As our lobster rolls arrived, I removed my suit jacket, folded it, and laid it over the arm of the chair to my left.
“I’ll never get used to it,” she said. “You, all dressed up.”
“Yeah, well, it’s not like the old days.” I bit into my lobster roll. Maybe the best lobster roll in Boston, which made it, arguably, the best lobster roll in the world. “It’s not the dressing-up I have a hard time with. It’s the hair care.”
“It’s a nice suit, though.” She touched the sleeve. “Very nice.” She bit into her roll and appraised the rest of me. “Nice tie, too. Your mom pick it out?”
“My wife, actually.”
“That’s right, you’re married,” she said. “Shame.”
“Why’s it a shame?”
“Well, maybe not for you.”
“Or my wife.”
“Or your wife,” she acknowledged. “But some of us remember when you were a lot more, um, playful, Patrick. ’Member those days?”
“I do.”
“And?”
“They seem a lot more fun to remember than they were to live.”
“I don’t know.” She raised one soft eyebrow and took a sip of beer. “I remember you living them pretty well.”
I drank some water. Drained the glass, actually. I refilled it from the overpriced blue bottle they’d left on the table. Not for the first time, I wondered why it was socially acceptable to leave a bottle of water or wine on the table but not a bottle of whiskey or gin.
She said, “You’re not a very polished staller.”
“I wasn’t aware I was stalling.”
“Trust me, you were.”
It’s odd how fast a beautiful woman can turn a guy’s mind into lint storage. Just by being a beautiful woman.
I reached into the inside pocket of my suit jacket. I pulled out an envelope and handed it across the table. “Your payment. Duhamel-Standiford already took out taxes.”
“Thoughtful of them.” She placed it in her purse.
“I don’t know if it’s thoughtful. They’re sticklers for the rules, though.”
“You never were,” she said.
“Things change.”
She considered that and her dark eyes grew darker, sadder. Then her face lit up. She reached into her purse and pulled the check back out. She laid it on the table between us. “I have an idea.”
“No, you don’t.”
“Sure I do. Let’s flip a coin. Heads-you pay for lunch.”
“I’m already paying for lunch.”
“Tails…” She tapped a fingernail on the side of her pilsner glass. “Tails-I cash this check and we walk over to the Millennium, get a room, and blow the rest of the afternoon damaging the structural integrity of a box spring.”
I took another drink of water. “I don’t have any change.”
She frowned. “Me, either.”
“Oh, well.”
“Excuse me,” she said to our waiter. “Would you have a quarter we could borrow? Give it right back.”
He handed it to her, a tiny tremor in his fingers for a woman almost twice his age. She could do that, though, unsettle a guy of most any age.
When he walked away, she said, “He was kinda cute.”
“For a zygote.”
“Now now.” She perched the coin on her thumbnail and spring-loaded the thumb against the tip of her index finger. “Call it.”
“I’m not playing,” I said.
“Come on. Call it.”
“I have to get back to work.”
“Play hooky. They won’t know the difference.”
“I’ll know the difference.”
“Integrity,” she said. “How overrated.”
She flicked her thumb and the quarter tumbled toward the ceiling, then tumbled back to the table. It landed on the paycheck, equidistant between my water and her beer.
Heads.
“Shit,” she said.
When the waiter passed, I gave him his quarter back and asked for the check. While he rang up the bill, we didn’t say a word. She finished her light beer. I finished my water. The waiter ran my credit card and I did the math for a good tip. The next time he passed, I handed him the bill.
I looked across the table into her large, almond eyes. Her lips were parted; if you knew where to look you would see a small chip at the bottom of her upper left incisor.
“Let’s do it anyway,” I said.
“The room.”
“Yes.”
“The box spring.”
“Si.”
“Sheets so wrinkled they’ll never be ironed out.”
“Let’s not set the bar too high.”
She flipped open her cell and called the hotel. After a few moments, she said to me, “They have a room.”
“Book it.”
“This is so decadent.”
“It was your idea.”
My wife spoke into the phone. “We’ll take that one if it’s available now.” She gave me another giddy look, as if we were sixteen and borrowing her father’s car without his knowledge. She tilted her jaw back toward the phone. “Last name is Kenzie.” She spelled it out. “Yes. K as in ‘kangaroo.’ First name is Angie.”
In the room, I said, “Would you prefer I call you Angie? Or Dominique?”
“The question is which one do you prefer?”
“I like ’em both.”
“Both it is.”
“Hey.”
“Yeah?”
“How can we wreck the sheets from over here on the dresser?”
“Good point. You got me?”
“I got you.”
After we’d dozed to the distant honks and beeps of rush-hour traffic ten stories below, Angie propped herself up on her elbow and said, “This was crazy.”
“It was.”
“Can we afford it?”
She knew the answer, but I said it anyway. “Probably not.”
“Shit.” She looked down at the white sheets with their high thread count.
I touched her shoulder. “Every now and then, we should get to live a little. D-S pretty much assured me they’d hire me on permanent after this job.”
She looked up at me, then back at the sheets. “ ‘Pretty much’ isn’t ironclad.”
“I know that.”
“They’ve been dangling this fucking permanence in front of you for-”
“I know.”
“-too long. It’s not right.”
“I know it’s not. But what am I going to do?”
She scowled. “What if they don’t make a real offer?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know.”
“We’re almost out of money.”
“I know.”
“And we have an insurance bill coming up.”
“I know.”
“Is that all you can say? ‘I know’?”
I realized my teeth were gritted hard enough to snap. “I’m sucking it up, Ange, and doing jobs I don’t like for a company I’m not terribly in love with so that eventually I can get hired permanent and we can get insurance and benefits and a paid vacation. I don’t like it any more than you do but until you finish school and get a job again, I don’t know what else I can do or fucking say that will change things.”
We each took a breath, our faces a little too red, the walls a little too close.
“I’m just talking about it,” she said softly.
I looked out the window for a minute, felt all the black fear and stress of the last couple of years crowding my skull and revving my heart.
Eventually, I said, “This is the best option I see on the table right now. If Duhamel-Standiford keeps playing carrot-on-a-stick, then, yeah, we’ll have to reconsider what I’m doing. Let’s hope they don’t.”
“Okay,” she said and it came out riding a long, slow exhalation.