favorite, though, and he wanted to do it right. Or at least as well as he could. Fiona would pop in early, but then she had to head back to her nanny job so the parents could go out on the town. “I need you guys too,” Terrence had said. “It doesn’t have to be midnight. I just want my party.” Yale could have used a real celebration, some pure stress relief—but the staff lunch counted, he supposed. He liked these people. They would celebrate now, and tonight Yale and Charlie would stay sober and walk to Masonic together. They’d sidestep puddles of vomit on the way home.
At noon, twelve staffers plus Yale crowded around smashed-together tables at the Melrose. They passed around yesterday’s issue, containing Richard’s photo essay. The write-up of the fundraiser had appeared last Monday, but Richard had needed more time. This was art, not reportage. As the paper made its way toward the bench where Yale was sandwiched, he felt irrationally uneasy, as if Richard had managed a photo of him and Julian gazing at each other in the bathroom. But no. Here, instead, was a shot, snapped from below, of Yale and Charlie listening to the speeches, Yale looking emotional. It must have been taken right before he broke down. There was a shot, too, of Cecily laughing with two men—presumably the friends she came with. “What’s her deal?” Gloria asked and reached over to point. “She was cute.”
Yale said, “Straight. And confused. She kind of hit on me once.”
They all found this hilarious. Charlie called down the table, “Women used to hit on me all the time. Before I started losing my hair.” And, good employees, they clamored their protest.
Yale knew most of the staff well, although there’d been some turnover. Nico, for one. And two others of the original crew were sick now too. “Is it terrible that I want to replace them all with women?” Charlie had said that fall. “It’s insurance. Dykes won’t die on me. They won’t even take maternity leave.” Yale had answered that yes, it was terrible. “Blessed be the dykes,” Charlie said, “for they shall inherit all our shit.”
Yale mentioned to Dwight, the copy editor, that he was about to head up to Door County again, and Dwight, who’d grown up vacationing there, had all sorts of advice for him, most of it seasonally inappropriate. Dwight was a tedious person, but Yale hadn’t caught a typo in Out Loud all year. Dwight also told him about the German POWs who’d been sent to the peninsula during World War II to pick cherries, and how many of them had stayed and married local girls. Yale logged this away as fodder for the ride up.
Down at Charlie’s end of the table, though, something was wrong. Charlie had his head in his hands, and he’d gone white, and he was saying, “Fuck, fuck, fuck.”
“I’m so sorry,” Rafael was saying. “I thought you’d know before I would.”
Yale said, “What?” and Charlie shook his head urgently. It was something to be dropped. Something to talk about at home. Meanwhile, no one at Yale’s end seemed to have heard whatever was said. They dutifully found conversations to cover the awkward silence. Dwight asked to taste Gloria’s tomato soup. But then Charlie was up from the table, heading out the door to the pay phone without his coat. Through the window Yale could see him dialing, listening, hanging up, retrieving his quarter, dialing again. Four times.
When he came back, he didn’t sit down but reached across the table to Yale. He handed him his credit card and whispered: “Take care of everyone, okay?” And then he turned and walked out.
The people sitting at what had been Charlie’s end of the table didn’t seem shocked, just chagrined, as if they’d made a horrible mistake. Yale squeezed his way off the bench past Gloria and went to fill Charlie’s vacant chair. He said, quietly, “What just happened?”
The two men on either side—Rafael and a new guy—both started to talk and then stopped. Rafael finally said, “It’s Julian Ames.”
“Oh. Fuck.” Yale felt faint, felt himself go as pale as Charlie had. “No,” he said. “Fuck.”
But they weren’t contradicting him, weren’t saying, “No, we only meant he broke his leg. We only meant someone beat him up.” He looked at them, and they looked at their plates.
Yale’s breath wasn’t coming on its own.
And, terribly, half his horror was selfish. Had he actually considered going up to Julian’s apartment?