More about them in a minute.
DUI guy probably found the meeting online in Rochester and drove out to the sticks to make damned sure the Anonymous part of Alcoholics A stuck.
Looks like a real estate agent, maybe a high-end car salesman, some industry that’s been whomped and he’s one of the last ones standing, barely hanging on by his martini habit, which stretched from three after work to four and he thought he was just getting a speeding ticket when the young-enough-to-be-his-nephew cop said, “Have you been drinking, sir?” and his heart skipped a beat, make it two, and he peed just a little in his khakis and tried on his first pair of handcuffs. When we pass the basket he’ll be all slick and fold his court-ordered attendance slip in a dollar bill, make it a five because he’ll want to show us he’s making it okay, and then the basket will come floating back with nothing in it but the signed slip and make its way to him like a homing pigeon and he’ll sheepishly pluck it out and pocket it. So much for discretion. I prefer the DUI guys who drop their slip in like an ace-queen in blackjack, defiantly, BOOM, fuck everybody in the ROOM.
I’m doing it again.
Motor-minding, shitty-committee.
Knock it off, Blankenship.
So Andrew blinks his lazy icon eyes and listens to tonight’s chairperson (Hi, Bob!) talking about humility, and just for fun (and exercise—the exercise never stops) he dims the good Presbyterian fluorescents above their yellowing Presbyterian screens, stopping before Bob notices, then brightens them again, stopping before any of them pop.
Chancho and Anneke both look at him.
Chancho the honcho and Anneke-Harmonica.
They of the smoking troika that watched the Lexus birth the DUI guy.
Chancho looks at him in a guilty Mexican Catholic stop-fucking-around way. Because this is guero God but still God’s house and you’re just lucky he doesn’t strike you down for being a brujo in the first place.
Anneke, who wants to and will be a bruja because Andrew is teaching her, side-eyes him as if she’s unsure whether he is the source of the phenomenon. His icon eyes reveal nothing. He casually reforks the samurai-style bun on top of his head, though, and she knows he’s doing that to fool Chancho into thinking he’s too distracted to fuck with the lights and to let her know that he’s fucking with the lights.
She wishes he were a woman.
He wishes she liked men.
Chancho wishes the meeting were over so he could go home for another plate of his wife’s mole enchiladas and an hour of UFC on Spike.
Andrew’s only real complaint about this particular group is that they run a more-than-normally religious meeting. Stands to reason, out in the sticks like this. Still beats the darkly secular town chapter with its constant friction between doomsaying bleeding deacons and cigarette-mooching relapse punks.
During the hand-holding Lord’s Prayer, only Anneke and Andrew are silent. That was what first made them notice one another, their shared agnosticism. And the fact that, except perhaps for Laura (Hi, Laura!), a runner-up for Miss New York in 1999, they are the two most empirically attractive people in the room, misaligned gender preferences (hers, not his) aside.
2
Andrew and Anneke drive to Dunkin Donuts and have coffee (his with cream, hers as black as a raven’s beak), then farther into Oswego to shoot pool at the waterfront bar. They are both far enough along in their sobriety to be comfortable in a bar, and they both enjoy pool enough to tolerate the clientele. In the twenty years Andrew has made his home in nearby Dog Neck Harbor, he has come to Oswego periodically for those things one goes to town for when one lives in a hamlet, pool and bowling being two of them, but he has never understood Oswego’s denizens.
Oswego hurts his feelings a little, with its redbrick waterfront buildings still faintly overlettered with hundred-year-old advertisements (Enjoy refreshing Coca-Cola! It still has cocaine!) wasted on its aesthetically impaired youth; with just a little artistic umph, just a thimbleful of intellectual zeitgeist, just one really banging university, this town could have been a tiny Amsterdam, a waterfront Ithaca. Instead, it… well, isn’t.
In the twenty years Andrew has been coming here, he has watched the town smother almost every good restaurant it birthed. French bistros, Indian buffets, from-scratch hippie bakeries, quirky greasy spoons. And the names… Casa Luna, The Coach House, Wahrendorf’s Diner, the Little While. Oh, the closing of the Little While hurt. The seafood marinara fed three; it was so thick with garlic that slivers of it stuck to your fork, and so generous with seafood that you had to push aside the shrimp and fish to get to the mussels, then opened a mussel to find it packed in with more shrimp and fish.
And the pancakes at Wahrendorf’s.
“Fucking Wahrendorf’s,” he says, punching the last word to give his cue more chi as he breaks. Sinks a colored and a stripe.
“Fucking Wahrendorf’s,” Anneke agrees.
A lad in droopy shorts, a wife beater, and a baseball cap (twenty years and the Oswegian wardrobe hasn’t changed any more than the appetite for cheap fried food and sports bars) saunters over with three quarters in his hand, but Anneke stacks six quarters on the table and shoots him a look that makes him veer to the jukebox instead. Andrew ignores him and turns his icon eyes to the task of sinking two more solids.
The boy goes back to his friends, also wearing their regulation tank tops and baseball caps, and makes them whinny with laughter at something. Andrew looks too small and exotic to be worth punching, and Anneke looks like she might throw a good punch herself.
No glory there.
“I’ve been thinking about your middle name. Why Ranulf?”
He pauses, hip on table, just about to take a flashy behind-the-back stab at a tough corner-pocket shot, and thinks about his long-ago ancestor.
“I mean, from what you’ve told me about your parents, I don’t see them pulling out some King-Arthury name like that.”
Andrew imagines Ranulf Blenkenshope, the first known proto-Blankenship, dodging piles of sheep pellets near the smoky Northumberland hovel in which a wife stirs the bland bubbling blankenfood that will keep them and their wan brood alive through another rainy thirteenth-century winter.
“It beats Randolph. I changed it when I was in college. For funsies.”
He misses his shot, his concentration bifurcate.
“And since when is an Anneke Zautke so ready to spar about names? It sounds like you should be wearing clogs.”
Suddenly curious about what she is wearing on her feet, Andrew glances at her Middle-Easternish sandals, sees the slightly chipped green toenail polish. Anneke has handsomely shaped feet. She has handsomely shaped everything. And she dresses well, not just well for a lesbian.
She hates that word.
3
“I hate that word,” she had said. “It sounds like something cold-blooded.”
“It is,” he had said, and she had frog-knuckle-punched him right between the scant muscles of his arm.
Hard.
That had been the night they first attempted to be lovers; the movie they had watched together was over, the bruschetta she had made all gone save for the sliver of basil and crust of cheese drying to the plate. She kissed him more out of loneliness than passion, finally taking him to bed for a self-conscious romp they both mostly laughed through, especially the application of the condom.