Perfect Tunes - Emily Gould Page 0,27

for more alcohol, eventually finding a dusty bottle of red wine between the piles of clothes on the floor of Callie’s room. “It’s fine, we’ll get her a new one tomorrow; she would never even notice anyway,” Laura told him, just wanting him to get whatever he wanted so that he would want her.

He poured himself a coffee mug full of wine and put it down on the floor, then got out Laura’s guitar. He played one of her songs. She felt loose and careless.

“There’s this girl Amanda who’s been pestering me about doing an interview, and it would be good for the Groupies to get press. But she wants you to be there, too.”

“Of course, baby, that’s so exciting. Wow, you guys are like a real band now,” he said, and she thought fleetingly that he would likely not remember the conversation. He segued into a Clips song, extending a riff endlessly, looping it around, making it more and more boring. He’d made Laura’s song sound boring, too. She had a weird brief flash of wanting to grab her guitar away from him and show him how to play it better, but his hands moving on the guitar’s body distracted her. She wanted him to touch her so badly. It had been a couple of days, maybe three days, since the last time they’d fucked. In the close, dark, small room she could smell him, sweat and nicotine and the cheap detergent they used at the wash-and-fold Laundromat unless you specifically asked for Tide and paid a dollar extra. She waited as long as she could and then reached out to stop his hand as he strummed.

They were too fucked up. He could still get hard, but neither of them came. They moved gently against each other for what seemed like hours. The hot room smelled like a body, like their bodies, sweating onto each other and rolling over to find a new cool patch of sheet to press each other into until it started to get light and they both finally fell asleep. They slept late, and when they woke up, everything had changed.

3

Laura met Dylan’s mom for the first time on September 13, when she drove down in the doggy-smelling family minivan from Concord to pick up Dylan and whoever else wanted to come home with him. Davey and Callie came, too. It felt wrong to leave, but it also felt dangerous to stay. Being around a mom, anyone’s mom, seemed like a good idea. Deep underneath the more panicked and pressing concerns, it occurred to Laura that these were strange circumstances in which to meet her boyfriend’s (he was her boyfriend, right?) parents for the first time, but there were nothing but strange circumstances to choose from.

At first glance, Daisy seemed like momness personified: short, practical gray hair framing a pretty face; a soft, sweatered body, helping them load their bags into the trunk and offering them all long, sincere hugs, with an especially long hug for Dylan, who winced.

They stopped for lunch at a Chili’s in Connecticut. At the table, looking at the long, laminated menu, Laura felt as though she were in a dream, a terrible one. In the car she had felt oddly soothed by novelty and motion. But going to a chain restaurant with a boyfriend’s mother felt familiar, except under the circumstances bizarre, and also thousands of people had just died horribly blocks away from what was now her home, and it seemed not only possible but also likely that something just as bad or worse was going to happen next. She felt grief and terror and, most pressingly, the absolute dry-eyeballed gut-clenched agony of being sober for the first time in three days. She decided to order a beer.

But when the server came to take their order, he asked for her ID, which in her hungover haste she’d left in a different purse back in New York. “Sorry, miss, I can’t serve you,” the waiter said with a condescending smile. It was humiliating that he assumed she was underage, though of course very recently she had been.

She smiled back like it was no big deal and ordered some kind of pasta with chicken. Dylan’s mom ordered an iced tea, and everyone else also ordered water or soda. When the waiter left, Daisy turned to Laura with her eyes very wide and bright.

“I can see why you’d want a drink!”

Laura tried to smile.

“I don’t drink, myself. I’m in recovery.”

“Mom,” said Dylan,