Chapter Three
“I’m guessing I’ll be an hour,” Annie told Sal, bouncing from foot to foot. “Maybe less. Maybe more?”
From the low stool by his station, Sal swiped the inside of a Rhodesian Ridgeback’s ear with the focus one would give to cleaning the Mona Lisa. “Roger that.”
Their slow Sunday afternoon was coming up alarmingly fast on four o’clock. Annie’s excitement at her much-anticipated meeting with Jazz was undercut by sharp worry that her old friend would deliver bad news that’d break her heart.
“We don’t have any more bookings,” Sal added. “Take your time, boo.”
Sal wasn’t technically Annie’s brother, but he might as well have been.
They’d met over a decade ago, when Sal worked in palliative care, doing weekly home visits for Annie’s grandmother Pearl in the final year of her life.
Even back then, Sal struck a balance of care and snark, which made Pearl chuckle when little else could.
They’d reconnected after Annie moved back to Rhodes.
Sal was slinging beers at a gay bar in Hudson.
Even staying six feet apart, in masks, they’d become fast friends.
Sal was one of the first people to encourage Annie to start her own business, spending hours helping her sketch out blueprints and dreaming up the quirky, queer-coded menu.
Their most affordable service? The Rose Apothecary Wash & Dry: Treat your precious pooch to a luxurious shampoo, followed by a gentle blow-dry to leave their coat as soft as David’s face!
Then there was the Heated Rivalry hairdo: Get your fur baby’s coat as springy as Ilya’s curls!
Or the Buffy teeth brushing: Love your pup as much as Willow loved Tara?
Slay teeth decay with our gentle ultrasound cleaning!
It was Sal’s idea for employees to wear matching pink jumpsuits.
When she’d presented him with a suit, hand-stitched with his name in curling lime-green font and asked if he’d be the Thelma to her Louise, Sal almost teared up as he agreed, stating that a lifetime of serving bitchy queens had prepared him for serving queeny bitches.
Annie trusted Sal, but now she was stalling, straightening a shampoo bottle by the front counter. “You sure there isn’t anything that needs doing?”
Sal gave the Ridgeback a pat. “Well, you could help me express this good boy’s anal glands.”
Annie cringed. Not her favorite part of the job.
“Annie,” Sal said, smile twitching. “Ever considered I might want to run the salon alone? More experience. More hours. More money.”
“Oh. Right. Okay, I’m going.”
Annie ducked out the back for one last fit check in her office, which was so small she had to shuffle sideways like a crab around her desk to get to the wall mirror.
At least she had a reason to wear her new outfit: a funky vintage sundress patterned with yellow flowers.
Summer-groovy when paired with sky-blue sandals and a heart-shaped pair of sunglasses.
She finger-combed her light pink bob, fiddling with the ends that skimmed the bottom of her jaw, and dabbed on some cherry lip balm.
Meeting her own gaze in the mirror, Annie felt satisfied with what she saw—someone cute yet capable.
She dropped into a curtsy, addressing her reflection.
“M’lady.” One must always have inside jokes with oneself.
Grabbing a straw bucket hat, Annie crab-walked her way around the desk and out the door.
· · ·
It was a beautiful Sunday afternoon. The July sun was bright, the humidity pleasant and not yet at the feeling-licked-by-a-Great-Dane stage. It was only a seven- or eight-minute drive to the theater, and Annie owned a yellow Volkswagen Beetle. But she needed the walk to calm her nerves.
Most of the town’s shops and bars were clustered along this end of Henry Street, the Hudson River just beyond the train tracks.
The Groom Room was close to the station—two and a half hours to New York City, but lately, Rhodes felt even farther.
The theater was at the less busy, less populated end of town.
The part that was encroaching on the “busy” end of town, little by little, year by year.
Not that Rhodes was written off just yet. The window boxes of the old general store, though neglected, still held tufts of stubborn marigolds, their bright orange petals catching the afternoon light.
Annie passed Clyde’s Grocery, where she’d had her first job at age fifteen until Clyde fired her for letting too many senior citizens use expired coupons.
(Annie believed women could do anything men could, except, in her circumstance, telling Betty Buford she could not have two dollars off her cat food.)
The store’s long roller door was up. While most of the produce was inside, wooden bins of fresh fruit and vegetables lined the sidewalk. Zero customers, but that didn’t stop Clyde saluting cheerfully from his position behind the counter. “Hello there, Annie!”
“Hello there, Clyde,” Annie called back, pausing to sniff a peach.
“Where are you off to on this lovely afternoon?” Her neighborhood grocer still wore the red grocer’s apron he’d had on since the store first opened, except his hair was now white and his belly was as large as his growing eccentricities.
“Just…getting some fresh air,” she fibbed.
“Very nice.” Clyde nodded. “Annie, have you ever heard of the Mothman?”
“Can’t say I have, Clyde.”
The grocer became animated as he explained that the Mothman was a half-man, half-moth who people claimed to see before a cataclysmic event. “But does the Mothman cause the disaster,” Clyde posited, “or is he trying to warn us?”
“Bigger question, Clyde,” Annie replied, “is the Mothman eating sweaters for breakfast? Scarves for lunch?” She waved. “Gotta run!”
Annie rarely came up to the far edge of town. Not only because she had no need to—the train station and exit to the city were closer to her salon—but also because this quieter end was close to Summerville Road. The street that Lola used to live on.
As teenagers, Lola and Annie had both lived in town: Annie, in the wisteria-covered cottage owned by her grandmother.
It was snug, but they made it homey. Lola’s single mother, Renée, rented an even smaller apartment that backed onto the train line.
Annie remembered low ceilings and silverware rattling when the express train rocketed past. She and Lola, both sophomores, went to Hudson High, a public school.
Vicky and Dylan lived in much bigger houses outside of town and went to Riverstone Prep, a K–12 private school. Smart, fearless Vicky was a family law attorney now, working in Manhattan.
Annie couldn’t find Dylan Rogers. There was another Dylan Rogers, an older British guy who was a bestselling author of an epic romantasy series.
Sorcery & Scales centered on shape-shifting dragons and horny young magicians with names like Isolde Nightshade and Aric Flameheart.
That Dylan Rogers made it finding someone with the same name, and as few details as Annie had, impossible to unearth.
Annie paused at the top of Summerville Road, gazing down on the unassuming red-brick apartment block.
How many times had she taken this turn, her heart bouncing in happy anticipation?
And how far it all seemed now from the Lola Wilson whom Annie would only ever see in an occasional Google search.
Which, after a second glass of wine, she’d succumbed to last night.
On Annie’s phone screen, a platinum Lola looked unrecognizably glamorous in a new interview, revealing her celebrity crush. Brett Burns—a paint-by-numbers leading man from a big sci-fi movie Annie would never watch.
A man. So, Lola probably didn’t date girls anymore.
Another thing they no longer had in common.
Lola Wilson was a capital-F Famous Hollywood actor and Annie didn’t know any of those.
She’d known a girl who loved the theater, and the Indigo Girls, and talking earnestly about art and big ideas.
Whose lips were eager and soft and couldn’t stop smiling when they’d kiss, secretly, during one unforgettable summer.
A summer she should not be thinking about! Lola was a completely different person now, probably on a private jet to the kind of rich-person spa they didn’t let normies into, where a beet juice cost as much as a small car and they massaged inside your mouth.
Lola left Rhodes. Annie came back. And that’s why it was Annie, not Lola, whom Jazz had requested to see.
Annie took a left onto Myrtle Street. On the corner, yet another empty shop front.
Once upon a time this had been home to Once Upon a Time, a beloved kids’ bookstore.
Now wild honeysuckle twisted around the wrought iron railing of the unused patio.
Annie paused by the smudged windows. She vaguely remembered the whimsical displays from years ago—storybook castles, paper dragons—but now, the interior lay bare, undressed.
Without the theater pulling crowds to this end of town, businesses like this didn’t stand a chance.
Continuing on, Annie passed a few freestanding houses, an overgrown lot of unruly, scorched grass, and then, all by itself at the end of the block, there it was.
Rhodes Playhouse. Or, as the misshapen maroon lettering on the sign above the front entrance actually read, odes P ayho e, like a permanently paused game of hangman.
The once-pristine cream of its painted weatherboards had faded to a murky gray, peeling and patchy. The windows were filthy, the front lawn overgrown with weeds.
Annie’s chest tightened. The Rhodes Playhouse used to be the heartbeat of the neighborhood. Now it felt like visiting a revered old friend, only to find their home in tragic disrepair, milk curdling in the fridge.
She walked up the concrete steps to the overlarge front entrance, took a fortifying breath to calm her nerves, and tried the grimy gold handle, half expecting the enormous door to be locked.
To her surprise, it creaked open.