Chapter 25
The Hearth & Stone is fuller than I’ve ever seen it. Half the company is still in stage makeup. Jackie Chambers has Banquo’s gore flaking off her hairline, because Lily once again applied it with particular generosity and no one was brave enough to intervene.
Dorcas comes in behind us with the as-of-yet untouched sheet cake and sets it on the pool table which Dana has closed for the evening by decree. The cake has Damien’s face on it, printed in frosting.
Hannah’s mother arrives at ten to collect the girls and is made to wait, because Lily is mid-performance.
She’s commandeered a barstool and is walking the nearest six adults through the duties of the Blood Assistant, which include rationing, application, and knowing where the extra corn syrup is hidden.
Emma is silently reviewing her notes at the table to Lily’s left.
“So, the curse is over?” I ask.
“The file is closed,” Emma says. “Closed isn’t the same as over.” She caps her pen and allows herself to be taken home.
Gabe comes in last, carrying the concessions box, and begins moving through the bar handing out the leftovers.
“On the house,” he keeps saying, to people who paid two dollars for these exact cookies at intermission. “Everything’s on the house. It’s a celebration.”
“You’re giving away my inventory,” Emma had told him on her way out.
“I’m liquidating,” Gabe said. “The next show is a new fiscal year.”
“The next show is tomorrow.”
* * *
At the corner table, Tiffany is holding court. She’s upright in a chair with most of her witch eyeliner intact, nursing a glass of wine. Her hands aren’t entirely steady, and she’s explaining, to a rotating audience of people who watched her do it, exactly what it was they watched.
“It’s a family craft,” she says. “It’s not a spell spell. Anyone can learn a spell. This is generational. But what I did tonight” —she pauses, locating the appropriate scale— “what I did tonight, nobody in my family has done. Nobody in anybody’s family has done.”
“And you did it marvelously,” Englebert says from the next table, his glamour long dissolved.
Tiffany agrees and points at at me with her wine glass. “You can print that, Mari.”
“I can’t print any of this, Tiffany.”
“Then at least remember it.”
Englebert hops over to her table with a surprising grace.
“Tiffany,” he says. “When they write the history of this company — and they will, for our historian friend is in the room and taking notes — there will be a debate about who gave the great performance of this inaugural season. Let the record show the producer’s position: that this honor belongs to Third Witch. ”
Tiffany’s eyeliner doesn’t survive that. Dorcas hands her a napkin.
Damien arrives a few minutes later, fifteen minutes after it would have been fashionable and forty-five minutes after he told his mother he’d stay home.
Skye wheels him in. The bucket hat and sunglasses are gone.
The disguise was only ever for the theater.
The cast party is a different jurisdiction.
The room gives him a round of applause he did nothing tonight to earn, and he receives it with grace.
“Fifteen minutes,” Skye says. “Annabel said we get to stay for fifteen minutes and that you can have one ginger ale.”
He gets his ginger ale in a wine glass and asks to be wheeled to the cake, where he studies his own frosted face, then holds out his hand for the knife.
“I’ve died on camera and on a stage more times than I can count,” he says, to the room. “I have reason to believe I can survive this.”
He cuts himself a piece out of his own jaw, examines it, and takes a bite.
He works the room from the chair, one table at a time, and I watch him tell four different people that the press is what filled that house tonight. I still owe Kayla Rigsby a phone call, off the record, when I know for certain who leaked the story. I’m beginning to think I know.
Not tonight, though. Tonight, I’m off the clock.
Somewhere around eleven, someone plays ‘Don’t Stop Believing’ on the jukebox. There are groans. Vivian, who has been on her feet since six in the morning and in heels since five in the afternoon, stands up, takes off the heels, sets them on the table, and holds out her hand to Dana.
They dance, and they are terrible at it.
Neither of them knows who leads. Dana counts under her breath and Vivian seems to be dancing to some other, better song that exists only in her head.
They step on each other twice in the first verse, and Dana laughs into Vivian’s shoulder.
Vivian says something into Dana’s ear that no one else gets to hear, and they keep going, badly, all the way through.
Moonbeam joins in, alone. Ms. Pelham dances with Cody, who submits to it.
There’s a knock at the window. Bandit is on the outside sill.
“Are we celebrating?” His voice comes through the gap. “It seems like we’re celebrating.”
“You had a whole plate of food at the community center,” I say.
“But now there’s cake.”
I glance to the bartender for approval, and she nods, and Bandit is allowed in.
She presents him with a stick of butter on a saucer.
“I’ve heard about you,” she says.
Bandit takes the entire stick in both hands and holds it to his chest. “I love this establishment.”
“That animal,” Englebert says, from the bar, “will tell every raccoon in the county to begin infiltrating this space.”
“Let him,” the bartender says. “We could use the business.”
The party thins the way they do. Skye wheels out an overtired Broadway veteran who stayed far beyond his allowed fifteen minutes. He blows kisses at his own half-eaten face on the way out. Pru leaves, ten diplomatic minutes later, carrying her flowers.
Gabe and I are somehow the last two at a table, again.
“I’ll walk you to your car,” Gabe says.
“My car is right across the street. As always.”
“I know where your car is.”
Outside, the night has cooled off. Englebert is already asleep in the passenger seat. Gabe walks me to the driver’s side and then doesn’t open the door, and doesn’t leave, and puts his hands in his pockets.
“So,” he says. “I’d like to take you to dinner.”
“It’s nearly midnight and we just had cake.”
“No, Mari. Not now. Not this. Not baskets at the Hearth with Hannah, not coffee at your kitchen table with a cat mediating, not sandwiches at a rehearsal. Dinner. At an actual restaurant. I’ll wear my good jacket.
Somewhere that isn’t the Hearth & Stone, or Black Eyed Susan’s, even.
Just you and me, no play, no poisoning, no—”
“Yes.”
He stops. “I had more.”
“I know,” I say.
He grins.
“Next Friday?”
“Next Friday.”
Englebert opens one eye when l start the engine.
“Item one,” he says. “Next Friday. You’ll want to wear your nice blue dress.”