It was still daylight but inside Poor People’s Pub it was perennially twilight. Anthony called Joy six times as they walked over; she didn’t answer even once. His heart was hammering, and he was sweating through his gray T-shirt. He felt the same smoldering fear and regret he’d felt when Huxley Wilder had called and said those five words: Puckett. We have a problem.
“What do you have for tequila?” Shelly asked the bartender, whom Anthony recognized as Joy’s friend Peter. Peter rattled off a list of names, most of which were unfamiliar to Anthony, who was not by nature or habit a tequila drinker. It had always seemed so unnecessarily complicated, the business with the lime and the salt: one more thing to figure out in an already abstruse world. “Ohmygod, you have Herradura?” She grasped Anthony’s arm. “Have you ever tried Herradura?”
Anthony had not, and said so.
“You. Will. Fucking. Love it. I promise.” To Peter she said, “Two,” and also held up two fingers; Anthony supposed this was in case the word two was somehow unclear.
“Ah,” Shelly said when the bartender put the shots in front of them. “God, I love the smell of a tequila shot, don’t you, Anthony?”
Anthony hadn’t done any kind of shot since the night before his wedding, when his groomsmen had taken him to Three Needs on Pearl Street in Burlington and gotten him inauspiciously loaded on Jack Daniel’s. “Sure,” he said politely. “Tequila. Love it.”
The bartender brought over a small plate with two slices of lime, a saltshaker, and two cocktail napkins; Shelly waved him away. “We don’t need the chasers,” she said. “Not with Herradura.” She lifted one of the shot glasses and handed the other to Anthony; she tipped hers into her mouth and indicated with one hand that Anthony should do the same. She closed her eyes and lifted her chin slightly: a gesture of ecstasy. “God, that’s good,” breathed Shelly. “It’s bold, I mean, you can taste it, but it’s so smooth. Doesn’t leave you cringing.” She flagged down the bartender. “Two more.”
“I’m all set,” said Anthony, who hadn’t done his first shot. Shelly shrugged and made no corrections in the order. She seemed entirely unaffected by the tequila. She was so very thin, he didn’t understand how this was possible.
When the next round arrived, Shelly dispatched her second shot as efficiently as she had her first and smacked her lips together. “So,” she said. “This place. Block Island. It’s so funny. What’s it like, for real?” She pushed his shots closer to him.
Anthony took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “It’s . . . amazing,” he said at last. “It’s really an amazing place.” Amazing was such a vague and banal word, and it didn’t begin to describe the blue-green water, the juxtaposition of the farmland with the ocean, the beach grasses blowing on the way to Scotch Beach. Mohegan Bluffs at sunrise. North Lighthouse at sunset. “Amazing,” he said for the third time. His father would have been ashamed of him. Specificity over vagueness was one of Leonard Puckett’s tenets. You had to be specific, when you were writing two thrillers a year. Your readers wouldn’t stick around otherwise. “I mean,” he finished lamely, “it’s a really nice place to take a break. Let’s put it that way.”
Shelly nodded. She twirled some hair around the tip of her finger, and when she let go the hair maintained a curl. She did the same thing to two more sections of hair and then let her hands fall to the bar, tapping it twice as if to say, There. That’s done.
Anthony needed to get to Joy. By now she would have plugged his real name into Google. She’d know everything. His heart had taken up residence in his throat. His insides were churning. “Listen, Shelly,” he began, “if you came all the way here to talk about the photo shoot, I really don’t know if I can—”
“Oh, that,” she interrupted him. “That’s okay, we’ll get to that later. I mean, I really think it could be a game-changer for you, I have absolutely no doubt, but I totally get it if you’re not ready to do it right now.”
“Okay,” he said, thrown by the later. What did Shelly think they would get to before? “Yeah, I guess I’m not ready.”
“Let’s just talk,” Shelly said, as if Anthony hadn’t spoken. “For now. I’ve never really talked to you, Anthony Puckett. I mean, I’ve talked to you, about the book stuff and whatever, but we’ve never really talked. You never told me, for example”—here she paused to twist one of the many giant rings on the fingers of her left hand—“what it’s like being the son of the Leonard Puckett. The one and only.”
“Oh,” Anthony said. “Gosh.” Same question Lu had asked, but decidedly different circumstances.
“You’re so adorable, Anthony Puckett. I can’t believe you just said gosh. We’ve got to get you out in front of the public again. Now, tell me what it’s like to be a Puckett.”
“It’s . . . hard to explain, Shelly. And honestly not all that interesting.”
“Or, we don’t have to talk, you know,” Shelly said. “I have a room at the Spring House Hotel.”
Oh, God, thought Anthony. He excused himself, walked to the bathroom, and called Joy again. No answer. When he returned, Peter asked, “Another round?”
“Yes, please,” said Shelly.
“Just a seltzer,” said Anthony weakly.
“If you don’t want to go to the hotel,” said Shelly, “I could just . . .” She let one of her manicured hands fall into his lap.
Anthony could feel his skin burning. He glanced at Peter to see if he could see where Shelly’s hand was. Peter was drying glasses with one of those little bar towels and didn’t seem to notice. There was a young couple sitting at a high-top in the middle of a fight. Anthony heard the girl say, “This is just such fucking bullshit, Michael. I can’t even.” At a nearby table a group of bachelorettes were drinking frozen daiquiris and laughing. He shifted and gently lifted Shelly’s hand from his lap, placed it on top of the bar, and gulped his seltzer.
Shelly Salazar took Anthony’s hand and flipped it over so that the palm faced up. She traced the lines on his palm with her manicured finger, closed her eyes, and breathed in deeply.
Anthony glanced around the bar. “What are you doing, Shelly?” he whispered uneasily. “Are you reading my palm?”
“Yes! Look at mine.” She opened her hand. “My left line is higher, which means I prefer a passionate or fiery kind of love. Let me see yours. Put your hands together, Anthony. Line up your little fingers.”
Anthony put his hands together and lined up his little fingers. Shelly frowned and studied his hands. He couldn’t believe he was indulging this. He needed to leave, to hunt down Joy, but he felt bewildered, adrift, and completely incapable of moving out of the way of the whirlwind that was Shelly Salazar.
“How do you know all this?” he asked.
“I read it online. You know, when you’re looking for some random thing, like the weather for some vacation you’re about to take, and then all of a sudden you’re clicking links that say ‘Top Ten Ugliest Celebrity Public Fights’ or ‘This Man Cured His Toenail Fungus with This Ancient Chinese Remedy’? Well, I came across a link that said ‘Become a Palm Reader in Ten Minutes.’ So I did.”
“Wow,” he said. “Ten minutes. So fast.”
“Anthony,” Shelly said. “I know you’ve split with your wife. But I have to tell you, your love line is really strong. Very active. So . . .” She looked at him meaningfully.
“I’m not interested,” he said quickly. “I mean, I think you’re a really pretty girl, Shelly.”
“Girl?” She sat back. “I am twenty-eight years old, Anthony Puckett. I am practically an old maid.”
“Woman,” Anthony corrected. “I think you’re a really pretty woman. I’m simply not looking for that right now.”
“Looking for what?” Shelly rested her chin in the palm of her hand and studied Anthony.
“You know what I mean. For that.” He nodded significantly at her other hand, the one that had been on his groin. “I’m not looking for that,” he repeated.
“Ohmygod,” she said, sitting back. “You all take everything so seriously.”
“Who is we all? Men?”
“Your generation. I dated a guy your age—what are you again, like forty-five?”
“Thirty-nine!”
“Whatever. This guy was forty-five. Forty-six, maybe. Divorced. Just like you.”
“I’m not divorced,” he said. He had, in fact, been honest with Joy about that part. It was just everything else he’d held back on. He wished he could walk the summer backward, all the way to the day the Le Baron broke down and the Jeep pulled up beside him. If he had to do it all over again he’d tell the truth right from the beginning.
She shrugged: same difference. “He had a couple of kids, I don’t know, two, maybe three, I’m not sure, I never met them. Anyway, everything was Let’s talk about where this is going, Shelly, or I need to know what you’re thinking about, Shelly. It was exhausting. I was just in it for some good sex, and also he had this amazing apartment on the Upper West Side, and this was when I was living with a completely psycho roommate down in the East Village in a total shithole. I would have slept with almost anyone to get out of that place.”
Anthony winced. He felt six hundred years old. He missed Joy: he wanted Joy.
“I said, Why’s everything have to be so serious?” Shelly continued, either ignoring or missing his wince. “I mean, the places he took me to! Atla. Fairfax. Le Coucou. I kept asking him, Why can’t we just keep going out to these amazing dinners and fucking?” She paused. “Actually,” she said pensively, “the sex was just okay, if you want to know the truth.”
“I don’t need to know the truth,” said Anthony.
“But seriously, the dinners and the apartment were amazing.” She was lost for a moment in a glassy-eyed reverie, and then she snapped out of it and turned her laser gaze on Anthony. Anthony flinched. “Everyone is too serious about everything these days,” she said. “I just don’t get it. So you copied a couple of paragraphs from some book by some dead writer nobody’s ever heard of. Does the world have to end?” Her gaze shifted, and she indicated the shot glasses in front of Anthony. “You going to do these or not?”
“Not,” said Anthony. “Definitely not.”
“Well, I’m not going to waste two shots of Herradura.” She lifted the glasses, one by one, and tipped them into her mouth. Then Shelly Salazar smacked her lips together, held out her hand, and said, “Goodbye, Anthony Puckett. It has been a pleasure working with you.”
“Goodbye, Shelly,” Anthony said. “Thank you for everything.”
“When you change your mind about that thing with your dad,” she said, “which I know for a fact you will, you pick up your phone and you call me immediately. Okay?”
“I’m pretty sure I won’t,” said Anthony. “But if I do, I will.”
Shelly Salazar slid off the barstool and straightened the skirt of her dress and left the bar. Anthony turned to watch her go; a slight wobble on her super-high heels was the only indication that anything had gone on in that bar, anything at all.