1200 PM Richie #2
The bartender leaned against the back of the bar.
She picked up her phone, connected to an outlet by a long white cord, from the counter.
For a minute or so she scrolled her finger across it, laughing every so often and tapping its screen.
Richie considered the options in front of him.
He could drink the bourbon. He hadn’t drunk in over a year, not since he got back from out west, though it wasn’t like he had forgotten how to do it—by now drinking was the only thing he knew he was actually good at.
And people expected him to do it too. So, there was also that, the pleasure of living up, or maybe succumbing, to everyone else’s expectations.
They expected him to get his shit together for a few years, right up to the point where it looked like he was in the clear, and then to do something stupid and fall apart in a spectacular fashion.
And what was today if not a day to spectacularly fall apart?
The bartender said, “Did you see this thing about Trump falling asleep in court?”
“I did.”
She held up her phone so Richie could see its screen.
“It’s so funny. Like, how is it so funny?”
“I don’t know. Is it funny or depressing?”
The bartender cocked her head to one side. She looked at the screen again and pinched her lower lip. She set her phone back down on the counter and said, “That’s a nice suit, by the way.”
“Oh, thanks.”
“I keep trying to get my boyfriend to buy a black suit, but he’s always like, ‘Babe, I’m not a fucking waiter.’ Which is actually insulting because it’s like, hello, I’m a bartender.”
“Yeah. Totally.”
The suit was old and didn’t fit as well as it used to; it was somehow too snug in some places and too loose in others, as if his body had changed in weird, contradictory ways.
He couldn’t remember the last time he’d worn it; when he put it on this morning, he’d reached into one of the pockets and found an empty dime bag and a business card for someone named Ernesto de la Cruz who—evidently—worked at Deloitte’s Houston office.
The phone number was crossed out, and on top of it was written a different one in blue ink, along with a wobbly smiley face.
Richie frowned. Licking his thumb, he’d rubbed at a spot on the jacket’s lapel and thrown the business card away.
At that point he still had at least some hope of going to the service.
When he woke up that morning he had eaten a bowl of granola, which he almost instantly threw up, but he figured if he could get dressed and out the door, the momentum would carry him across the East River and to the church on Hudson.
But then as he was knotting his tie he started shaking, and breathing quickly and shallowly, like there were two thick steel plates pressing against his chest. His head turned somehow both impossibly heavy and disconcertingly light, and to keep himself from falling over, he sat on the floor of his closet.
Rami began texting him, asking him where he was.
He sounded calm at first, but then the texts took on a tone that hovered between angry and concerned, and Richie immediately knew what Rami was thinking.
Richie didn’t respond. There was a parka hanging directly in front of him, and reaching up, he slipped his phone into its pocket.
He sat on the floor for twenty minutes, which turned into thirty minutes, and then an entire hour.
Dust balls lined the closet’s corners—Richie wondered how long it had taken them to grow so large.
Eventually the texts stopped coming, but by that point Richie didn’t notice.
He didn’t notice the silence, or the way sunlight had turned his bedroom a light, midday yellow.
He had found the box that Adam had given him and was opening its lid.
The bartender picked up her phone again and checked the time.
She said, “I need to go change out these kegs before everyone else gets here. And there are all these sandwiches that have been delivered. Do you know if your friend wanted them set out for people right away? I’m sorry to ask—I’ve never worked a wake. ”
“I don’t know what he wants to do with the sandwiches.”
“Why didn’t you go to the church?”
“Because I do better in bars.”
The bartender looked at the end of her ponytail. She tapped her chin with her finger.
“This thing starts at twelve thirty,” she said. “I’m going to go get the sandwiches.”
She walked through a door next to the bathroom with a sign that said EMPLOYEES ONLY, leaving Richie alone.
The glass of bourbon was still in front of him.
Its sides were wet with condensation, and when Richie reached out to touch them they cooled the burning at the tips of his fingers.
Ice cubes rattled pleasantly against each other.
God, it would be so easy. He could take it down in two swallows and order another one before everyone came filing in.
He could forget, at least for today, and then maybe again tomorrow, that nothing had worked out as he had planned, and that he had fallen pathetically short of the person he always assumed he would turn out to be.
Or maybe that wasn’t true at all. Maybe this was the person that, on some subconscious level, he knew that he would become, and that was exactly the problem.
No matter what he did he was going to end up here, always a little out of breath from running away from himself.
But then he remembered. He remembered the last time he was with Adam, and the way their knees brushed against each other as they talked.
He remembered how Adam looked outside, and how his voice got quiet when said he loved the winter.
He remembered thinking how incredible it was that after all these years they could still sit there together, staring out a window into the blue-gray city, like it was the most natural thing in the world.
The bartender came back with the sandwiches—two large trays of them, which she placed on the opposite end of the bar.
They were covered in plastic wrap, and as she was peeling it away, the door to outside opened. Richie heard Mia’s voice.
She said, “You’re insane, Buckingham Palace looks like a wedding cake,” and then, in a near-whisper: “Oh my God.”
Richie let go of the bourbon. The ice was quiet.
He looked at the bartender and said, “You can take that away.”