been very quiet so far tonight, drinking her resentment.
But Char had meant for everyone to go. It was her club, and she was closing it. She paused, and I knew she didn’t want to leave me with some of my least favorite neighbors, all three already drunk, and this usurping stranger. I was torn, wanting to see what happened, but at the same time I didn’t want to end up cleaning Tate Bonasco’s vomit out of my sofa.
“I do not like this,” Charlotte said to me. “Not one little bit.”
Roux was carrying limes and rocks glasses and my room-temp gin back to the coffee table. She overheard Char, and a sly smile spread across her face.
“You aren’t a porcupine,” Roux said, setting out the glasses and expertly pouring shots, not measuring. “You aren’t Kanga either. I know you, lady. You’re that fish. That orange fish in a bowl from The Cat in the Hat. That’s your spirit animal.”
“Oh, my God, you are,” Lavonda said, laughing so hard she choked.
“Roux should not be here when your mother is out,” Tate said in an uptight Fish voice, reaching across a giggling Panda to pat Lavonda’s back.
“Go get some sleep. We’re almost done here,” I assured Char, turning her toward the stairs before she had a rage stroke.
“Yes,” Roux said, “Amy, you play Up-Up-Up with a fish,” making herding motions toward the stairs, and that put the sloshed trio on the sofa into hysterics.
Char stomped up ahead of me, the back of her neck crimson.
“Hey, did you really read the book?” Tate asked over the laughing, so loud we heard it at the tip-top of the stairs. “Because I only read the Spark Notes.”
I closed the door to the basement.
“Good grief!” Char whispered with a fierceness that I rarely saw in her. “How will you ever get them out of here?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
Except for pregnant Charlotte, I was the soberest woman in the house. Even so, I could feel the gin in my veins. I took another little sip. I wanted to be back downstairs playing, not up here disapproving. Still, loyalty had me walk Char to the door, nodding agreement as she whisper-railed.
“Who comes into someone’s house, someone’s club, and takes it over and makes everybody drunk and stupid? If I were you, I would go right up to bed and just leave them there to realize how stinking rude they’re being. Except I wouldn’t trust that Roux not to steal something.”
Upstairs, Davis would be in bed reading with an ear cocked for the baby monitor. Oliver was no doubt enjoying the sleep of the innocent, his arms thrown up over his head. I was naïve enough to assume that my stepdaughter Madison was upstairs in bed, too.
“Yeah, that was pretty . . .” I trailed off, because what word came next?
Interesting.
Which, though I’d never say it out loud, book club often wasn’t. Char’s selections were heavy on Ladies and Society. She liked white-gloved books that explored long-dead social mores. On my own I read high-stakes fiction: Margaret Atwood, Stephen King. Or memoirs like The Glass Castle and Wild, the ones by women who’d lived risky and survived.
I understood, maybe better than anyone, that the saying “May you live in interesting times” was the cruelest curse that could be laid. I didn’t want my life to be interesting ever, ever again, but I liked interesting on paper, contained between closable covers. I didn’t mind this Roux person hijacking our decorous, mild fun. Just this once.
To Char I said, “We can discuss House of Mirth ourselves, after our walk tomorrow,” and I resolved to get up early and read the last third. I would give Char her book talk, to make up for this disloyalty. For thinking, for just a moment, Dear God, she really is a little like that orange fish, fussing in his bowl. “I’ll make us lunch, and we’ll do every question.”
Char’s eyes pricked with tears, the pregnancy hormones maxing out every emotion, and then she lurched at me and hugged me. I hugged her back, tight, feeling the arc of her inflating belly pressing against my hip. Char’s extended family was very small. An elderly, unwell father and a military brother who’d married a German girl and still lived overseas. I was nearly estranged from my own family as well. It was one reason we were so close, forming a do-it-yourself support system.
“God, you’re so nice to me. And I am such a whiner,” she said. “Okay,