Truly (New York 1)

“Something will work out. Alec will let me sleep on the couch for a while if I have to.”

This was true, because Alec was a pushover. It was also a bad idea. Ben’s former pastry chef was bringing his new bride home from Spain. Ben crashing on the couch would put a real cramp in the honeymoon.

“You can always come stay with us,” Connor said. “Erin and Bridget can bunk together, and you can have Erin’s room.”

“Yeah, that’d be really cozy. Right up until your sisters killed me in my sleep.”

“They wouldn’t mind sharing if it was for you. They like you.”

“Thanks, but I have to stick close to the bees.” Connor lived way the hell out in Queens.

“You and those bees.”

Ben gathered all the darts and positioned himself for another shot. The dart died on the way to the wall and buried itself in a crack between the floorboards. Connor checked his watch. “Shoot.” He grabbed his jacket off the arm of the couch and stood. “I have to head out. I told Erin I’d take her for her driving test in an hour.”

“You’re going to be late.”

“Don’t say that. She’ll whine if I’m late.”

Connor came up behind him, clapped one hand on his shoulder, and raised Ben’s dart-clenching fingers with the other. He cocked Ben’s arm like a puppet limb, aimed, and shot.

Forty points.

“You should really stick to pinball.”

“Check back again in six months. Tiger Woods of darts.”

Connor chuckled. “See you next week for the game?”

“Yeah, I’ll be here.”

He and Connor usually got together on game days. In college at UW, they’d been roommates, first by luck of the draw, then by choice. The Badgers and the Packers became their religion. The church had been forced to close its doors when Ben was in Europe, but after he came back and started working in New York he’d connected with Connor again. It didn’t take them long to figure out that Pulvermacher’s was a better venue than Connor’s place. His sisters didn’t treat the Packers with sufficient gravity, and Ben liked to say things to the refs that weren’t fit for the ears of teenage girls. At Pulvermacher’s, everybody took the Packers seriously, and bitching at the refs was a communal activity.

As Connor headed out, Ben threw again. Missed by a mile.

Son of a bitch.

He gave up and stuck all the darts in the board. Flopping onto the back room’s couch, he pulled his book from his pocket, intending to finish his beer before he took off.

There was a lull in the music, and from the main room he heard the friendly murmur of Connor’s voice followed by a woman’s laugh—a deep, throaty, way-too-loud bray that echoed in his head after the jukebox started playing again.

Without thinking, Ben rose and walked to the pinball machine, curious to pinpoint the source of that sound.

There were a few other people in the front room now, but they were all engaged in conversation or fondling their cell phones. Connor was backing toward the exit, beaming his trademark ear-to-ear grin, and May was still at the bar, smiling back.

It had to be her who had laughed.

Some laugh.

Connor jogged up the steps. His torso disappeared from sight, then his legs, then his feet. May’s smile faded along with him.

She blew out a breath, her unfocused gaze falling on the liquor bottles.

I bet you couldn’t be nice if you tried, Connor had said.

It wasn’t true. Probably.

Niceness wasn’t a prized commodity in restaurant kitchens, and the divorce had amplified Ben’s bad temper. In the first year after he and Sandy broke it off, he’d felt fucking scary. Pissed off and clenched, like he might strike out any second if he’d been able to find anything to strike out at. He’d started getting headaches in the season before she took the restaurant, Sardo, and in the months after his ears were ringing all the time. His doctor had doubled his blood-pressure medication and warned him to chill out before he had a stroke.