Lightweight
Billy's phone call lasted forty-five seconds.
Judah heard his own name said twice — once in greeting, once in something approaching apology — and then Billy was pocketing the phone and looking at him with an expression Judah had absolutely no desire to decipher.
“She's coming,” Billy said.
“Who.”
“Lauren.”
The lamp post was warm against the back of Judah's skull. His legs felt like something borrowed from a larger man — heavy and uncooperative.
“You didn't have to call Lauren.”
“I didn't have a lot of options.” Billy produced the bottle from his jacket — not the Randy's bottle, a different one, smaller, from somewhere that had no good explanation — and offered it.
“The Jaguar's at my house. You drove the Mustang here and you are not touching that Mustang. My conscience wouldn’t let me let you wrap it around a telephone pole.”
Funny, Judah thought without any sense of levity.
Judah took the bottle and poured a quarter of it straight in his throat.
“Whoa, Preacher—”
Judah wiped his mouth with the top of his palm. “You could've called a cab.”
“In St. Frankenville?” Billy looked at him. “Just… keep drinking, man,” he said, and then added, “Lauren answered on the second ring.”
Judah said nothing. The street was swaying. Or maybe he was. He couldn’t understand much of it. Or rather couldn’t understand much of what his eyes were telling him. All he knew was that a dog had crossed the far end of the block and had lifted his leg to pee on someone’s bike tire.
He drank some more.
Lauren's car was a silver Honda and she pulled up to the curb at 5:47. Judah watched her through the window. She was looking straight ahead. Not at him.
Billy opened the back door, and Judah folded himself in. The car was small.
Too small.
She didn't say anything. He didn't either, not for the first two blocks.
Then: “Lauren.”
She glanced at the rearview mirror. Her jaw was set. She'd done her eyes — he noticed that, and wished he hadn't, because it meant she'd made herself presentable when Billy called, which meant something he didn't have the right to think about tonight.
“You don't have to—” He stopped. “I'm not going to—” He pressed his fingers to his eyes. The bourbon was doing what bourbon did: making everything very clear and very useless at the same time. “I'm sorry.”
“Judah.”
“No, I mean it.” He let his hand drop. The Spanish moss was going past outside in the headlights. “It wasn't fair. The way I—” He exhaled. “I should've said so sooner.”
The silence from the front seat was its own answer.
“It's fine,” she said.
It wasn’t. And they both knew it.
She returned her attention to the road.
Billy, beside him, was studying the ceiling with great interest, pulling at a loose thread, then tucking it back in, then pulling at the seatbelt without actually putting the seatbelt on — to test it, he might’ve said, and coming to no good conclusions.
“Well, this is grim,” he finally said after a prolonged moment of silence. Billy had the small bottle opened and ready in his hand; he took a sip and leaned close to Lauren’s seat, wrapping his arm around her from behind. “Doll, you’re too fucking hot for him anyway.”
Lauren’s eyes found the rearview mirror again, and in it — Judah. Something passed between them — a current, an understanding, a memory. Then she grinned and said, “Yeah. I know.”
She pulled up to the estate gates at 6:14. The driveway lights were on — they were on a timer, had been for years.
Judah got out as soon as the car was immobile and proceeded to stand in the driveway, breathing the air. He thought he was getting sick.
Lauren's window came down.
“Take care of yourself,” she said.
Judah swallowed the nausea and the odd, spicy taste of Billy’s booze, and said, “You too.”
She pulled out without waiting for Billy, who had to step back fast to avoid his own feet, and her taillights disappeared around the curve of the drive.
Billy watched them go. “Fucking rude. And to think I called her hot.” Then he looked at Judah, thought about it for a second. “You handled that well.”
“Shut up.”
“I'm serious.” He produced the small bottle again — it still had two inches in it, which was almost insulting. “That was almost a real apology.”
“Billy.”
“Almost.” He shook the bottle gently. The liquid caught the warm light from the driveway.
Judah took it. Thought about drinking it, then realized he was gonna be sick, and leaned over the flowerbed.
Billy looked at him. Saw the liquor steadily pouring out of the bottle because of the angle in which Judah was holding it.
“Jesus fucking Christ — you’re a lightweight, man.” He placed a hand on Judah's back as Judah emptied the contents of his stomach onto some hydrangeas.
When Judah straightened, Billy handed him a handkerchief. Judah stared at it, momentarily confused by its existence.
“What?” Billy shrugged. “My mama raised me right.”
Judah wiped his mouth, feeling the world tilt and settle.
“Come on,” Billy said and his grin grew wide and devilish. “You look like you could use a drink.”
The front door went like a gunshot.
Billy hit it too hard — always did, always had, said the Beaumont hinges could survive a hurricane so they could survive him, which was something that made sense until the crash of the hall table going over, the vase on it hitting the floor, the sound bouncing up the stairwell and off every surface in the dark.
“Christ,” Billy said, not quietly.
“That was the Sèvres,” Judah said.
“Was it.”
“Three hundred years old.”
“Hm.” Billy looked at the pieces on the floor. Nudged one with his shoe. “Was.”
Judah walked past him toward the study, a little steadier on his feet since fertilizing the hydrangeas but not as steady as he would’ve liked.
His shoulder caught the door frame; he didn't address it.
The lights in the hall were off — he didn't turn them on, mostly because he couldn’t remember where the light switch was.
He navigated by memory and the ambient glow from outside, and the fact that he'd walked this particular path several thousand times. And yet, still didn’t know where the light switch was.
That was an impressive skill — to not know things about your own house.
But that was the way with the wealthy. Until very recently, Judah had had a housekeeper who’d taken care of everything. When he’d gone to work, lights were off, when he’d come back — they were on. Those were the little things he didn’t think of.
Until now. His housekeeper, Anita, had passed, and the knowledge of the light switches had gone with her.
He pulled open the French doors to his study and proceeded toward the shelves behind his desk.
He stood in front of them and ran his finger along the bottles until he found the one he wanted. Tennessee whiskey. The good kind. The kind his father had kept locked behind glass and Judah had still managed to drink anyway.
Billy appeared in the doorway. “You're not serious.”
“About what.”
“About continuing.”
Judah broke the seal. “I'm very serious.”
Billy exhaled through his nose and came in. He dropped into the leather chair across from the desk — not the desk chair, never the desk chair, that was a line Billy had held for twenty-two years for reasons neither of them had ever said out loud — and shook his head. Then — he held out his glass.
Judah poured.
He found the record player without looking. The shelf to the left of the window — his grandfather's, too heavy to move, so it had stayed when everything else was rearranged around it. He didn't look at what was on the platter. He set the needle down.
Nothing Else Matters came out of the speakers and filled the room.
Billy stared at him.
“Metallica,” he said.
“Yes.”
“Coming from vinyl.” His eyebrows pulled together. “That’s too pretentious even for me, man.”
Judah sank into his chair with a glass in hand. “It's for clarity.”
“Clarity,” Billy repeated. “Because what we need right now is clarity.”
“Exactly.”
The whiskey was different from what they'd been drinking all night — richer, more complex.
It wasn't meant to be knocked back like they were doing.
It was meant to be savored, contemplated.
Judah's father would have had some choice words to say about how they were drinking it now.
Thank fucking God the bastard was dead, Judah thought.
The guitar came in low and slow and the study felt different with it — larger, or maybe emptier, or maybe just… honest? Judah didn’t know. His eyes locked on a shelf with pictures. The framed photograph on the far left — his mother, young, before… He caught himself mid-thought and looked away.
Nothing else matters.
He'd always thought it was a love song. Probably was. He was beginning to understand that love songs and eulogies came from the same place, and only when that place had become too small to hold them.
Billy was watching him with an expression of deep contemplation; he was waiting for the right — or perhaps the wrong — moment to reveal some age-old truth that only Billy could’ve come up with.
It came soon enough.
“She's upstairs,” Billy said.
“I know.”
“You going up?”
“No.”
Billy took a sip and set his glass on his knee. The record moved through the first verse, strings building under the guitar. “You know she's not asleep.”
That wasn’t even a question he was thinking. Even if she’d been asleep — at seven in the evening — she wasn’t anymore. The house carried sound well.
Judah turned to the shelves, not to get anything — just to have something to look at that wasn't Billy's face or his mother's photograph, or the window facing the drive where Lauren's taillights had gone.
He pulled a book out. Didn't look at the spine. Started paging through it, too drunk to even see the letters. And when he decided he wasn’t too drunk to see them, he quickly realized the book was not in English.
“She had this book called Priest,” Judah said, remembering the first time he’d seen it. “I looked it up. Curious.”