Chapter 22 Babe the Big Blue Tots
Babe the Big Blue Tots
Two and a Half Years Ago
The ax-throwing bar was my idea. I had no one to blame but myself for how terribly this party was going.
Like all bachelorette parties, the guest list was a collection of stray friends from various stages of my development: Stacy (new friend and work colleague), Rebecca (law school friend/nemesis), Olive (one of those friends of unknown origin who appeared on a group chat and was somehow inaugurated into my inner circle without my knowledge), and Laurel, of course.
Though they all knew Laurel and me, they didn’t know each other. Or so we’d thought.
The guest-list snafu we couldn’t have accounted for was that Rebecca and Olive did in fact know each other. They’d dated, actually. And it had ended badly.
“You lost my dog!” Rebecca shouted, throwing her finger in Olive’s face.
Olive swept it away with the implied intimacy of two people who’d once shared a toothbrush.
“His ashes !” Her ax whacked against the plywood target behind her with wild arm movements.
“And I found them. But, noooo, we never talk about the part where I searched a Kum & Go dumpster for a Ziploc baggie of Sherlock Bones!”
“And how did Sherlock get in the dumpster in the first place?” Rebecca asked.
Olive sucked her teeth. “This is sooo like you. You’re making the night honoring one of the sweetest women in the world all about you.
” Olive’s declaration on my behalf was nice but fairly performative considering I wasn’t quite sure how I’d met her, and no one has ever accused me of being sweet .
It brought the whole friendship into question.
Rebecca laughed, because she did know me and was possibly still plotting my “accidental” death in the elevator shaft of the IDS tower. But before Rebecca could act on any potentially murderous impulses, Laurel ripped the weapon from her hands.
And that was when they confiscated our axes.
“Paula Bunyan’s is a family establishment,” a server in shorts and suspenders hissed.
“I’m the reason this didn’t wind up in someone’s skull!” Laurel insisted, indignant. Even though the party was a complete and utter disaster from moment one, my sister had nothing to do with its descent into madness.
“I think we should call it,” I said, surveying the way our group had practically emptied out the place, including the exes, who’d taken their yelling outside.
The only person who’d evaded the bar’s notice was Stacy, who was parked next to the pull-tab dispenser, responding to work emails in noise-canceling headphones.
The party was over. Time of death: eleven p.m.
“No,” Laurel whined, and tugged at my arms. “This was supposed to be the fun part. We can still crash a stranger’s pedal pub. That was my break-glass-in-case-of-emergency plan.”
I grimaced. “Pass. Can we put this party out of its misery, please? I’ll settle up.”
“Fine,” she relented. “No matter what, you looked hot tonight. No one can take that away from you.” She pulled me into a goodbye hug, then opened her rideshare app. “I’ll make sure Drunk and Drunker find their way into separate Ubers. You’ll be good getting home?”
I nodded and left her in our little lumberjack cubicle of partitioned plywood targets lining the back wall and headed for the bartender.
Cedar planks covered every inch of wall space and filled the bar with the scents of a Norwegian sauna and stale beer.
The place had recently opened up in the cursed part of a strip mall, next to an AMC, and would undoubtedly revert to a Spirit Halloween in nine months.
Still, I was attracted to the idea of cutting loose in such a controlled environment.
THUNK.
My shoulders jumped the tiniest bit at the sound of an ax careening into plywood.
I’d assumed the noise would fade into the background at some point, but it hadn’t.
The reverberations of cracking wood continued to hit me between the eyes like a ball-peen hammer to my lightly liquored skull. Every. Single. Time.
Still, I was disappointed that I hadn’t gotten the chance to throw one myself.
THUNK.
I tried to close out the tab with the bartender, but the bar’s grudge against our party was too fresh. A couple who’d been playing at the target next to ours came and went and still I hadn’t received an ounce of recognition from Paula Bunyan et al. I was invisible.
The light of an Edison bulb refracted off the blade of an abandoned ax like a neon sign reading Throw Me. You Know You Want To. I tried once more to get the bartender’s attention—seriously, was I a ghost?—before wandering over to the forfeited target.
Ax in hand, I lifted my arms above my head. No one was looking. I let out a long stream of air between my lips, already wincing in anticipation of my ax’s thud against the back wall.
“Beekman.”
The voice behind me sliced deep into my core. I jerked backward.
“Are we seriously at an ax-throwing bar?” he asked.
He’s here , I thought, my inner voice giddy. I turned around and there he was. Ethan.
He was dressed like an indie dirtbag in distressed jeans and a stained T-shirt.
His arms were more toned than I remembered.
They must’ve been forcing him to lift weights on that tour bus of his.
It was like his forearms were flexing, even at rest. The floral tattoo I’d picked for him when we were eighteen was now framed by other botanicals in a complementary style, and he was wearing some expensive-smelling cologne I didn’t recognize.
Yet, even with all the changes, he felt exactly the same. Like home.
“Jesus, Powell. Don’t you know not to surprise a woman with an ax in her hands? I could’ve thrown this at your head.”
“You couldn’t hit my head if I offered you a million dollars to hit my head.”
“Think you can do better?” I offered him the ax. “Go on. Let it fly.”
His lips curved up into a perfect sideways grin. “There’s my Chuck. I knew you were still in there.”
I pulled a face at the insinuation that I’d disappeared somewhere, but he was too busy lining up with the bull’s-eye to notice.
His life had changed way more than mine had in the last few years.
There was the tour with Silver Lining Society, their first album, their single that spent three whole days on the Billboard Top 100 after SNL parodied it, and the sophomore album that I…
didn’t totally get , but I was still hotly anticipating their next musical move.
For years, we’d texted almost daily. We FaceTimed, me in corners of the law library and him in the backs of vans and tour buses.
We’d been each other’s first call, until the calls from him started coming less and less frequently.
I found Rich, and as a result, Ethan and I placed each other on the back burner, each hoping the other wouldn’t scald from the lack of attention as we focused our energies on other, more tenuous parts of our lives.
It was the unspoken agreement of our twenties: we’ll neglect each other and call it “growing up.”
Still, selfishly, I wanted it all. I wanted the career, the husband, the house, and Ethan. I wanted to stay the most important person in his life even as mine stretched to hold Rich. I knew it wasn’t fair, but it didn’t make it any less true.
Seeing him now, at this bar, I wanted to believe there were still parts of us that were the same, preserved all these years, to be excavated by each other alone.
I wanted it to mean something that he’d come here tonight.
That I was still the first person he wanted to laugh with and share secrets with.
Now Ethan was here—proof positive that our friendship was still as meaningful to him as it was to me.
He let the ax go with a thunderous grunt. Maria Sharapova had nothing on Ethan Powell. Despite the deep vocalization, the ax landed about two feet right of the board with a disappointing thump.
“So close,” I taunted.
He dug the ax out of the wall and handed it back to me.
“Your move, Lumber Jill. Show me what you got.” He tilted his head toward the red bull’s-eye.
And just like that, it was as though both no time had passed and years had come and gone all at once. I grinned and squared my shoulders in front of the target. With a deep exhale, I hurled the ax and watched it soar end over end until it landed dead center with an elegant thwack.
“That’s right,” I muttered triumphantly under my breath.
“Beekman!” Without hesitation, he picked me up and spun me around, his hand pressing against my bare back. “That was incredible!”
“I have a gift,” I told him with a satisfied snicker.
When he set me down, I had to adjust the hemline of my slinky dress so as not to flash the bar queue behind us. “Tell the truth. Did you study? Did you practice?”
I considered lying but then didn’t. I didn’t lie to Ethan as a matter of course. “Fine. Yes. I’ve been watching YouTube videos obsessively, because I’m a nerd who hates to lose. It’s why I’m a fantastic lawyer.”
He leaned against the plywood partition and pressed his head to the side like I was simply too much. “You’re a fantastic lawyer because you’re brilliant and you’re a badass. You’re incredible at everything you set your mind to.”
Something soft and nostalgic curled in my chest.
“So where’s the rest of the bachelorette party?” he asked.
“Paula had to break us up. We were too rowdy. Except for my work friend, Stacy, who’s by the bar taking our office’s ‘work from anywhere’ policy extremely literally.”
I pointed behind his ear, but his head didn’t move.
Instead, his eyes narrowed on me as though he was weighing all probabilities.
“My instinct is to assume you’re lying…” A group of a dozen or so men in matching tuxedo T-shirts bustled past. He stepped closer to my ear so his words could reach me through the increasing noise of the bar.
“But the bouncer warned me there’d be a zero-tolerance policy for ‘disturbances,’ so I’m torn. ”