“You mean flour,” Patricia said.
“Yeah, flour.” Serafina smiled.
There was a long silence. Kevin cleared his throat like he was going to say something clever, but then he thought better of it.
Laurence still itched all over, thinking about how he’d tried to lecture Serafina about her job at dinner and now she was forced to hang out with his middle-school friend. He needed a patch for this date. Not to mention, he felt some random need to prove to Patricia that he wasn’t a total jerkface.
While they waited for drinks, Laurence tried telling Patricia all about Serafina’s emotional robots — then realized halfway through that talking about Serafina in the third person didn’t make her seem cool, but just made it seem like Laurence thought she couldn’t speak for herself.
“Patricia seemed cool,” Serafina said afterward, as she and Laurence sat in Humphry Slocombe and shared some Secret Breakfast, that weird ice cream with the cornflakes and whiskey in it.
“You didn’t really get to see what’s cool about her.” Laurence scooped some ice cream.
“Obviously I did, since I already said I thought she was cool.”
“It’s weird to see someone you haven’t seen in ten years, and it brings back all sorts of stuff. I was such a loser, you wouldn’t believe.” (When talking about middle school, Laurence had long since learned it was best not even to mention that he believed he’d created artificial intelligence in his bedroom closet, even as a funny story. It just made him sound like an asshat.)
They finished their ice cream. Which, ice cream with whiskey in it might not have been the best idea after three beers at the Latin American. Laurence was seeing a lot of floaters and his head was only getting fuzzier, plus he felt a deep unrest in the pit of his stomach.
“So what’s going on?” Serafina said. “I feel like there was some subtext to this evening that I missed.”
Laurence thought of saying that he didn’t know whether subtext was an emotional state or a mental state or even what the exact difference between the two things might be. But he bit his tongue and said, “I feel as though I’m on probation. I mean, in this relationship.”
“Huh. News to me.” Serafina shrugged. Her eyes widened and her lower lip curled inward as she looked at her boyfriend. Her red highlights glistened under the fluorescent hipster-ice-cream-store lights. She looked so beautiful and so filled with curiosity, Laurence felt a brand-new pang of love for her. He was ready to open himself up to her, something that did not come naturally to him. Her callused and manicured fingers toyed with the unladen ice-cream spoon.
“Have I said or done anything to give you the idea that you’re on probation?” she asked.
Laurence searched his memory for a moment, then shook his head. “I guess I just decided I was. I don’t know why.”
“This is weirding me out. I mean, I feel like our communication has sucked for, I don’t know, a month or so. But maybe it was worse than I knew.” Serafina massaged her own temples, pinching the skin on either side of her eyebrows.
“So … I’m not on probation then?”
“Well…” Serafina stopped mortar-and-pestling her forehead and looked him in the eye. “I guess you are now.”
“Oh.” Well played, Armstead.
18
PATRICIA COULDN’T GET that image out of her head: Laurence dropping out of the sky and waving money around, boasting that he would Save the World by writing off the planet. Even if she hadn’t seen it with her own eyes, the video clip was all over the net afterward. Patricia shouldn’t be surprised that Laurence had turned into an entitled yuppie. This was what he’d always wanted, wasn’t it? To be admired, to have everybody get his name right. Patricia kept feeling annoyed, until she realized maybe she was jealous. She spent so much energy keeping her good deeds secret, it was hard to watch someone else show off. Lately, the other witches were always on her case about Aggrandizement, no matter how hard she tried to be humble.
Patricia found herself still obsessing about Laurence as she slid on knee-high leather boots and a black babydoll dress with red sparkles and went to an Irish bar in the Financial District to put a curse on someone.
Patricia sucked at walking in spike heels, and kept almost wiping out as she strode inside the stuffy, blaring pub and tried to recognize Garrett Borg from the picture Kawashima had e-mailed her. In person, Garrett looked like a once-hot Alpine ski instructor gone to seed, with very fair hair and a blue double-breasted suit that camouflaged his pudge. He was halfway passed out at the bar, drooling into the Guinness towel but still raising his head to pour more high-end Scotch into his mouth with his free hand every few moments.
In theory, Patricia shouldn’t need to know why she was hitting this guy — Kawashima had ordered it, and that ought to be enough for her. But Kawashima had included some other pictures along with Garrett’s head shot: the coroner’s photos of the teenage girls he’d left buried in an old culvert along the I-90, nearly matching bruise marks on their necks and inner thighs. So Patricia was properly motivated when she slid onto the leather-top stool next to Garrett and whispered in his ear. “I bet you’ll have one hell of a hangover tomorrow. But you know what? I know the best hangover remedy there is. This shit will cure anything.” She made it sound miraculous, but also sexy and illicit. He popped both the pills she gave him without hesitation. Then she helped him into a cab, and he went home to Pacific Heights, to sleep it off. She hadn’t lied: The shit she’d given him would indeed cure anything.
There was zero chance that Patricia would sleep after putting a curse on someone. But she would be careful and would follow Kawashima’s advice to avoid overreaching. She knew why they were so worried about her going off the rails: She could still see Toby’s corpse when she closed her eyes. The janky expression, like Toby was about to sit up and tell a dirty joke.
Patricia had to crouch down to talk to a confused marmalade cat, who needed help finding his way home. (He remembered what his house looked like on the inside, but not on the outside.) Patricia checked on Jake the krokodil junkie, who seemed stable now, give or take, and then she cruised the St. Mary’s emergency room, looking for people to heal on the down-low. She spent a couple hours trying to compose a letter to the Parks Department on behalf of some gophers whose burrow was being disturbed, pointlessly, by some inept landscaping in Golden Gate Park. It took a lot of concentration to translate from gopher language into bureaucratese.
Right about now, Garrett Borg would be evaporating into a whiskey-scented cloud over his heart-shaped bed.
Patricia ended up at the edge of the Park, on Fulton. Staring at the warm dirt, so full of life, between her pointy toes. She wasn’t pacing herself, after all. She dug in her bag for her phone and peered at the screen. There was nobody for her to call at three in the morning. Even at three in the afternoon, there would have been nobody to call. Maybe Kevin, her ambiguous friend-with-benefits/boyfriend? She was trying not to crowd him. The traffic light at the edge of her vision changed primary colors. It was another hot, itchy night.
An owl landed on a branch nearby, without a sound. “Hello,” Patricia said. The owl blinked at the sound of her voice.
“If I can see you, so can others,” the owl said.
“I’m not trying to hide, exactly,” Patricia said. The owl shrugged with its whole body, like it was Patricia’s funeral, then flew off again because there were some gophers with an imperfect burrow not far away.