Madly (New York 2)

“Can’t you just tell him you’ve changed your mind?”

“Sure, I can, but that’s just an example.” Allie drained her glass. The whiskey that had clung to the side slowly settled to the bottom, and she swirled the golden liquid around, trying to remember how Elvira had explained it. Things always made more sense when Elvira explained them. And then there was the fact that she was a tiny bit muddled from two rum and Cokes and…three? Was it three whiskeys?

Just little ones, though. Three, or possibly four, bitty baby whiskeys to take the edge off her long day of traveling and stress. Her trench coat was draped over the back of the chair, too, on the opposite side from Winston’s, with her hat perched on top of it and her suit jacket folded neatly beside the whiskey bottle.

The bar kept getting hotter and louder. Her cheeks were flaming, her ears kind of buzzing from the whiskey. She unbuttoned the top two buttons of her blouse, glancing down to make sure the lace of her slip didn’t show.

A woman squeezed behind Winston, passing from the bar area to the back room, where there were people playing darts and dancing to the music. Then another woman with two men, just as the pinball game made the noise that meant Winston had lost his ball.

So many people—a late night crowd now. “What time is it?”

One hand on the pinball game’s plunger, he leaned down and tapped his phone. “Half eleven.”

“But they’re still there?”

Winston craned his head over the crowd. “Yes. They haven’t moved.”

“Good. So, wait—what was I saying?”

“You couldn’t take a yoga class.”

“Right, so, I mean I could. If I wanted to go to yoga, I could just go, but the thing is, with your family and the people who know you, you’re always anticipating their reactions to stuff. You don’t want to tell them, like, ‘I’m totally into yoga now,’ if you know they think you’re the kind of person who doesn’t like yoga, because maybe then they’ll tease you for turning into a hippie, so instead you just don’t.”

“Don’t do yoga?”

“Maybe, or you don’t tell them things. You don’t do anything that they don’t already think would be something that you would do. You don’t even try doing it, and then explaining why you’ve changed, or why they were wrong about you, or why you were wrong about yourself. You can’t be authentic with them. You’re always just the role that they cast you in, or you cast yourself in. That’s what I’m saying—it’s hard to be authentic with your own people. Because if you were, you would mess absolutely everything up, and you know, you don’t want to mess anything up, sometimes even if you don’t like what would get messed up. But if you want to be your real self, or maybe you want to practice being your real self, for when you’re ready to mess everything up, you can practice on the mailman.”

“I never see my mailman. He just leaves the post in the box.”

“Or whoever delivers your packages. The UPS man. Or, in this scenario, you.”

Winston drained his glass. “I’m the mailman?”

“You’re the person who it’s easy to tell stuff to, is my point.”

“Ah. And to practice messing things up with.” He did a surprisingly rakish move with his eyebrow, but it was over so fast, she had to assume she’d imagined it. He picked up the whiskey bottle. “Another?”

“Please.”

He filled her glass with a steady hand. Either he hadn’t reached his limit yet or he was a highly competent drunk. She couldn’t decide.

The lights on the pinball machine blinked and whirled, its music competing with the rock ballad blasting from the bar stereo’s speakers. A large group squeezed by them, and Winston took a step closer.

“To the mailman,” he said.

She clinked their glasses. “Cheers.”

“Tell me something.”

She’d already told him so many things, things she couldn’t tell her dad or her sister or even Elvira.

She’d told him that for as long as she could remember, her mom disappeared. How she always knew when it was coming, because her mom would get farther and farther away, dreamy and distant, then snap at her for nothing. And one day she would get off the bus from school and find her dad in the kitchen.

Your mom’s taking some time for herself, he would tell her.

Sometimes it was just a day or two. Sometimes it was a week. Once, their mother had been gone for a month.

At night she would sneak into May’s bed and ask her big sister, When’s Mom coming back? and, Where do you think she went? and, What did I do, May?