Chapter 14
Hal sloshes a highball glass down on the service well, sticking one sad little lemon wedge on the sugared rim. He doesn’t care about creating pirate ship sails out of rinds like I do. I have an artist’s attention to detail, even if it’s almost last call.
“I want you to come to Treehouse on Thursday.” I like the way he phrases this. It’s direct, intentional. He has made a plan. That means something. It’s just a few degrees off from a literal date. I adjust my mental coordinates accordingly. “They’re hosting a book launch in the back room.”
Okay, so plus-one at a boring-ass hipster literary event isn’t the most romantic proposition.
When I make a face, he shifts tactics.
“You have to come. I don’t want to suffer through MFA small talk by myself. I don’t want to hear about anyone’s poetry chapbook when there’s no one I can surreptitiously roll my eyes at. Do me this one favor.”
“Can you do me a favor and invite me to a venue with a restroom that isn’t a summer home for a family of rats?”
“Come on, it’s just like Ratatouille. It’s part of the charm.” He puts his hands on my shoulders, and the degree to which this excites me is embarrassing. “And you owe me because I already agreed to go to your mom’s wedding. That’s a much bigger commitment, Samantha.”
A beat passes. His hands linger a little too long, I think. There’s a flicker of anticipation shooting up my body, almost like he could kiss me. Here. In public.
That’s something we don’t really do. I mean, it’s happened, but only when we get really carried away.
“Jesus, who wanders into a fucking tiki place twenty minutes before closing?” Hal peers over my shoulder, apparently watching a customer make their way to the bar.
“Wearing a fucking U2 shirt.” He looks back in my eyes again.
“If you take the bullet and make this Margaritaville motherfucker a frozen daiquiri, I’ll run the trash out to the dumpster by myself. ”
“Deal,” I say. “If you also restock the sparkling wine.”
“Done.”
Until the moment I turn around, I hadn’t given any thought to the possibility of Hal meeting Nick. They occupy such separate spheres in my head that the actual fact of them encountering each other simply hadn’t occurred to me.
And yet, I’m standing here, watching Nick amble up to the bar in a U2 360 tour T-shirt, backpack slung over his shoulder.
“What are you doing here?” My voice sounds like a strangled cat.
“Just left work,” Nick replies. “I thought I’d see if you want a ride home.”
“Oh. You don’t have to do that.” I wasn’t planning on going back to my mom’s apartment tonight.
“It’s on my way. I saw the flaming torches and I thought I’d see if you wanted a lift.”
“What can I get you?” Hal slaps a napkin and a drink menu down on the bar between Nick and me.
“Fastest trash run ever,” I mutter, stepping to the side.
“I’m all about efficiency, Samantha.”
“You do start your pre-close as soon as you clock in,” I reply.
Hal turns his attention to Nick. “Speaking of which, it’s last call, but I’m sure Sam would be happy to get out the blender one last time.”
I decide to cut in with an introduction. “Hal, this is my mom’s new neighbor, Nick.”
Hal nods. “Always nice to meet another U2 fan in the wild.”
“They put on a great show,” Nick says, before adding, “I worked a leg of this tour.”
Hal and I must have matching baffled expressions.
“You did?” I ask.
“In another life, pre-kid. It was one of my first jobs. Kind of a miserable gig until I got the hang of being on the road.” He pulls at the shirt. “This is LaundroMerch—my clothes went missing from a laundromat in Raleigh. I had to borrow merch so I’d have something to wear.”
The shirt explanation seems to throw Hal off his game because he forgoes whatever additional U2 material he’s been devising for the two minutes.
“I’ll pass on the drink.” Nick hands the menu back. “I spent all day trying to get my bartenders to upsell more cherry margaritas.”
“You’re in the industry?” Hal asks.
Nick gives a noncommittal shrug. “I’m a GM at a Chili’s.”
“Chili’s!” Hal’s excitement level ramps up from a three to an eleven. “Samantha, is this guy trying to poach you?” He turns to me. “Did you show him your flair? She does an ice toss.”
“He stopped by to see if I wanted a ride,” I say.
“A ride?” Hal looks from Nick, to me, and then back to Nick, with a puzzled, almost amused expression. “How neighborly.” Then he turns to me. “Samantha, I need a hand with those bottles of sparkling wine.”
Ordinarily, the prospect of a slightly jealous Hal asking me to join him in the back hallway would make me giddy as fuck. But there’s something caustic in his demeanor that’s beyond our standard workplace snark.
“What’s this?” Hal exclaims after I close the storage closet door behind us. “I thought you deleted Christian Mingle.”
We look at each other for a moment, but I can’t get a read whether this a bit—if he’s playing the role of the possessive would-be boyfriend or genuinely agitated.
“He moved next door to my mom,” I say. “He has a daughter. He’s being nice.”
Hal laughs. “I’m sure he goes out of his way to offer the neighbor on the other side of his apartment a ride home from work.”
“His other neighbor is a sixty-seven-year-old retired man,” I point out.
“That guy wants to sleep with you.” He says it so plainly that I have trouble processing it. With Hal, I’m always looking for the sarcastic bite.
“Wow.” I scan his face like I’m probing for a weak spot in his armor. “Are you actually threatened by my neighbor?”
Hal puts his hand on my shoulder.
“Hey—”
I hold my breath again, preparing for that moment.
Jughead:
We’re only sleeping with each other, right?
“—you don’t owe me an explanation.” His tone is all false sincerity. “You don’t have to ask permission.”
I can’t stand when his words don’t match his delivery. It’s a trick he does—verbal sleight-of-hand. Having this argument among the plastic palm fronds we keep in the storage closet only adds to my confusion.
“Do you want me to come over tonight?” I ask. If he’s not willing to be straightforward, I will. Maybe I’m practicing self-disclosure.
“I think it’s fantastic that you’re into older men now,” he says. “Broaden those horizons.”
“Okay, then I’ll go home.” Some small part of me hopes that if I call his bluff, he’ll drop the attitude. Maybe we can just go back to his place and reset. Even laugh about it. Maybe this is the jolt we need to spark the “what are we?” conversation.
All Hal says is “Great. Enjoy,” before walking away.
“So, was that guy your ex?” Nick asks after I finish my closing tasks and clock out.
Lōkahi is air-conditioned to the point of freezing, so it’s always a shock to push open the back door and step into the hot, humid air.
“No.” I pause, unsure how to qualify our relationship. “It’s…a whole thing.” Perhaps I should draw him Romily’s diagram with the quadrants.
“Okay.”
“Neither of us wants to be in a relationship at this point in our lives. And depending on where I get into grad school, it’s just easier not to have entanglements.”
Nick heads for the last vehicle in the customer side of the parking lot. “He seems a little territorial for someone without entanglements.”
“It’s only because bartending makes him cranky. I think he liked you,” I say, lying. “I’ve never seen him back down so quickly. He didn’t even bring up that U2 Spider-Man musical that kept sending actors to the hospital.”
“Or that album they forced onto everyone’s iPhones.” He presses a button on his key fob. “Or were you, like, four years old when that happened?”
“Very funny.” I nod at the car he just unlocked. “You drive a minivan.”
“No, a minivan has sliding doors,” he says. “This is a very manly sport utility vehicle with a third row of seats. Just give me a minute to clean it out.”
He opens the passenger door and picks up a huge bottle of wiper fluid off the floor. I glance around, investigating. Lots of discarded wrappers in the back seat—granola bars, fruit snacks—empty Gatorade bottles, evidence of chauffeuring a child around.
“You have a whole family of stuffed animals riding in the back,” I say, peering over his shoulder.
“They all have very elaborate backstories,” he replies.
I wait for him to move aside and let me climb up to the passenger seat, but he ducks his head and sits down there instead. Nick tosses me his key fob. “You’re gonna need to push the driver’s seat forward a bit.” I don’t budge and neither does he. “Get in.”
“To drive your car? Do you have a death wish? I don’t even have a learner’s permit.”
“We’ll practice here. There’s very limited property damage you can do driving around an empty parking lot for twenty minutes.”
I relent, but it’s mostly because his car has air conditioning and it’s so humid I’m convinced steam is rising from the asphalt.
“I genuinely loathe being forced to do things I suck at,” I whine.
“How do you know you suck?” he asks.
“Previous experiences behind the wheel.” I don’t care to relive the time my dad decided it was best for me to learn to drive stick shift “by doing.”
“It’s just practice. You don’t have to be a prodigy.”
With a little huff, I walk around to the other side of the car and plant myself in the driver’s seat. I do indeed need to raise the seat and push it forward.
“No one wants to teach another person how to drive,” I say. “It’s famously stressful.”
I have a quick flash of my dad yelling, “Don’t be so dramatic!” when I had a panic attack at the wheel.
“It’s stressful when it’s a close family member or someone you love. I figure ‘neighbors’ is exactly the right level for this. I’ll only yell if we’re about to careen into the side of the flaming statue,” he says. “Just don’t forget to check your mirrors. I’m a hard-ass about mirrors.”
“And yet my mom keeps telling me you’re such a nice man.”
I get the sense that he wants to ask a follow-up question, but instead he forges ahead.
“Okay, what’s the first thing you do?”
I look around. “Put it in reverse?”
“Adjust your mirrors.” He points at the little buttons on my door that move the side mirrors. “And check your blind spot, especially in a parking lot.”
“Right. There could be rogue parking lot squirrels.” I make a show of looking behind me. “Now can I back up?”
He nods.
I move the gear shift and watch the backup camera, trying to remember which way you turn the wheel to back up toward the right. The vehicle moves three inches and Nick puts his hand over the screen on the dashboard that displays the feed from the backup camera.
“Get in the habit of physically looking through your back windshield,” he says. “Don’t rely on the camera.”
I take a breath and turn my head, trying again.
Four minutes later, Nick’s car is out of the parking spot and facing the intended direction.
“We probably should’ve started with the part where you just make circles around the lot,” he says.
“Well, it’s good that I humbled myself before I demonstrate my skill at very slowly curving right.” I take my foot off the brake and navigate the car around Lōkahi, trying to keep the speed steady.
“So, you never took driver’s ed?” he asks.
“I did the classroom part, where you watch videos of accidents and get quizzed about what a flashing red light means. Sometimes my dad would let me get behind the wheel just for fun.”
He called it fun. He claimed that he learned how to drive at fourteen because he had a “natural affinity for cars.” It wasn’t fun to feel my fifteen-year-old palms sweating on the steering wheel, horns honking, trying desperately to remember where the clutch was.
The fact that I failed to master the skill immediately crushed my desire to keep trying.
“Try pulling into one of these spaces,” Nick says. “Be very light on the accelerator.”
I push on the gas with a little too much force and the car hurtles toward the curb. I scream and slam on the brakes, causing the tires to screech against the asphalt.
“Shit. Sorry-sorry-sorry-sorry.” I try to catch my breath. “Dammit.”
“It’s fine,” Nick says. I look over to see if he’s white-knuckling the nearest handle. “Just try it again.” He looks much calmer than I feel. I’m practically cowering.
“Maybe you should take the wheel.”
“Just tap the gas lighter this time and try to stay between the lines. You’re just practicing.”
I exhale. No part of me wants to press my foot against this pedal again. But I do it because I can’t stand failing at something. (Yes, I realize that’s ironic, because I’ve been feeling like a huge failure for five years.)
I pull into parking spots, pull out, circle around until I feel just how lightly I can press my foot against the gas pedal.
“You’re a good teacher,” I say quietly. “Are you hungry?” I ask, shifting into park. “Or is that a stupid question because you have unlimited access to baby back ribs?”