in her Wild Turkey to melt to just the right size before drinking. It was after eight o’clock, but the front room at Nursing Holmes was orange with natural light. Some guys in a band were hauling their gear through the bar and into the bigger room.
“Can you just let the expression slide for the sake of the story? ” Richie asked.
“It’s not just the expression,” Jocelyn said. “It’s the whole story.”
The other person at the table with us was a pretty Mexican kitchen worker named Milagro. The other Mex icans at Esposito’s called her Flaca because they thought she was skinny. Flaca’s English was broken. She backed Richie up. “What’s wrong with saying ‘piece of ass’? ”
“You know what? ” Jocelyn said. “There’s nothing wrong with it. It’s a fine expression. Succinct, and not wholly without texture. Use it liberally.” She didn’t feel like teaching Flaca both the English language and Feminism 101. She gave me a dirty look, which I shrugged off. Someone at a pool table in the next room executed an explosive break. Jocelyn flinched.
Richie continued where he left off. “For me it’s a toss-up. I’ve had a few amazing ‘wedding pieces.’ ”
I had drunk two beers and a shot. I was feeling all of them. “Hang on,” I said. “For it to qualify as a wedding piece, do you have to fuck during the actual reception, or is it just someone you hook up with at a wedding and end up fucking? ” I was a stickler for details.
Jocelyn blew smoke in all our faces.
“Either one,” Richie said. “But let me go on record: It’s way better if you screw during the festivities. It heightens it.”
Flaca laughed, then said something in Spanish.
Richie continued. “I screwed a bridesmaid at my cousin Eleni’s wedding. We were in a supply closet in the basement of the reception hall. I swear to God, Eleni and my uncle Nick were doing their father-daughter dance to ‘All the Way’ right above our heads. It was pretty priceless.”
“Sounds classy,” Jocelyn said.
“Hey, it wasn’t my idea.”
“Oh, in that case, sounds classy.”
“What was her name? ” I asked.
“Honestly? I could not tell you.”
Jocelyn stood up. She frisbeed a Sam Adams beer coaster at the tabletop, and it skipped onto the battered red wool carpet. “In case you’re all wondering,” she said, “I’m going to the bathroom now to take a dump.”
“Thanks for sharing,” Richie said. We watched Jocelyn vanish, then Richie drew Flaca and me closer toward him. He smelled of Murray’s pomade and Salems. He lowered his voice. “You ever get a wake piece? ”
“Get the fuck out of here.”
“What’s a wake piece? ” Flaca asked.
“You’re telling me you got laid at a fucking wake? ”
“Not at the wake. Right after. And it was someone I sort of knew back in high school.”
“That’s insane.”
“Amy Dellorto,” he reminisced. “You have to love a girl with the same last name as a carburetor.”
“When the fuck was this? ”
“I don’t know. Couple years ago.”
“Who died? Don’t tell me it was her mother.”
“No, our American history teacher, Mr. Savage. The only good teacher anyone in East Longmeadow ever had.” Richie raised his glass, and we toasted this Mr. Savage.
“How in the fuck do you engineer something like that? What did you do, whisper in her ear while you were kneeling at the corpse? ”
“A bunch of us met up for drinks afterward. She and I were catching up, and she says out of nowhere that she always liked me back then, but was too shy. We start making out in the bar. One thing led to another, blah, blah, blah, and you know that Budgetel on Route Five in Holyoke? ”
“Wow.”
“First floor. Third window from the right. I still look at it whenever I drive by.”
“That’s hilarious.”
“The best part is, I was sitting on the edge of the bed with my Filene’s Basement el cheapo suit pants pulled down to my ankles, and she’s kneeling there, glazing my vase—”
“You just make that up, ‘glazing my vase’? ”
“I don’t know. Maybe. Anyway, so she’s glazing my vase, and the TV’s on, and the Happy Days theme song starts playing. Not ‘Rock Around the Clock,’ the other one. I can’t stop reading the names going by: Ron Howard, Henry Winkler, Donny Most, Anson Williams, blah, blah, blah. It was distracting, so I look down at my feet, and I’m wearing one brown sock and one blue sock.”
“That is rich.”
“A good time was had by all.” He turned to Flaca.