“Man, I bet this place is great during the holidays,” Angela mused, looking around the dark bar. “Did I ever tell you about the time I hosted my family for Thanksgiving?”
I shook my head.
Angela scoffed. “I don’t know why I even wanted to. I think part of me wanted to be like my grandma. She’s always hosted our holidays, you know? She’d cook her heart out for Thanksgiving, have the biggest and best tree every Christmas.” She smiled. “But I was in college. Sure, I had a little apartment that I shared with a few girlfriends rather than a dorm, but still, I had no business hosting a holiday.”
“How many people did you host?”
“Fifteen,” she said after taking a sip of her wine. “My whole family. Parents, grandparents, mom’s sister, and two of my cousins, my three brothers and their significant others.”
I laughed. “How in the world did you fit them all in an apartment?”
“Uncomfortably,” Angela answered. “My roommate had a dog at the time. Bastard jumped up on the table when we weren’t looking and ate all the cheese and sausage we’d cut for appetizers. And because I’m a kid and not an adult, I made instant mashed potatoes and stuffing.” She shook her head with a wide grin. “That was the angriest I’ve ever seen my grandma — including when I told her I was lesbian.”
I chuckled.
“Everything just went to shit. I cooked the turkey too long, so it was dry, and I forgot to take the giblets out so that all got cooked along with it in this gross bag of juice.”
She wrinkled her nose as I laughed again, imagining the scene.
“We ended up driving all over town trying to find somewhere open for us to eat, and there was this small, family-owned dive bar just like this.” She looked around with a soft smile. “We played pool and Grandpa spent at least a hundred dollars on the juke box. The family who owned it joined us after a while. We shut the place down.” Angela’s eyebrows bent together. “That was the last time we were all together and happy. It was before I told them.”
I frowned, reaching over to cover her hand just like she’d done to me in the room.
“Yeah,” she said after a minute, shaking off the memory as she reached for her wine. “I bet this place is great during the holidays.”
I smiled, looking around at the exposed brick and low-hanging chandeliers. “It does have quite the vibe.”
“What does your family do for the holidays?”
I shrugged. “Usually it’s just the three of us; my mom, Dad, and me. We have a tradition of getting McDonald’s on Christmas Eve.”
“Ew.”
“I know,” I admitted on a laugh. “It’s weird because when we do go to my grandma’s house, she has all these traditions and dishes she cooks every year. She makes the best green bean casserole,” I added, mouth salivating at the thought of it. “But we don’t go very often. I think it hurts my mom to be around her siblings and all their perfect kids.”
“Perfect kids?” Angela said after swallowing another drink of wine. “Pretty sure that’s an oxymoron.”
I tried to smile. “My mom is one of five kids. She wanted to have five kids, too. But then I came first and… well…” I held up my right hand, wiggling my pinky and thumb as evidence. “She thought I’d be a handful, no pun intended, so she and Dad decided one was enough.”
Angela watched me for a minute before she said, “You’re not responsible for your parents’ decisions. And for what it’s worth, I think you would be a rad big sister.”
“Right now, I’d rather be a rad artist.”
“Well, let’s get you drunk. Maybe that’s the missing piece. Lots of artists experimented with drugs in their prime, you know. Just look at Picasso.”
I laughed, reaching for my wine glass and tilting it to meet hers. They met with a satisfying ting in the middle of the table, and at that exact moment, I looked behind my roommate and found the boy from my art class.
“You’ve got to be kidding me.”
“What?” Angela asked with wide eyes, whipping around to look where my eyes were trained.
“That’s him. That’s the boy from class.”
I didn’t have to tell her which one I meant. It was easy to see from the confidence radiating off him. It might as well have been a pungent cologne for how he wore it, his shoulders square and wide, eyes lazy and a bit glazed, a sideways smirk playing on his lips. He looked carefree and a little bored, like he could be anywhere he wanted to be in the world but chose to wander into this bar just for fun.
His hair was even messier than it had been in class, tousled on top of his head like he’d just had his hands running through it. He did at least change his clothes since I’d last seen him, but there was no evidence of a shower. He wore wide-legged, baggy jeans and a cream-and-brown plaid button-up with a denim jacket over it. It was far too hot to be wearing that jacket, as was it far too dark to be wearing sunglasses inside, but he donned both.