Miles was clocking in for his shift when he realized it was the last day of June. Once the schools had let out and families flooded Sea Point on a weekly-rental basis, the days started running together faster than the red, white, and blue of a rocket Popsicle in the sun. Every waking moment revolved around not drowning, not failing, not forgetting to set an alarm clock, and not accidentally setting that alarm for “p.m.” instead of “a.m.” after the fourth straight night of soberly stumbling home from work at daybreak.
At the Wharf and around town, July stalked all of them in broad daylight because the high season always attacked from behind, no matter how hard the locals tried to face it head-on. Miles imagined how much better prepared he’d be for the influx if he’d spent the last decade perfecting his chopping instead of his bullshitting. But at this point, the summer plunge was inevitable—he’d just have to kick like hell toward the light of September.
“Are you going on Friday?” Joey the barback asked as they dragged trash cans to the dumpster. Technically, trash cans were Danny’s job, but technically, Danny’s back was still a mess.
“What’s Friday?”
“That thing at the library?” Joey said. “Rock Star Readers?” At Miles’s blank stare, he continued: “Your boy Ziggy is the main attraction, at least for this first one. My sister is all excited to take her kids—they love Ziggy. Apparently my nephews keep singing ‘Little Drummer Boy’ but changing it to ‘Little Plumber Boy’—but not in, like, an offensive way,” Joey added, gulping nervously. Miles laughed to put him at ease. He realized that he must seem like an adult to twenty-five-year-old Joey, even though he remembered being twenty-five like it was last month. Actually, Miles was pretty sure he knew more at twenty-five than he did now—or at least, he hadn’t been afraid of what he didn’t know at twenty-five. Now in his midthirties, he felt like he was just getting started and already so far behind.
“Think you’ll go?” Joey asked as they walked back into the kitchen and Miles washed his hands to resume his prep. He was a good guy, Joey, the second-oldest of six kids who’d just put himself through technical school. He’d graduated the Friday of Memorial Day Weekend, the night Miles had first taken over dishwashing duties. Now that Miles thought about it, Joey was an integral part of the equation—if he hadn’t asked for the night off to graduate, Joey would have covered for Danny, which meant Miles would still be front of house and lost in the world.
“We’ll see,” Miles replied a little too curtly to hide his annoyance that Ziggy hadn’t told him. And why hadn’t Kate asked him to be a rock star? Misreading the source of Miles’s sudden irritation, Joey began to explain how “Little Plumber Boy” was really, if you thought about it, a pretty profound compliment, and so Miles swiftly changed topics. “Your graduation over Memorial Day Weekend—what’s your certification in?”
Joey puffed out his chest and said, “Sustainable energy,” which Miles translated as permission to zone out. “I’ve been working on a business model and cash-flow projections,” Joey continued, loading up a rack of champagne flutes and beaming with pride. “Given how things kinda fell apart over the winter, I figured I’d work one more summer here for fast cash and then launch in the fall, once I figure out the best strategy for moving forward.” Miles nodded absently as he focused on turning his paring knife 90 degrees to slice away the oyster’s adductor muscle. He considered asking what had fallen apart, but worried Joey would get the wrong idea, maybe misread his polite questions as invested interest. The last thing Miles needed was yet another obligation from which he’d then need to wriggle free.
Just then Miles heard Denise greet Kate at the hostess stand. He abandoned Joey, who was still blathering on about some acronym Miles didn’t understand, to confront the decider of rock stars.
“Hey!” Kate called out from down the bar. She’d arrived not even two minutes ago and she was already deep into her station prep.
“Ziggy’s your Rock Star Reader and not me?”
Kate surprised him by laughing. “You’re ridiculous,” she said, shaking her head as she continued to slice limes. “You’ve been back in town for, what, six weeks? How would I even introduce you? Novice bartender? Mediocre line cook? Resident mansplainer?”
Miles chuckled in spite of himself. She made a good argument. Raising his hands to signal no foul, Miles dug deep and found the white-flag language he was looking for: “You’re right, I’m a jackass.”
Kate nodded. “But you’re becoming a more self-aware jackass, which is why I wanted to ask you something.”
“If it’s ‘Would I make a more entertaining Rock Star Reader than Ziggy?’ the answer is yes, one hundred percent.”
“I can depend on him to show up,” Kate said, “which is more than we can say for you.”
Miles caught her words in the pit of his stomach. He hadn’t seen Ziggy since Kate’s birthday party a month ago, when he’d embraced the role as Bev’s date in part to evade conversations he wasn’t ready to have. Never before could Miles have spent a whole day in Sea Point without talking to Ziggy, let alone an entire month, but now the kitchen possessed him, the sizzling meats called to him like the Sirens. A newfound love was the perfect distraction from facing his best friend who, Miles knew, would make him face himself.
“For the record, I did what he asked me to do,” Miles contended. “I showed up, I went through the books. I just haven’t—”
“Please just tell him,” Kate said, cutting him off. “Playing dumb doesn’t come as naturally to me as it does to you.” She wasn’t wrong, but Kate Campbell could be so irritating when she was right. It made him miss Bell, who would never snort at her own joke the way Kate did now.
“Is that what you wanted to ask me?”
Kate’s smile evacuated her face. She put down the bottle of honey she’d been squeezing into the mint julep remix she was perfecting and stared at Miles with such utter seriousness that Miles held his breath, suddenly fearing the worst.
“Would you go to Nessie’s wedding with me?” Kate’s dilated eyes reminded Miles of E.T. and made it difficult to process her question.
“What?”
They stood there, separately mortified, as Joey appeared with a bucket of ice but kept his head down as he dumped it and sprinted back into the kitchen. Miles bit his lip and examined a blister on the inside of his thumb. “Did you ask Ziggy?”
Kate looked away, surprised to find herself fighting back tears of rage or humiliation or both. She was a high school junior all over again, waiting in the dark outside her house, listening to the Prince of Sea Point and his Yates Academy friends laugh in his red Jeep about how chuck-able she was.
“Forget it,” Kate said, turning her attention to the several bunches of mint in front of her. Destemming each leaf, she realized that she’d made the grave mistake of assuming that Miles would do her this solid. Before he had deserted her for a career in the kitchen, he’d let her think they were friends. Now Kate recognized that his amiability must have been Miles’s way to get her to train him into becoming a viable bartender. With his flawless face and impeccable manners, the Prince of Sea Point had charmed her with an almost sociopathic flip of a switch. Kate understood how that sort of magnetism could be emotionally dangerous, but it was also necessary for impressing Thomas at the wedding.
“I’m just surprised you didn’t ask Ziggy,” Miles said tentatively, watching her pick each mint leaf with unnecessary violence.
“No,” Kate finally said, imagining Ziggy in his baggy overalls and steel-toed boots, shaking Thomas’s hand with dirt under his fingernails. “It didn’t seem like his thing.”
“But it’s mine?”
“It’s black tie and full of rich people worried they’re not rich enough.”
“Fair,” Miles sighed. “Did you ask Denise?”
“Her tux doesn’t fit her anymore.”
“You’re hilarious,” Miles deadpanned.
In theory, Kate had to ask her manager permission for specific nights off, but in reality, Kate could do whatever she wanted. She was the Wharf’s MVP bartender, hands down, which meant she could be trusted to find her own coverage. Miles, on the other hand, would have to ask for Chef’s approval, which was far from guaranteed.
“It’s fine. Never mind,” Kate said, raking the mint into a pile with her fingers. “But for the record, I’m not trying to catfish you into dating me—I know I’m not your type. I’ve seen the photos.”
“Photos?”
“Of your girlfriends. You date models with IQs even lower than their BMIs.”
“Sick burn,” Miles grinned, adding, “especially coming from someone asking a favor.”
Kate braved a glance at Miles and was relieved to see his brown eyes sparkle with amusement—or maybe that’s just what his stellar looks encouraged her to see.
“Please?” she asked.
Miles grabbed a mop and wiped down the bar, surprised by his own reluctance. He typically said yes to just about everything, and Kate had been a good friend to him. But Bell would hate it. Although she still wasn’t responding to his texts, Miles held out hope she’d come around. If Bell heard he’d gone to a wedding as Kate’s plus-one, it would give her grounds to continue her silence. And then there was Ziggy. Not that they’d talked about it, but he had built Kate an outdoor shower, which, in Ziggy language, was the equivalent of John Cusack posted up with a boombox over his head, even if he thought no one knew.
“Why don’t you try Ziggy?” Miles asked, straining to sound casual.
“Never mind, forget it. I thought it could be fun.”
Miles took a deep breath in as he tried to scheme up a solution in record time. Natalie would be on his ass any second if he didn’t get back to his station, but he hated confrontation and he owed Kate. “You’re right,” he said, ignoring the questions flooding his brain and muting the concerns about Ziggy and Bell. “I’ll go with you and make your ex feel like a fool—right? Or not a fool? Wait, do you want him to feel like a fool?”
Kate nodded. “I want him to feel just foolish enough that he fights you and wins me back—not physically fights you, just, like, breaks up with his girlfriend and asks me to dance…slash marry him.”
Grinning, Miles extended his hand and said, “Game on.”