all right. You’re probably just getting the monthlies.”
I punched him in the arm. “Don’t be a dick.”
“You love it,” he whispered. “You know you do.”
I phoned Astrid three times before I left for work the next morning, but no one picked up.
The whole thing seemed unreal after a good night’s sleep. Not just her midnight call, but Taliaferro being so obnoxious, Christoph going all sieg heil, and my parking-lot fight with Dean on top of everything else.
I pulled on my coat, which still took some doing, one-armed, and wondered whether it was worth dialing her number one more time before I left for work.
Maybe she was just sleeping in.
And why the hell shouldn’t she? It’s not like she has a job she’s got to show up for, right?
All the same, there was a flicker of uneasiness in my belly.
Or maybe she’s dead. And wouldn’t you feel like a creepy bitch for dissing her in your head then , Maddie Dare?
I went back into the living room and punched in her phone number one more time.
The machine picked up again, her voice saying, “You’ve reached Astrid and Christoph. Please leave a message.”
“Astrid, listen, it’s Maddie. I just wanted to see how you were doing this morning. Give me a call at work.”
I was just about to start reciting the Catalog’s 800 number when she picked up, groggy.
“Hey,” I said. “You all right? I was worried.”
“Maddie?” she said, coughing. “What the hell time is it?”
“Early.”
I heard the rasp of a lighter. “You woke me up.”
“Sorry. I just wanted to make sure you were okay before I left for work.”
“I’m fine,” she said. “Really. I just need more sleep.”
“Okay. I’ll let you go, then. Call me later.”
“Yeah. Sure.”
She coughed again and hung up.
We were slammed that week at work: phone and fax orders already picking up for the holidays, and Betty ran through every hour on the hour to throw things in Editorial while shrieking about how we were all lazy, incompetent pieces of shit.
At one point she even made Yumiko cry, though of course Yumiko got all tough again a minute later and swore it wasn’t anything That Crazy One-Arm White Bitch had said, it was just that she’d caught some shrapnel when Betty missed her with the stapler, smashing a fresh pot of Sanka with it instead.
Even so, I left Astrid a message every day on my lunch hour, saying I hoped she was doing okay.
She didn’t call back.
Dean saw her a couple of times out at the office with Christoph. He said she seemed fine. That they both did.
“Want to have dinner with Astrid and Christoph?” asked Dean, when I walked in the door Friday night. “He just called a minute ago.”
“Is it a command performance?” I walked into our room and tossed my coat across the bed, then sat down at the end of the mattress to take off my boots.
I didn’t feel up for double-dating, not having heard from Astrid since her midnight phone call about getting pushed down the stairs.
“More like a bon voyage,” said Dean. “We kicked off early because he’s coming with me to Houston tomorrow. I said we’d let him know when you got home.”
“They want us to slog uptown?”
“He suggested Meriken.”
This was a sushi joint just a few blocks up from us, on Seventh.
“Sounds okay, actually,” I said, surprised to find this was true. “Especially if the offer includes some beer. What time?”
“Whenever. He said they’d cab it.”
I flopped backwards onto the bed, cast thunking against my ribs. The arm inside didn’t ache anymore, but it itched like hell.
“Will you call him back?” I asked. “I feel the need to lie here stupidly horizontal for a minute before I peel off my work-crap clothes.”
“Want a beer now? I think there’s a Rolling Rock.”
“That would be heaven,” I said. “Yea verily.”
“Did you ever hear anything else about the whole episode with the stairs?” he asked.
“No. I could ask them both during dinner—be really subtle, you know? Like, ‘Hey, Christoph, have you stopped beating your wife?’ Bet that would go over big.”
“Promise you won’t and I’ll make it two Rolling Rocks, even if it means a run to the deli.”
“My lips are sealed,” I said.
Dinner was going better than expected so far. Astrid wasn’t talking much, but Dean and Christoph were chatting about Switzerland.
Maybe he was a Nazi but not a wifebeater? At that point I was too exhausted from work to parse through the distinctions.
And at any rate, Astrid was there voluntarily, with no