He ran lines until his stop, but couldn’t find the right one. Maybe he’d wing it.
Rossi’s was one of those identity-crisis places, a bar-slash-restaurant that drew families for dinner but an after-work crowd for drinks. Perched on a stretch of Lincoln that fell between more fashionable areas, the place had become their haunt in the last few years mostly because with Alex there, they could drink cheap. Funny, really; in a city filled with terrific bars, they chose to meet every week at a half-assed restaurant that they’d otherwise never have noticed.
After the heat of the bus, walking into the air-conditioning felt wonderful. Mitch nodded at the hostess, moved past the dining room, with its rich smell of bolognese and carbonara, and into the bar. The postwork crowd was thinning but not gone, men in business casual, women laughing, glasses filled with pink and green and pale yellow, specialty martinis made with syrups and liqueurs. He moved through them, looking toward their customary seats.
Dammit. Other than Alex pulling drinks, he was the first one there. He should have showered.
“THAT PRICK,” Alex was saying as she walked up. “He should be, I don’t know. Drawn and quartered.”
“Who should?” Jenn smiled at him, careful not to hold it too long, then hugged Ian, the blades of his shoulders sharp through his shirt, then Mitch, still in his uniform, the jacket with the hotel logo slung over the back of his chair.
“Tasty,” Alex said, “right on time, as usual.” He smiled back at her, his eyes warm. Normally she wouldn’t have liked the nickname, Tasty-sort-of-rhymes-with-Lacie, but he had a way of saying it that sounded warm instead of dirty. “Hot date?”
“Kickboxing class. Who should be drawn and quartered?”
“That Cayne guy.”
“Who?”
“James Cayne. He was the CEO of Bear Stearns,” Ian said. “It’s a securities firm, the one the Fed just bailed out. They’ve had a lot of trouble lately. The whole subprime mortgage collapse? Started with their hedge funds.”
“Apparently,” Alex said, “while the company was tanking, he was playing in a bridge tournament. Guy’s company is responsible for half of America losing their houses, he’s playing cards.”
“It’s a little more complicated than that.” Ian gave that sharp-edged grin. “There were market forces in play.”
“Hi, Jenn,” Mitch said.
“He should be killed,” Alex said again, pouring a martini from a stainless steel shaker and setting it in front of her. He stabbed three olives with a toothpick shaped like a sword and balanced it across the top. “Line him and that Enron guy, Ken Lay, and the rest of them up against a wall and shoot them.”
“Ken Lay is already dead. Heart attack.”
“OK, well, everybody else from Enron.”
Jenn said, “Bad day?” then laughed when all three of them nodded. “OK. Next round is on me.”
Her mother found it strange, the way her closest friends were guys. She was always asking unsubtle questions about which one Jenn was dating. Hoping it would be Ian, whom she’d never met but had come to believe must be a nice boy, a judgment that had a lot to do with the fact that he worked as a trader.
Jenn had always gotten along fine with women. But her friends, especially as she’d gotten older, they tended to be guys. It wasn’t that she was a tomboy or the perennial little sister or one of those women who talked sex all the time to keep the boys nearby. Somehow, though, as her twenties had slipped into her early thirties, it had gotten harder to have real girlfriends. The married ones retreated into couplehood. The single ones looked over her shoulder every time the door opened, checking the men at the bar, scoping shoes and ring fingers. Wondering if the guy walking in was the one for them, the one who would let them jettison this tedious phase, the single apartment and Christmas with the parents and the fear that they would end up owning cats. Ever hopeful that a cute stranger would spill coffee on them and have just the right line to follow it up. Romantic Comedy Syndrome.
Which was fine, and she wished them luck. They just made for lousy friends, whereas the boys kept things easy. Which was how she ended up here every week, all four of them at the end of the bar. She, Alex, Ian, and Mitch, the Thursday Night Drinking Club. “Which game tonight?”
“Tonight,” Ian said, “is clearly a Ready-Go night.”
“Why?”
“I’m feeling hypothetical.”
“I feel that way all the time,” she said. “OK. In the spirit of the evening: If you had half a million dollars. Ready, go.”
“Only half?” Ian cocked his eyebrow.
“I’d buy a house,” Alex said. “Nothing fancy, just something with a spare bedroom for Cassie. I think she’d stay with me more often if she had a room of her own. In Lincoln Park so she could walk to the shops, the lake.”
“Somebody hasn’t looked at real-estate prices in a while,” Ian said.
“What?”
“A house in Lincoln Park for a half million?”
“No?” Alex looked genuinely wounded, as though the neighborhood pricing was all that was holding him back. “Huh. All right, a condo. Whatever. How about you?”
“I’d quit the firm. Work from home. Day trade. I could turn that into ten million in no time.”
Alex snorted. “You’d be broke in a week.”
Ian smiled that thin smile again. “Jenn?”
She sipped at her martini, pulled off an olive, chewed it slowly. “Travel.”
“Where would you go?” Mitch leaned forward.
“Everywhere. All the places I book trips for other people. Paris. St. Petersburg. The islands. I’d like to spend a while in the islands. A little cabin on the beach, someplace with screens for walls, where you could hear the ocean day and night. Drink coconut drinks. Live in a bathing suit.” It was strange hearing the words come out of her mouth, like this was a long-held fantasy. Truth was, she hadn’t known what she was going to say until she’d started.
“Sounds nice,” Mitch said.
“Sounds boring,” Ian said. “I’d be out of my head in a week.”
“Then you’re not invited. Alex, Mitch, you guys want to come to the islands with me?”
“And leave all this?” Alex laughed and picked up a cloth, started buffing the bar. His sleeves were rolled to his elbows, and the muscles of his forearms were knotted ropes. “At this rate, in just twenty short years, I’ll be full manager. At which point if one of you wanted to shoot me, I’d thank you for the favor.”
“Why don’t you quit?” Mitch said.
“Why don’t you?”
“I-well, I mean, it’s a job, right?”
Alex nodded slowly. “Yes. It’s a job, all right.” He glanced down the line, where a plump, tanned guy stood with finger crooked, a gaudy ring flashing on one finger. “Speaking of.” He dropped the cloth and started away.
For a moment, silence fell. Then Ian raised his glass said, “Fuck work.”
Laughing, they clinked glasses. Jenn leaned into the bar, feeling good, a little bit of that old energy swirling around, the kind she missed, the sense that the evening could go anywhere, that there were adventures yet to be had. Ian asked the next Ready-Go question: What was something they would never, ever, do? Ready, go-and she settled in, let the night flow.
MITCH WASN’T DRUNK. Tipsy, OK, but not drunk. He’d had a couple of shots with Alex before the others arrived, and three or four beers since, a fair bit for two hours, but it had been a long day.
No, he wasn’t drunk, so that wasn’t why he was pissed off. Or it was only part of it. The real reason was that he’d finally caught his moment, and then the asshole had come over.