I chewed the inside of my cheek. The joke seemed to be over and I could see her grandma’s face coming through, all serious and intense behind her thickly made-up features. This was the expression she reserved for her most grave moments. She was Making A Point, and I realized she wasn’t going to give up.
“You seriously want me to, like, hit on somebody.”
“Yes,” she nodded once, her curls flashing forward in agreement.
“Which is totally unlike me. Because I have a boyfriend.”
“Yes.”
“And I’m just… not that kind of girl.”
“Agreed,” she nodded. “You’re not that kind of girl. You’re a goddamn country song in a borrowed dress and everything. And you are going to flirt with a man….”
“Melita, why?” I whined. On the one hand, it was probably harmless and I should just do it so we could leave. On the other, it seemed gut-churningly disloyal.
“Because I want you to prove it.”
“Prove what? What are you talking about?”
“Prove that Carl didn’t trade in your vagina for, like, a travel-sized packet of Kleenex or something.”
“Stop it.”
“Or a bag of wavy Ruffles.”
“Oh, I do love potato chips.”
“Tell me about it.”
“Great, now I’m hungry.”
“Me too,” she snapped. “Now I want tacos. So do it. Show me you’re not really letting some chucklehead turn your cootch into dust. Prove you still have your V card, and then let’s go get us some barba-freakin-coa.”
“But seriously whyyyyy?” I whined again, now full-on freaking out. I felt cornered, and I didn’t like it one bit. She leaned forward and glared at me.
“Because you keep telling me how unhappy you are, how lonely you are, how sad you are that your weenie boyfriend acts like you’re invisible, and yet you won’t do a damn thing about it. It’s like you think you are a passenger on this train and you are not. This is your life. You’re the goddamn conductor, Bree, so act like it. Be a woman. Go.”
She pointed toward the door and glared at me while she sucked the last couple slurps from the bottom of her glass.
“OK give that to me,” I said with my hand out, figuring that another drink would buy me a few minutes to get a plan straight in my head. She held it out with a vigorous nod, and I wondered briefly if I was going to have to give her a piggyback ride up the stairs to her front door later. Again.
CHAPTER 2
I picked my way carefully toward the bar, avoiding the artfully placed piles of sawdust on the floor. This bar had gone through so many personality changes it was downright schizophrenic. The honky-tonk thing was recent (we had assumed it was still Asian fusion when we planned for the evening) and I could only pray it wouldn’t last long. Bits of grit and peanut shells sawed at the sole of my foot inside my shoe.
Another song started and some of the drinkers let out a simultaneous whoop, followed by the sound of bar stool legs dragging on the floor. Apparently it was a known line-dancing song, if you were the sort of person who knew that kind of thing, and a shiny-faced group of women who looked like bridal-shower-partiers lined right up and started pantomiming a hoe down to the delight of the other drinkers.
Holding the empty glasses straight out in front of me, I swerved for a vacant spot at the bar and leaned gratefully against it. I raised a finger for the bartender as the group behind me swayed back and forth all together, picking up new bar patrons to join in everywhere it went like a Swiffer pad picking up dust.
The bartender rolled up one plaid sleeve and leaned his ear toward me.
“What can I get you?” he hollered over the music.
I pushed the glasses toward him.
“A Long Island, tall, and a gin and Diet Sprite?” I hollered back, shoving myself over the bar as close as I could get.
Behind me, the line dancers trundled rhythmically from one side of the room to the other, slapping at their imaginary cowboy boots. Everyone else scattered to the perimeter and crushed me back to the bar to make room.
“Long Island tall and gin and juice?” he repeated.
“No, wait!” I objected, stepping up on rail and heaving my top half closer to him. “Gin and diet. DIET SPRITE!”
“Yeah, OK,” he said with a scowl like I was stupid or something and walked away shaking his head.
I tried to climb down from the brass boot rail below the bar but the dancers were on their way back, now waving their imaginary cowboy hats. My hooker heel slipped on the shiny metal and I tipped the wrong way, my ankle shooting out from underneath me like it had been greased. I threw out an arm to catch myself as my head dipped below bar height and everything went dark.