“GIRLFRIEND?” ASHLEIGH KICKS me underneath the bar.
I yelp and scoot away from her. “It’s a joke. This is my roommate. Miles. Miles, Ashleigh.”
He sticks his hand out to shake hers. “Nice to meet you.”
“Charmed,” she says, suddenly a Gilded Age heiress.
“What can I get you?” he asks.
Ashleigh props her chin in her hand and leans forward to be heard: “What do you recommend?”
He drags a paper menu out of a nearby cup and pushes it toward us. “Kitchen’s out of a bunch of stuff, but we still have these.” He marks three of the six small-plate options, then flips the menu and circles the wine flights, drawing scrappy little stars beside the one he recommends.
He looks to me for approval. I look to Ashleigh. She nods and half shouts, “Whatever Miles says!”
“I’ll be right back,” he promises, disappearing with the marked menu, stopping to murmur something to a bartender with curtain bangs before slipping through the door.
Ashleigh swivels toward me. “So what’s this hilarious ‘joke’ about you being his girlfriend?”
“What’s this about my roommate being a drug dealer?”
She waves a hand. “That’s just what I call him in my mind, because of his aesthetic.”
“His selling-prescription-bottles-under-the-bleachers aesthetic?”
“More like eight-plants-and-grow-light-in-his-apartment. But that was before I unknowingly wandered into his bedroom thirty minutes ago. Now I have to revise his whole image in my brain castle.”
“Do you mean ‘memory palace’?” I ask.
“My turn to ask the questions.” Her eyes dance devilishly. I haven’t seen this mischievous side of Ashleigh before. It’s intimidating, feeling like I can’t escape her curiosity, but it also reminds me a little bit of Sadie, which sends a pang through my stomach. “Tell me about this joke, where you’re Hot Miles’s girlfriend.”
“Hello, ladies!” the curtain-fringed bartender says, making us both jump.
“Hi!” Ashleigh and I cheep in unison.
“Miles will be right back with your flight, but can I get you anything in the meantime?” She flips two water glasses onto the bar and fills them from a pitcher.
We shake our heads.
“Well, I’m Katya, if you need anything. Just shout.” She pats the bar and saunters off.
“So?” Ashleigh prods. “The joke?”
“It was just about this picture.”
She arches a brow, waiting. I give in, pull my phone out, and tap to the picture of Miles and me, avocado smeared on my face, our mouths suspiciously close. It’s more lascivious than I remembered. My stomach flutters uncomfortably.
Ashleigh stares at it, a divot forming in her chin. “What, because you look so much like a couple in this? That’s the whole joke?”
I grimace, debating how much more to divulge. This is my problem. I don’t know how to talk along the surface of things, but I also don’t want to unearth the ugly stuff, over and over again, for people who are just passing through my life. It’s depleting. Like every time I dole out a kernel of my history to someone who’s not going to become a fixture in my life, a piece of me gets carried away, somewhere I can never get it back.
You can’t untell someone your secrets. You can’t unsay those delicate truths once you learn you can’t trust the person you handed them to.
Ashleigh sets my phone aside. “Look. If you don’t want to be friends, I’m not going to make you. We’ve worked together for over a year, and I’ve managed to learn startlingly little about you in that time, and I haven’t pressed, because I can tell when someone’s a closed book—”
“I’m not a closed book,” I protest.
“—but what I can’t figure out,” she says, “is why ask me to hang out now? If this is just some Good Samaritan shtick, I would’ve rather stayed home than go on a pity outing.”
“It’s not a pity outing!” I say. “At least not on my end. And I’m sorry I didn’t make more of an effort to get to know you up front. It wasn’t you.”
She gives me a pointed look.
“Okay, maybe it was a little bit you,” I admit.
She lets out a guffaw of genuine laughter that makes me crack a smile. “What, you think I’m scary?”
“Well, yes,” I say. “But in a good way! It’s more that you’re always late.”
Another guffaw. “God, you’re not from Michigan, are you?”
“No, why?” I say.
“This honesty thing,” she says. “It’s refreshing. So you didn’t want to be friends with me because I’m always late to work.”
“And you didn’t want to be friends with me because of the gigantic stick up my ass?” I guess.
She chortles. “No, it actually wasn’t that. It was more that you were so happily coupled. The divorce is still too fresh for me to be around someone who’s got cartoon hearts in their eyes and baby birds carrying a long lace veil behind them.”
I didn’t tell anyone at work about the breakup, per se. But when you have three weeks scheduled off work for a honeymoon, then unceremoniously cancel the request, people talk.
“Well, even before my breakup,” I tell her, “I didn’t have either of those things.”
“Because of the stick?” she jokes.
My own smile widens. “Because baby birds are never on time, and it may seem trite, but when people are always late, I don’t expect them to be reliable, and I definitely don’t assume they’re interested in being close with me.”
She nods thoughtfully. “Fair. But for what it’s worth, I’m always late because I have a kid. So I’d like to think my friends can rely on me, but if it comes down to it, yeah, I choose Mulder every time.”
If I’m a closed book, bound in chains and kept under a padlock, Ashleigh Rahimi might’ve said the one thing that could function as the key.
“Also fair,” I say.
“So,” she says. “Have I earned the origin story of this ‘joke’?”
“There’s something I haven’t told everyone at the library,” I say, buying myself time. “About my breakup. Something . . . humiliating.”
Her jaw drops. “You cheated with Miles.”
“What? God! No!” I look around for eavesdroppers. If I’m going to utter this aloud one more time, I’d like it to stay in this room. “How do I know this story won’t race through the stacks at work like wildfire?”
She has the grace to not look offended. Instead she purses her lips, considering. “Let me ask you this: Have I ever told you anything about Landon?”
“Other than that you two have a betting pool about what a freak I am?”
“Let’s just say,” she replies, “when you get him to pause his My Bloody Valentine album, you’ll find how easy it would be to make a full The Crown–style television series about his family. And yet you know nothing. I’m good with secrets.”
“You could be completely making this up,” I point out.
“Sure,” she says. “But I’m not. I’m a recent divorcée who spends most of her time with an eleven-year-old. I’m not out here telling people’s secrets. I just enjoy hearing about drama! Sue me!”
“If you divulge what I’m about to tell you,” I say, “I might.”
“I’ve got it!” she cries, slapping both hands down on the bar. She swings her huge purse atop it and digs for her phone. “I currently have a horrible rash on my back. I’ll send you a picture.”
“Please don’t,” I say.
“It can be your collateral,” she says.
“What if—and stay with me here—you just, like, tell me something about yourself?” I say.
“Hm.” She narrows her gaze. “Kind of an old-fashioned ‘actually getting to know each other’ approach.”
“Precisely,” I say.
“What do you want to know?”
“Whatever you want to tell me,” I say.
“Well.” She sighs, looking up at the exposed beams across the ceiling as she thinks. “My kid was conceived in a parked car behind a YMCA. Does that do the trick?”
A snort of laughter escapes me.
“Oh!” She scoots forward, more animated now than I’ve yet seen her. “In sixth grade, the tissue I’d stuffed in my bra fell out of my shirt while I was at the whiteboard.”
“Oh my god,” I say. “So you’re Dante. You went all the way to the ninth circle of the Inferno.”
“What else?” Her eyes tip toward the ceiling again. “Oh! When I first had Mulder, I had no idea what to do with him ninety percent of the time while Duke was at work. So I’d bring him to the library to this moms’ group, and I’d find the calmest parent in the bunch and ask if they could watch him while I went to the bathroom. Then I’d go lock myself inside, set a timer, and sob as hard as I could for five minutes.”
“Ashleigh! That’s heartbreaking!” I cry, but she’s laughing now too.
“It was terrible!” she agrees. “Every day I’d wake up and have, like, one second of peace. Then I’d remember, Oh, shit, I’m someone’s mom. I was a wreck, for like six months. But it did convince me to go back to school to become a librarian, and Mulder’s pretty much my best friend, so all worth it.”
My heart keens at the thought of my own mother. How, even with the long hours she pulled at work, she made time to hand-sew Halloween costumes and chaperone field trips and stumble her way through helping me with algebra. She worked so hard to give me the best life she could, and I don’t take any of it for granted.
I just always thought our family of two would grow, and someday I’d have a house full of little voices, deep laughter, endless love. I thought the Best Mom Ever would graduate to the World’s Best Grandma, and I’d give someone new the love she gave me, but with a different kind of life. A full house, where they didn’t spend most nights alone, waiting for their overworked mom to get home or a mostly absent father to deign to stop by.
“What do you think?” Ashleigh bats her eyelashes. “Have I earned some intel?”
I hold up a finger while I take a long sip of water.
“Oooh, she needs to hydrate,” she says. “Must be juicy.”
I set the glass down. “I’m going to say this fast, and I’d prefer not to dwell on it too long.”
“Got it,” she says.
“Peter dumped me for his childhood best friend, who happened to be Miles’s girlfriend, and that’s how we ended up living together,” I say all in one breath.
Her jaw drops.
I take another sip. “And then I accidentally told Peter that Miles and I are dating now, so we took that picture to make the lie more convincing.”
Ashleigh’s mouth forms a perfect circle. “You’re kidding.”
I hide my face behind my hands. “I’m not.”
“I love it,” she cries. Volume, I’m realizing, is Ashleigh’s primary indicator of emotion. That and the surprising bark-laugh that occasionally jumps out of her before she’s even cracked a smile.
“What do we love?”
I open my eyes to find Miles arranging wineglasses in front of us.
“Your fake relationship,” Ashleigh says.
“Well, I don’t,” I say. “Now there’s no good way to get out of it. I mean, when we ‘break up,’ Peter will get to feel smug and superior about that.”
“That’s no problem,” Miles says, pouring a taste of white wine for each of us. “All we have to do is get married, and then stay together until they split up. And if they have kids, just have one more than them. If they get a dog, we get a cuter dog. If they buy a new house, we get a mansion.”
“A perfect plan,” I say. “Why didn’t I think of it?”
He pushes the wineglasses toward us. “Pinot blanc. It’s crisp and citrusy, with a little bit of pear, and it goes well with poultry and seafood. I’m kidding about the marriage, by the way.”
“You don’t say,” I reply, taking a sip.
“What do you think?” He leans forward, eager, focused.
I let the taste roll across my tongue before swallowing it. “It tastes like springtime.”
He smiles. “Exactly.”
“I think there’s something wrong with mine,” Ashleigh says. “It tastes like wine.”
“Here.” Miles pours more. “Try again.”
Ashleigh sips, then smacks her lips. “Oh, yeah. Big spring vibe.”
Katya, with the curtain fringe, calls for Miles then. He glances over his shoulder. A middle-aged guy with slicked-back hair, eyes disappearing into his face, is drunkenly leaning across the bar demanding something of the bartenders.
Miles pushes off the bar. “I’ll be right back.”
He beelines toward the drunk guy, a calm and polite smile fixed to his face though something about his eyes has flattened out, changed. Like he’s peering out from heavily tinted windows.
Ashleigh angles toward me. “Do you think if I keep being ignorant, he’ll keep pouring more, or was that a onetime thing?”
I watch him exchange a few words with the man. Miles nods, then bends his head toward Katya’s, the two of them quietly conferring, her hands braced lightly against his shoulders as she pushes up onto her tiptoes to reach his ear.
They both glance our way at the same time, and I spin back to Ashleigh, downing my drink. “I think you can just ask for more,” I say, “and he’ll probably give it to you.”
“I feel like a celeb,” she says. “I’ve never had this kind of in before.”
“Well, if having my heart shattered in the single most humiliating way imaginable can be of service to someone, I’ll take it.”
“I’m sorry, sweetie,” Ashleigh says, swirling her glass, “but if Peter was going to break your heart now, he would’ve done it eventually.”
“So, what?” I say. “Peter and Petra are soulmates, and it was going to happen sooner or later?”
“Soulmates?” She laughs. “No. I’m saying your ex is the little boy looking over someone else’s shoulder, trying to figure out if the kid next to him has a better lunch. Only, the lunch box is shut, so even though he knows what his parents packed for him is pretty good, he’d still trade it just to open up that rusty little Batman lunch box.”
“What is this metaphor, Ashleigh,” I say.
“It makes perfect sense,” she says. “He’s a lunch swapper, and whether it was the rusty metal Batman lunch box or a Cars 2 zip-up one that’s filled with mold, at some point, he was going to trade in the sack lunch.”
“Just to be clear, I’m the sack lunch here?” I say.
“It ain’t about the bag, babe,” she says. “It’s what’s inside.”
“So I’m a paper sack with a heart of gold.”
“You could be a three-course balanced meal with a cute little Hostess dessert, and it wouldn’t matter. He knows you, and the lunch he doesn’t know is going to catch his eye. I’m sorry, I just realized I’m really hungry, so that probably explains some of the—oh, thank god.”
Miles is back, unloading our order in front of us: a board with three local cheeses, a variety of pickled vegetables, and some Waning Bay preserves, along with a basket of bread from a bakery in town.
“So,” he says, “a bit of a snag.”
“What, you ran out of grapes?” I say.
His eyes flick down as he lifts the next bottle from beneath the bar. “Katya, my coworker . . .” He clears his throat as he pours our next taste. “She heard from Petra. About my new girlfriend.”
“Oh no,” I say.
He grimaces. “I am . . . really sorry, Daphne.”
“She just asked if it was me, didn’t she,” I say. “If I’m the new girlfriend.”
He nods, the tea lights sprinkling the bar catching the flush creeping up his neck.
“And you said yes,” I say.
The flush deepens. “I don’t know what came over me.”
Ashleigh tips her head back and laughs. The man to her left turns at the sound and gives her a flirtatious body-scan, which she, in her delight, entirely misses. “I love this so much.” She claps to emphasize each word.
“I’m never lying again,” I say.
“Except if Katya walks up to you and says, Hey, you’re sleeping with Miles, right?” he jokes. “Because if you tell the truth, this will all be very embarrassing.”
“You told her we’re sleeping together?” I say.
“Yeah, she said, Is that your girlfriend, and I was like, We have sex, and we’re in love. Someday, when we have a baby, we’re going to name her Sue Ellen after my mom. No, Daphne. I didn’t tell her we’re sleeping together. Petra told her I’m living with my new girlfriend. I’m just guessing Katya might do some high-level deduction here. But if you want me to go ask whether she thinks we’re having sex, I can.”
“How soon until everyone in Waning Bay hears this lie,” I groan.
“I’m sure the paparazzi are gathering as we speak,” he replies. “This is the 2020 Chardonnay, by the way. People think they hate Chardonnay because they’ve mostly had shitty Chardonnay. It’s a misunderstood wine.”
“Aw,” Ashleigh coos, clutching her heart. “Misunderstood little wine.”
“Don’t feel too bad for it,” I mumble. “Sounds like it gets laid a lot.”
Miles gives me a teasingly admonishing look and goes on: “Ours is pretty restrained.”
“Okay, I take my last comment back,” I say.
“See, Daphne,” he says, meeting my heckling with over-the-top sobriety, “the Chardonnay grapes themselves are pretty neutral. That’s why they can take on too much oak for a lot of wine drinkers’ tastes. But ours has a nice peach nose, and this pinch of lemon zest, and a faint, warm oakiness, but not so much that the wine’s overpowered.”
“It really is a lovely nose,” Ashleigh says.
“Thanks, I think so too.” Miles angles himself back to me, clearly waiting for me to try it.
I make a big show of swirling it around and studying it from various angles, then very, very slowly lift it to my lips and take one tiny sip.
Still, that one sip makes the inside of my mouth feel sunlit. Like I’ve just tasted a day on the Michigan coast.
“Wow,” I say.
Miles straightens, grinning. “It’s good?”
“It’s good,” I answer.
A bright flash pops to our left and I glance over at Ashleigh, little colorful circles still dancing through my vision. “Aw,” she says, looking down at her phone. “Your first couples’ candid.”
The man behind her taps her shoulder. “If you want one of all three of you,” he shouts over the music, which has gotten louder as full night has fallen, “I’d be happy to take it.”
“That’s okay,” I try to shout back, but Ashleigh is nodding enthusiastically.
“I’m vetting my friend’s new boyfriend,” she tells him. “Aren’t they cute?”
“If anything,” I say to Miles, “we’re still vetting her.”
He looks over, smile deepening. “I say we keep her.”
“Who’s going to feed and walk her?” I say.
“I will,” he insists. “Every day. I promise.”
Ashleigh drags her stool around mine and pops back onto it, leaning in against my side as her suitor lines up her phone for the shot. Miles slides one elbow further over the bar, leaning in on my other side, his chin resting on my shoulder.
“Everyone say wine,” the man says with a wink. Under her breath, Ashleigh mumbles, “I can look past that.”
