A Toast to the Good Times - By Liz Reinhardt Page 0,1
hating the idea of you spending the holidays in this bar. It’s beyond depressing. I feel like I have to step in and stop this madness.” She hops on a barstool and pulls off her hat and mittens, like she means business. Like she’s planning to stay a while.
Oh, shit.
I toss the sticky rag back under the bar and it sloshes around in the bucket of brown water.
“Look, Mila, it’s not a big deal. I’ll be fine.”
“I know. I mean, I know you’ll be alive and buzzed and stuffed on stale pretzels. But think about your soul.”
She puts one hand over the red scarf she still has tied around her neck. She always has a scarf on, even at home, I guess for weird girly fashion? Or maybe because it’s always so bitter cold in our tiny, uninsulated dump of an apartment, she just has to keep warm anyway she can.
“I have no soul,” I gripe, and she laughs at me.
“You are a calamity. You are a Christmas miracle just waiting to happen.” She hops back off the barstool, sweeps the pile of unmentionably disgusting crap into the dustpan, and throws it out before leaning on the broom handle and looking at me with that bad-idea look she gets so often. “Hey, since you’re going to be serving brew on Christmas, and I refuse to trade my last shred of humanity in by joining you, we should do a little shindig tonight. You up for it?”
“You’re sweet. I appreciate it. I do. But shift isn’t over for five hours, and I don’t think I’ll be able to face one more sauced person wearing a Santa hat and wishing me a Merry Christmas after I’m done. Rain check?”
I hold out a hand for the broom, and she passes it to me.
“Just me and you, then. We’ll unironically watch It’s a Wonderful Life, I’ll scrounge up some delicious food, and we can sit in sleeping bags on the couch and attempt to keep warm. What do you say? Say ‘yes.’ Oh, and do you like cranberry sauce with the berries?” She wrinkles her nose. “Or without? You seem like a ‘without the berries’ kinda guy. Am I right? You know what? I’ll just pick up both. Okay?”
Maybe I could have managed to let her down gently, let her know I’m really not in the mood at all. But she does the two-eyed baby-panda-sneeze wink.
It is two days before Christmas.
And I do, I guess, have a tiny shred of soul buried deep inside somewhere.
“Okay. Okay, sounds...fun.” I attempt to not look completely unexcited and she narrows her eyes.
“You’re the worst liar. Ever. Anyone ever tell you that?” She backs to the door, pulling her hat over her dark, messy hair streaked with fire-engine red pieces. “But this will be epic, Landry! Epic merriness, and it will make me feel better. To spread some Christmas cheer to the ultimate Grinch!” She throws her skinny arms up and knocks into the bells above the door. “Ho ho ho!”
I can’t help smiling, and it turns into a laugh fast. Mila is definitely a little dorky, but she’s got this irresistible cheerfulness that always manages to crack me up, no matter how hard I try to wallow in my own stubborn depression.
She’s probably the reason I didn’t leave Boston with my tail between my legs the first month, when everything felt like it had gone to overwhelming shit, and I felt like a huge failure. And it wasn’t just because she picked up half the rent.
Mila was someone dependable. Comfortable. Someone who wasn’t after anything from me.
She was someone to watch cartoons with in the mornings and never bitched that it was juvenile.
And even if she didn’t remember to replace my dental floss, she always remembered to pick up milk, so we could eat our Lucky Charms the way they were intended to be eaten and not with water or juice, both of which I had sadly attempted, unsuccessfully, pre-Mila.
She danced around the kitchen to awful girly pop music while she cooked even more awful food, and then, as she forced me to eat her inedible cooking, she told me stories about the people who came to the library where she worked and who were so freaking unbelievably crazy, they had me rolling even on my worst days.
She and I were both pigs, so our apartment was almost always a warzone, but Mila added some kind of magical touch that still made it feel homey, gym-sock stink