Chapter 16
JOEL
The party thinned and wilded. The older guests retreated to the hotel in a procession of golf carts snaking away from the house, the faint headlights glowing like fireflies.
Only a few of them remained, mostly men smoking cigars on the patio.
The evening was an opportunity for them to indulge in their maleness, to drink too much and hold forth on the failures of the Ford administration, the lineup of any baseball team of consequence to them.
To complain about the younger generation as if they’d had nothing to do with raising them—how these children respected nothing, appreciated nothing; how they were destroying America.
Nearby, oblivious to these ravings, Joel’s peers appeared to be getting younger, weddings a time to return to their college selves.
After half an hour, he still could not find Carmen.
He searched the house, seeing only old classmates he didn’t want to talk to.
“Introduce me to your girl!” Ken shouted at him from the living room sofa, his muddy loafer nosing the cream upholstery.
Joel ignored him, winding toward the hallway.
He passed the kitchen, halted by raised voices and a thick haze of smoke.
Waiters were frantically opening windows, a chef with a singed shirtsleeve inspecting a pan in the basin of the sink, and everyone was coughing, one of the waiters so violently he had to brace himself on a counter.
Joel felt the same fear as when he’d seen the glass shard, like the moment was teetering on the edge of catastrophe.
“Everything okay?” he asked the server nearest him.
“Grease fire,” the server said, wiping his brow. “It’s out now.”
“Jesus.”
“Not sure how it happened. Someone panicked and threw water on it, which made it worse, but we were able to contain it with pot lids and baking sheets.”
“Is there anything I can do?”
“Just don’t tell the Pruitts.”
Joel nodded, raising the crook of his elbow to cover his nose and mouth, his eyes beginning to sting. A chef was claiming some guest had been in the kitchen, someone he didn’t recognize, right before the fire started, but everyone else was shaking their heads, unable to corroborate.
Joel retreated back toward the locus of the party, the fumes too potent.
He found Shay’s brother and the three others from the patio scaling the house’s central sweep of stairs.
William stumbled on the carpet’s lip, causing Joel’s arms to jerk upward to catch him, even though he was yards away.
He was fine, his laughter a shout. Joel shook his head—William seemed younger than his twenty-one years.
Carmen would never venture upstairs, so he returned to the patio.
The night air bit his ankles, cool with the wind off the ocean.
Shay’s mother stood several feet behind the bar.
She was talking to a man in an ill-fitting suit, her body stiff in a pose that reminded Joel of her daughter, that same reserve Shay had exhibited during the speech.
They were speaking quickly. From where Joel stood, the only words he caught were come on and overdue, everything else lost to the party’s chatter.
Half the candles lighting the cocktail tables had been snuffed out.
The moon tipped the grass silver. As he strode across the lawn, he could only see suggestions of faces, features cast in shadow.
A laugh spiked to his left, and he turned to find Carmen, down the sloping hill to the driveway.
She was sitting on the short hood of a golf cart, smoking a cigarette with one of the waiters, and when she looked up toward Joel, her face was expressionless.
Their embers burned a bright hole in the dark.
“Joel?”
A chill skipped along the stones of his back at Shay’s low husk, saying his name.