He cut her off. “You know,” he said, “that’s all I heard today from anyone. Can’t take much more sorry.”
“I’m sor—” she began, then dropped it with an involuntary laugh.
“That’s what I need,” Lance said. “I need to see a pretty girl smile.”
Brigid obliged.
“Would you like a beer?” Lance asked. “We can shoot the shit here, just talk, just talk, not talk about sorry, about how sorry we all are, just not talking about anything, just shoot the shit . . . Would you do that, gorgeous? Can I get you a beer? Please? Sit and have one beer with an old man?”
Brigid took the bait. She swiveled her head from side to side. “What old man’s that? Where?”
Lance veritably leapt from his chair, pulling it back and offering it to her. “You sit. Sit. I’ll get you a beer.”
Brigid did as she was told.
When the door slammed again, Lance was placing an icy can of Schlitz in her hand and plunking down a chair for himself beside her. The beer felt exactly like what she wanted. She cracked it open, took a long sip, then rolled the can along her stinging forearms.
“It’s that cleanser stuff,” Lance said. “Right? It itches?” His eyes were already welling with tears. “Lorna’d rub ice on it.” He flicked at his eyes with the back of his hand, then fumbled to light a cigarette. “God, I’m a fucking mess.” He got the smoke lighted and inhaled deeply.
“Could I bum one?” Brigid asked.
“My pleasure, baby.” He handed her the pack and the lighter. As she extracted one and got it lit he was saying, “Tell me something— anything. Tell me some dumb normal thing. Like you’d of told me last week. Some stupid thing about noth—hey,” he remembered, “how’s that boy? That college boy—how’s things with the fucking college boy?” He was extraordinarily pleased with himself for the retention of that small memory outside his own circumstance and pounced on it. “How the fuck goes it with the college boy?” He smiled so wide, it was ghoulish.
“To tell you the truth,” Brigid said on an exhale of smoke, “he’s a shitty bastard and I should have known it from the outset.”
“Oh, no,” Lance cooed, enjoying himself now. “What’d he do to hurt you, baby?”
Brigid brushed hair from her face with calculated nonchalance. “Just found himself another girl to take up with entirely.”
Lance let his mouth drop open. Then his face contorted in disbelief. “Who?” he said, so vehemently it sounded like a dare: You just try and name someone hotter than you on this island.
“The one from the beauty salon . . . ?”
Lance nearly tipped over in his chair. His eyes bulged with laughter. “Reesa?!” he cried incredulously.
“No, not her,” Brigid said, “the younger one . . . Janna, is it?” Brigid now knew precisely what her name was, but the fact that she gave a fuck was no one’s business but her own.
Lance’s disbelief abated only slightly. “That fuckhead’s going to take Janna Winger over you? He’s out of his fucking mind, baby! Baby, anyone who’s going slumming with Janna Winger instead of the hottest little girl to hit this shithole in a hell of a time—he’s not in his right mind, baby. That boy’s fucking nuts!”
Brigid drank her beer eagerly. She didn’t know what to say.
Lance drank too, marveling at the insanity of the world. “Fucking nutcase. What a dumb stupid fuck.”
When Brigid had finished her beer, she set it down on the railing and stood to go. “I’ve got to have a shower . . . these chemicals . . .”
Lance’s eyes lit up. “Oooohhh-ooh! Can I come?”
And if the look she wanted to give him was the look she’d practiced for Gavin—the What the fuck is your problem, asshole? look—she managed somehow not to. Somehow she managed just to laugh—a hearty, heady, Ha ha ha ha, we’re all so bloody funny, aren’t we? laugh that at least got her down the porch steps and headed toward home.
SUZY STOPPED INTO the beauty salon when she’d finished in the maid’s room for the day. Reesa, too, was about to close up and head home, and Suzy helped her and Janna tidy the place a bit as they chatted. Reesa had trained a few of the local girls herself—Janna, and Cybelle Schwartz too. They were just past eighteen, and Reesa had invested a great deal of time and energy in trying to persuade both of them to get off Osprey