Chapter 6 #2
I got literal and glanced down at our outfits. As this night had gone on, I’d realized that our clothes didn’t begin to approach what the other women around us were wearing, despite how I’d tried to fix us up. But I knew what Morgan meant, and it wasn’t just that we dressed wrong.
“I’m doing my best,” I told her. “I’m going to graduate soon.”
“Then what? You’ll win the lottery? Rob a bank? Run away?”
Honestly, all of those ideas sounded ok to me. “What are we going to do, for real?” I asked her, as if she would have had a good answer.
“We’re going to lose the restaurant. Mom is also going to lose her mind and Dad will end up in jail, probably. Max will be homeless. I’ll…” She hesitated. “I don’t have any skills or education. I don’t know.” She finished the tequila and blinked a few times. “I might puke.”
“Well, this is sure fun,” I said. “I’m super glad that I decided to invite you.”
“You didn’t. I invited myself.”
I almost started to laugh. When had Morgan gotten funny again? I remembered playing when we’d been kids, but that was years before. “I had a plan to marry one of the Woodsmen,” I said, and she did laugh. “Why is that so hilarious? Why couldn’t I?”
“We can’t even find them,” she said, gasping.
“It was a stupid idea. I just want some help,” I said. “I want someone to provide a solution. You don’t have one, I don’t have one.”
“Mom and Dad don’t and Max is a Backpfeifengesicht. I never thought of you as a fairy tale kind of person,” she said, and signaled to the bartender. “I have another,” she told him.
“You going to get sick.” I knew that from personal experience.
“No, I’m not a fairy tale person. But other people have good endings.
Not, like, ride into the sunset and that’s the end, but their problems work out.
They seem happy,” I said. “It was a nice distraction, anyway.” The ice had melted in my glass, providing me with a second round.
I swirled it a little before I spoke again.
“You know, I could just leave. I could walk away from the restaurant and do something totally different. I hate the smell of the grease. I hate cleaning the bathrooms. I really, really hate that stupid hat we have to wear.” I could almost feel it resting on top of my head right now and I shook my hair.
“Why do you keep working so hard at Walter’s?” Morgan asked.
“Because no one else is,” I stated. “You and Max aren’t pulling your weight, so I pull it for you.”
Even in the flashing lights that they’d used to try to make this place seem more exciting and even with the foundation and bronzer that we’d applied to her skin to try to make her less dead, I could see her blush.
I stopped looking because it made me even madder, and I checked my phone.
I didn’t have to constantly worry about reminders of my drunken behavior at the party because the video had almost disappeared.
I was also interested in updates from Shane.
I got one, too. “I’m back home,” he’s written. “Where are you? Want to have dinner?”
I sent him my location and invited him to join us, because really, this evening needed a boost and it was always nice to see him. Plus, his new house wasn’t too far away (one of its advantages had been an awesome location) so in not too long, he showed up at the bar.
I stood and started waving when I spotted him, although it wouldn’t have been hard to miss me. This place that wasn’t very crowded (it did make sense for a Sunday night) and with all the glowing white skin between my sister and me, we stood out like beacons.
He came right over. “Hi,” he greeted me and also said hello to her. Then he leaned a little closer and added, “Morgan.”
She seemed extremely pleased that he knew her name, blushing again in the way that highlighted her overly pale face.
I swiveled and put my equally pale legs in the shadow of the bar top, then twisted at the waist so that I could face him.
It wasn’t the most comfortable position to maintain. “Where did you come from?” I asked.
“Indiana. What do you have on draft?” he asked the bartender after he answered me, and then he looked again at my sister. “Morgan, what do you have there?”
“Tequila,” she told him and then finished it. “I’ll have another.”
I shook my head at her. “That will be your third. Remember what happened to me when I got drunk.”
“You were alone and friendless,” she reminded me back and that felt just great. I couldn’t imagine why I had allowed her to come tonight.
“Straight tequila?” he questioned. “Expensive.”
“It’s the kind they use for mixing. I knew enough to order from the bottom shelf,” she said, and he made a face like he knew exactly how it tasted.
“Do you know anything about a Woodsmen party happening tonight somewhere around here?” I asked him, but he was as clueless as we were. Despite the emptiness of the bar, it was still hard to talk because of the music, and the flashing lights were giving me a headache.
Or maybe, that was due to the company of my sister. Morgan suddenly launched into story after story about me as a kid, mostly about how I used to worship our older brother. “She called herself ‘the bat girl,’” she said, giggling. Yes, my sister was giggling, which I had never heard before.
“Like the superhero?” Shane asked.
“No, because she carried around his baseball gear. She used to go to all his games and most of his practices. Molly was his biggest fan and he reveled in it.” She looked at me and did exactly the same eye roll that I had been trying to prevent in myself.
“It was fun!” I said. “I liked going and he liked having me there, and so did Dad. We used to sit and talk about Max and how he’d make it someday…you’re jealous because you didn’t get to come too.”
“Jealous?” She called me some choice names, some I recognized and some that sounded Germanic, and he winced as he looked back and forth between us.
“Seems like this has been a great night out,” he commented.
“It hasn’t been all bad,” I said. “After she had the whiskey and Coke and before the second tequila, we were enjoying ourselves.”
“Really?” Morgan wondered. “You were having fun? So was I! I was thinking that we should go out all the time, except you’re always at the restaurant, wasting your time on a failing business.”
“And you’re always in your dirty sheets, playing on your phone like a child,” I answered.
“Ok,” Shane said, nodding. He put his mug down on the bar. “Let’s get on home, ladies.”
“Fine by me,” my sister said grandly but when she got off her high stool, her ankle twisted due to my large shoes and her drunkenness, and she almost fell.
“Here we go,” he told her, and she mostly draped over him in order to make it out to the street.
I walked behind, carrying the raincoat she had insisted on bringing even though no woman our age wore yellow slickers of this type, the kind favored by toddlers.
At least she had stayed dry on our long walk to the bars.
The streets were now empty, since the Woodsmen hadn’t shown up.
“Where did you park?” I asked him, hopeful that he could drive us to our faraway spot.
“Oopsy daisy! One foot in front of the other,” he told my flailing sister. “I parked at my house,” he answered me. “I took a car over here.”
That had been a smart move if he’d planned to drink and have fun. Unfortunately, he’d left his half-finished beer and had no fun whatsoever. “Sorry I invited you,” I told him.
“That’s really rude, Molly! Why don’t you just say straight out that you’re not attracted to him?”
“Morgan!” I yelped. “That’s not true.”
“Then why don’t you like him? Is it because you’re worried about money?
” She turned to Shane. “We’re going to lose our restaurant and she has this very misguided idea that she’ll be the savior.
I know that she tried to borrow money and she also tried to get another job making food deliveries.
Because over Christmas, we all found out that my father had started gambling again—”
“Morgan, will you shut up?” I demanded. She stepped out of one of my shoes and kicked the other into the middle of the street so I had to retrieve them both. When I returned, I heard her still going on about me and our family tragedies.
“So Molly thought, ‘Hm, I know! I’ll get a boyfriend who can help me! I’ll take his money just like our parents appropriate from us!
’ I don’t mean that they steal—no, they are stealing,” she told him.
“My parents give money to Max all the time. It’s supposed to belong to all of us because it’s a family business.
Mom keeps repeating that, it’s a family business, it’s a family business.
But when he gets some dumb idea and they hand over funds that supposedly belong to all of us—” She tripped but he kept her on her feet.
“How far are we going?” he called back to me. “We might get there faster if I carry her.”
“Or we could leave her,” I suggested, but sighed. “Three more blocks.”
We eventually made it, although she had blabbed like an idiot for the whole time and forced him to listen to every poor decision that my family had ever made, from my father’s gambling habits and questionable loan sources, to my mother’s bookkeeping failures, to Max’s total stupidity, to my gold digger plan.