end up on the subject of decomposition. Tell me more about Ireland.”
But he didn’t want to. He kept steering the conversation right back here to America. He wanted to know more about my life outside the morgue. And I didn’t want to get into that—at all.
“It’s my round,” I said. I called the bartender over. “What kind of fruity drink can you make with that awful Irish whiskey?”
“I could do a Shark Eye.”
It took him a few minutes. He served the cocktails in plastic imitation skulls, each with a shark-shaped stir stick.
The drinks were actually pretty good, but the skulls weren’t anatomically correct. I rotated one around and pointed out all the reasons why. Denis and I nearly fell off our barstools laughing. The rest of the crowd at Trad’r Sam took it in stride.
A toilet flushed and I woke. God, the light was blinding. I was in a strange bed, in a strange room. Sounds of traffic outside, and a bathroom sink running. It stopped, and a door opened, and out of the bathroom came Denis Monaghan. He was naked, and looked as hungover as I felt.
The room wobbled. I lay back down. My mouth tasted like bad whiskey and sticky fruit juice.
“Boże mój...”
“Morning,” said Denis. I squinted in his direction. His hair was ruffled and his face pale and sour in the aftermath of drink, but he carried his builder’s muscles on a broad, solid frame, and from the neck down was altogether buff and beautiful in that dazzling light. Seeing him dangling there brought it back to me—our romp through the night, after leaving Trad’r Sam, in the sheets where I found myself lying, undone by alcohol and debauchery and the cruel bright sunshine of California in November.
“Good morning,” I said, but didn’t mean it. I scanned the rest of the room. One of my high heels was lying on its side in a corner, and the other was AWOL. My special-occasion navy blue dress was hanging on an actual lampshade. I snatched it and held it in front of myself as cover while I scurried toward the bathroom and scanned for my underwear, which was also AWOL.
I slid past Denis with an effort at a demure smile, and barricaded myself in the john. I used the toilet and splashed cold water on my face, then hazarded a look in the mirror. My hair was a dirty blond thicket, and the meticulous makeup I’d spent so much time on the day before was blurred and smeared in grotesque streaks.
In place of bath linens Denis had only a roll of contractor’s paper towels, the heavy-duty blue kind, so I scrubbed my face with a couple of those. When I kicked open the trash can to throw them out, three used condoms stared back at me. I concentrated, which hurt my head. The first time—I remembered that vividly. The second one? Also yes, for sure. But the third...? Oh, wait. Oh, yes. Yes indeed.
Holy moly.
I caught myself in the mirror again and found that I was wearing a goofy grin. I wiped it off and wiggled naked into the dress, then opened the bathroom door and came slinking out. I scanned the room for my panties. And my bra. Shit—where was my phone?
Denis had put on jeans and was pulling a T-shirt over his head, but he paused to watch me pad around his apartment, rumpled and barefoot and bare-assed under my fancy dress. The sight pleased him.
“Make yourself useful and help me find my phone.”
“Oh, I can be useful. Handy, even.”
“Don’t I know it. Now help me look.”
“I’m one step ahead of you, love.”
I turned. He was wearing a poker face and my panties on his head, cocked like a beret.
Yes, I was hungover. I needed coffee. I was embarrassed, and felt exposed in the glaring sunlight. But, damn it, Denis’s stunt was really fucking funny—and I found myself sprawled on his bed again, losing myself in giggling hysterics.
Denis took the opportunity to bounce down next to me. He started caressing me and nibbling my ear. I pushed him away and grabbed the panties off his head.
“That’s unfriendly,” he said.
“Leave me alone, you. I have to get home before my dog tears the place up.”
“You have time enough. We’ll be efficient.” He started to undo my dress.
I pulled away from him. “No.”
His fingers stayed on the dress. All the playful had gone out of his eyes.
“Not time enough?” he said.
“No.”
Denis didn’t move. He watched me and I watched him back. Then he let go. I slid off the bed and got to my feet. I pulled my hair up.
“Right,” said Denis. He sat up, ran a hand through his own hair, and rose to go toward the kitchen. “But surely you have time for a cup of tea.”
“I can’t. Believe me—this dog won’t wait.”
“Ah, now,” he said. “Jessie, honest, I do not make a habit of picking up women in bars. Let me make you a civilized breakfast before you go. I would hate for you to think...”
“Denis,” I said, “you’ve been a perfect gentleman. Now, would you please help me find my phone.”
He reached into the back pocket of his jeans—and pulled it out. He tossed it on the bed.
“You sneaky bastard,” I said, scooping it up.
Denis produced that ready smile of his. “I’m only bold, love.”
My phone still had plenty of juice—but, of course, there was no signal. Cell service had been spotty before the quake, and turned shitty after. I asked Denis for his Wi-Fi password.
“Can’t give you that, love,” he said. “I have secrets.”
“Don’t we all. You have nothing to fear from my hacking skills, believe me.”
He acquiesced. “It’s Janina.”
“Oh, really,” I said, arch as hell.
Denis held up a palm in self-defense. “Not what you think! It’s my toothpaste.”
“Sure. Sure it is, Denis.”
“It’s true, I’m telling you! Hang on...” He popped into the bathroom and, true enough, came back with a tube of something called Janina Whitening Toothpaste.
“Ye don’t use it here,” he said, cradling the tube in both hands like a sleeping kitten. “I have to order it special. Bloody expensive, but worth it.” He bared his mouthful of bright teeth in a predatory grin.
I entered the password and got my phone connected to the internet. Denis offered to drive me home, but I demurred and said I’d get an Uber. I had enjoyed our romp, but had no intention of repeating it. He didn’t need to know where I lived. It occurred to me, though, that I didn’t know where the hell I was, either. I opened the ride-share app and looked at the blue dot.
We were in the Richmond District. If I weren’t knackered and hungover, I could walk home. I ordered an Uber anyhow, to save face, for both of us.
As soon as I clicked the seat belt, my cell pinged with a text. It was Anup.
Sorry again bout yesterday. I’ll pick u up 4 a hike? Whole day free, would love to spend it w/u.
The Uber ride was all of five minutes. I burned four of them thinking about a response.
Can’t do it, under weather.
He came right back: Can I get u anything? Come over, nurse u?
No thx, I typed, gonna just lie down & drink tea.
That wasn’t even a lie. The car pulled up in front of 892 41st Avenue and Anup replied:
Kk. Feel better.
I could hear Bea the beagle’s frantic yelping as my key scraped into the gate’s lock. The phone pinged again.
Maybe nxt weekend we catch up. Love u.
I paused, half in the gate, phone in my hand. Then I typed, Love u 2, and fought down a wave of hungover regret and shame. Shame, because that was no lie, either.