release you’re holding there.”
Josie came down. “Sorry.” She surrendered the jacket.
Richie looked it over, at first for damage, then simply to admire it and the larger idea of Nick Drake. “Man, to play like that, the guy must have made a deal with the devil.”
“It’s like he was superhuman or something,” Josie said.
Richie was stunned, like he’d just answered his door-bell to find Ed McMahon standing there with a giant cardboard check. “You know this record?”
“What, are you kidding?” Josie asked.
“No. Nobody knows Nick Drake.” He turned to me. “Is this fucking cool or what? I finally meet a hot girl who has halfway decent taste in music.”
Josie got up and ran to the bathroom. She slammed the door, and the towel rack fell to the floor.
Richie was confused. “What the fuck?”
“Dude,” I whispered, “she said you guys were listening to Nick Drake all night.”
Richie’s face showed a different kind of concern. Either very small missing pieces of the night before were coming back to him or very large ones were not.
“Did you fuck her?” He didn’t answer. He made the slow, strategizing walk to the bathroom door. I took a cigarette from Josie’s pack and lit it.
“Is everything okay in there?” Richie asked. No answer. “Josie?”
“I’m fine,” she said.
“You don’t sound fine.”
“Well, I am.” She flushed the toilet.
Richie waited until it died down. “Are you sure?”
“Yes.” The faucet went on, then off. “You should just go to work.”
“I don’t want to leave you like this.”
“Go. I’m okay.”
“You sure?” No answer. “You’re sure you’re okay?”
“Yes.”
“Well, only if you’re sure.”
“I am.”
“But you’ll come by the restaurant so I can see you before you head back?” Josie didn’t answer.
It sucked for me to witness the whole thing. Richie really was a good guy, but every so often an innocent got chewed up in his gears.
“Okay? You’ll swing by the restaurant before you go?”
“Sure,” Josie said.
Richie had probably been banking on some quick, pre-dinner-rush skull in the alley behind Esposito’s. Now, if Josie showed up at all, he’d have to hide in the walk-in freezer until she left.
“Okay,” he said. “I’ll see you later. I hope you feel better.” He walked back to the kitchen at a noticeably fast clip. He swept his keys up off the table.
“What about her?” I whispered.
“Just wait here until her ride shows up, please?”
“Christ.” Richie dashed out the back door. I could feel the kitchen quieting down, like a placid body of water that had just finished swallowing a cruise ship. I polished off most of the smoke before Josie emerged from the bathroom. Here eyes were puffy, and her nose was pink. She took the seat across from me and started sobbing. I touched her shoulder on the place where her bra strap was digging into her skin.
Her girlfriend knocked on the screen door.
“It’s open,” I said.
Josie ran to her girlfriend and gave her a weepy hug. My future wife scowled at me from over Josie’s shoulder. “What the fuck did you do to her?” Jocelyn demanded, holding Josie up so she wouldn’t leak through the floor.
I LET SWEET THUNDER recover against a chain-link cage filled with empty propane tanks, and went inside the Great Atlantic Job Lot. A true connoisseur of food can take a bite of the house specialty and identify its ingredients. I took one whiff and detected PVC vinyl, rubber cement, mothballs, a hint of tarragon, mesquite wood charcoal, and Absorbine Junior muscle rub.
A wind-battered elderly woman wearing an airbrush-on-white Robert Goulet concert sweatshirt stood at the only activated register. A tablecloth-sized piece of heavy clear plastic hung by its four corners from the high ceiling and served as a catch basin for whatever was dripping down into it. A length of rubber surgical tubing punctured the amniotic bulge and shunted the liquid out of sight through the “Employees Only” door. I grabbed a shopping cart and got down to business.
“Hello,” I said to Goulet.
“Uh-huh.”
I negotiated the narrow aisles, finding in logical order a twelve-pack of white tube socks; a six-pack of no-name briefs; a seven-pack of no-name T-shirts; a camouflaged knit hunter’s hat and gloves; a gray polyester hooded sweatshirt; a tube of green Close-Up toothpaste with a free, extra-firm bristled toothbrush; a spool of “Jackson and Jackson” dental floss; a bar of Lux soap; and a beach towel that said “Fisherman’s Friend,” with a cartoon depicting a naked-from-the-waist-down fisherman getting a blow job underwater from a fugu. I also picked up two tires and tubes for Sweet Thunder; two tins