days to recover from it. What was the point of having him, if they were going to treat him like an outcast all his life? He lay in bed, thinking of them, as the headache his mother had warned him about began to pound. It took him nearly an hour after that to fall asleep.
An hour later, he was in a deep sleep when the telephone rang. He dreamed that it was monsters from outer space, trying to eat him alive, and making strange buzzing sounds while they did. And all the while, his mother stood laughing at him, waving newspapers in his face. He put the covers over his head, and dreamed that he was running screaming from them, until he realized it was the phone. He put the receiver to his ear, and was still more than half asleep when he answered.
“…llo…”
“Adam?” He didn't recognize the voice, and realized as he woke up that the headache was even worse than it had been when he went to bed.
“Who is this?” He didn't know, and no longer cared, as he rolled over in bed and started to go back to sleep.
“It's Maggie. You left a message on my machine.”
“Maggie who?” He was still too out of it to understand.
“Maggie O'Malley. You called me. Did I wake you up?”
“Yeah. You did.” His mind was a little clearer then, as he glanced at the alarm clock next to his bed. It was just after two. “Why are you calling me at this hour?” As his head cleared, the headache did too. But he knew that if he talked to her, he would have trouble going back to sleep.
“I thought it was important. You called me at midnight. I just got home from work. I thought you'd still be up.”
“I'm not,” he said, lying in bed and thinking about her. His call to her must have sounded like a booty call to her at that hour. But calling him back at two A.M. was hardly any better. In fact, slightly worse. And now it was too late to see her anyway. He was half asleep.
“What were you calling me about?” She sounded curious, and somewhat ill at ease. She had liked meeting him, and was grateful for the seat he'd gotten her. But she was disappointed he hadn't called her afterward. When she mentioned it to them, her friends at the restaurant where she worked didn't think he would. They thought the fact that she hadn't slept with him might make him less interested. Maybe if she had, he might have felt some bond to her. Although the maître d' insisted it was just the reverse.
“I was just wondering if you were busy,” Adam said sleepily.
“At midnight?” She sounded shocked, and as he woke up and turned on the light, he was faintly embarrassed. Most of the women he knew would have hung up on him at that point, except those who were truly desperate. Maggie wasn't, and sounded insulted by his explanation. “What was that, a booty call?” She had called it. Except in his case, it had been an antidote to the venom of his mother. Her particular brand was singularly potent, and he'd been hoping some sympathetic soul would provide the antivenom he needed. And if sexual favors were involved, that wouldn't hurt either. It was just slightly more awkward in Maggie's case, because he really didn't know her.
“No, it wasn't a booty call, I was just lonely. And I had a headache.” Even to his own ears, he sounded pathetic.
“You called me because you had a headache?”
“Yeah, sort of,” he said, sounding embarrassed. “I had a shit evening with my parents on Long Island. It's Yom Kippur.” He guessed correctly that with a name like O'Malley, she wouldn't know beans about Yom Kippur. Most of his dates didn't.
“Well, Happy Yom Kippur,” she said a little tartly.
“Not exactly. It's the Day of Atonement,” he informed her.
“How come you didn't call me before this?” She was justifiably suspicious.
“I've been busy.” He was growing sorrier by the minute. The last thing he needed was to deal with this girl he had planned never to call, at two o'clock in the morning. It served him right, he realized, for calling her in the first place. So much for booty calls to strangers at midnight.
“Yeah, I've been busy too,” she said in her distinctly New York accent. “Thanks for the seat anyway, and a nice evening. You weren't going to call me again,