Chapter Three
Maya
Vicky's liquor cabinet is better stocked than her conscience, which is really saying something, because half a bottle of Casamigos does not scream I’m leaving in the dead of night without paying my share of the electric bill.
I find it while packing up the kitchen, wedged behind a rice cooker neither of us ever used, next to a mostly full bottle of some raspberry liqueur that looks like it's been waiting since a Halloween party two years ago to ruin somebody's night.
Phone's wedged between my ear and shoulder, Sunny's voice coming through tinny and warm. "You don't have to pack tonight," she's saying, over what sounds like Beck building something in the background. "Come now, pack tomorrow, we'll make it a whole production."
"I have a system." I set the tequila on the counter next to the raspberry thing, next to a bottle of red that's decent, all of it clearly not mine, all of it very abandoned along with everything else Vicky decided wasn't worth the trip to Danny's.
"If I don't finish tonight, I'll lose momentum, and if I lose momentum, I'll end up living out of a single suitcase for eight months like that girl we went to school with who got dumped and never unpacked.
I refuse to become her, Sunny. I refuse. "
"Nobody's becoming anybody. Drink some water and go to bed."
I look at the tequila. Then the wine. And at the raspberry liqueur, out of some morbid curiosity, the way you'd look at a car accident you're not involved in.
"She owes me for June and July," I say, mostly to myself, doing math.
"Two months, split fifty-fifty on a fourteen-hundred-dollar apartment, that's seven hundred dollars per month she just walked away from.
If I drink this entire cabinet at forty dollars a bottle on average, that's maybe two hundred in recovered value, which isn't the full fourteen hundred, but it's something; it's a start. Better than nothing."
"Are you doing debt math with alcohol?"
"I'm doing restorative justice." I unscrew the tequila. It smells like a decision I'm going to have opinions about tomorrow. "This is the least I can do. For me. Compensation. She left me holding the bag; I'm going to hold this instead."
Sunny's laughing on the other end, the laugh that means she's given up trying to talk me out of something and switched to just enjoying the ride. "Okay, restorative justice queen. Pace yourself. I mean that."
I pace myself for one shot.
By the second, the packing slows down considerably, mostly because folding a fitted sheet requires coordination I no longer have access to.
By the third, I've abandoned the fitted sheet as a lost cause and moved on to narrating my entire employment history to Sunny in a tone that suggests I think this is new information for her.
"Eight years," I tell her, sitting on the floor now, back against the cabinets, the tequila bottle balanced against my knee like a very tiny, very toxic pet.
"Eight years, Sunny. I had a title. Senior.
It said Senior right on the door plaque.
You don't just hand a person a door plaque and then take it back in a conference room with a box of tissues on the table. That's not, that's not how doors work."
"I know, honey."
"I had a five-year plan, a ten-year plan, and a fifteen-year plan. I had the plans laminated." A thought arrives, fully formed and urgent. "Do you think the plastic sleeve thing is a red flag? Like, be honest. Is it a me thing?"
"I think it's extremely you, and I love you for it."
"That's not a no."
We keep going like that for a while, long enough that the tequila's somewhere past halfway and I've started rating my life decisions out loud on a scale I make up on the spot, long enough that Sunny says something gentle about getting some sleep and I agree, mostly because agreeing seems easier than the alternative, and we hang up with the particular softness of two people who've had this exact call a hundred times before.
The apartment goes quiet. I sit on the kitchen floor for a minute, tequila warm in my chest, half a fitted sheet still crumpled in my lap, and that's when I notice the little red numbers on my lock screen.
Two missed calls I sent to voicemail because who answers unknown numbers anymore. One voicemail. One text.
For one idiotic second, my heart does something hopeful and pathetic, like maybe it's the marketing director from that agency that never called me back, like maybe good news travels this late.
It is not good news. It is, I remember with the specific dread of a woman piecing together her own crime scene, the man I screamed at for four minutes about a spreadsheet.
I play the voicemail with my thumb shaking slightly, which I blame on the tequila and only the tequila.
“This is the guy you yelled at for four minutes about a spreadsheet.
Wrong number. I'm not your landlord; I don't have your file, and I definitely don't have the deposit you think I'm sitting on.
You might want to actually dial the guy next time.
Hope the eviction thing works out. For what it's worth. The blue rent thing. Solid system.”
I sit with that for a second. Then I read the text underneath it.
Unknown: Wrong number. Not your landlord. Figured you'd want to know before you lawyer up over nothing.
The horror arrives slowly and then all at once, the way it always does. I called a total stranger and workshopped an entire legal case at him. I gave him my employment history unprompted. And I used the word unconscionable on a man who never asked to hear it.
And he complimented my spreadsheet.
"Oh no," I say out loud to the empty kitchen, to Vicky's abandoned rice cooker. "Oh, that's so nice. Why was that so nice?"
The correct response here, the adult response, the response any reasonable sober person would choose, is to text back a short, dignified apology in the morning and never think about this again.
I’m not a reasonable sober person tonight.
I’m a woman on a kitchen floor with two hundred dollars of recovered restorative justice in her bloodstream, and I’ve never in my life let a wrong done to somebody sit uncorrected overnight, not even when the somebody is a stranger who thinks my rent color-coding is a solid system.
I call him.
He picks up on the second ring, voice low, a little rough, like maybe he wasn't asleep but was somewhere close to it. "Yeah."
"I would like to formally apologize." I enunciate very carefully, the way you do when you're aware your consonants have started drifting. "For the four minutes. And also for calling you again right now, which I recognize is objectively worse, timing-wise, than the original four minutes."
A pause. Long enough that I start composing a follow-up apology for the apology.
"You drunk?"
"I'm processing." I consider this further and decide honesty is the least I owe him at this point.
"With tequila. My roommate's tequila. Well, ex-roommate.
Ex as of tonight, ex as of a note on a mattress, extremely ex.
" I hear myself and course-correct. "That's not important.
What's important is that I owe you an apology, and I’ve prepared several talking points. "
"You prepared talking points. Drunk."
"I prepare talking points for everything.
It's a whole thing about me." I take this as an opening to sit up straighter against the cabinets, as if posture will help my case.
"Point one. I'm sorry I yelled at you about a spreadsheet you had nothing to do with.
Point two, the blue rent thing, thank you, that was a genuinely kind thing to say to a stranger who screamed at you, and I noticed, and I'm choosing to bring it up now instead of never, because that's apparently who I am at eleven at night. "
"It's one in the morning."
"That's worse. Add that to point two. Point three?" I lose the thread of point three entirely, which has never happened to me in my life, not once, not during a single client pitch. "I don't remember point three. I had a point three."
"Take your time." He doesn't sound annoyed. He sounds, if anything, like a man settling into a chair, as if he's decided this is happening and might as well get comfortable for it.
"I got laid off," I say instead, because point three has clearly left the building and this is what's rushed in to fill the space. "Did I mention that on the call? I feel like I mentioned that."
"You mentioned it."
"I had a title." My throat does something unreliable on the word title, and I clear it, annoyed at my body for the betrayal. "It's stupid to be this upset about a title."
"Doesn't sound stupid to me."
Something about the way he says it, flat and certain, no hesitation in it at all, gets me somewhere under the tequila, somewhere I don't have a system built to handle yet. "You're being weirdly nice for a man I verbally assaulted over the phone."
"You didn't assault me. You gave me a very thorough audit."
That startles a laugh out of me, real and a little too loud for the empty kitchen. "That's the nicest way anyone's described a mental breakdown to me all week."
"Been a rough week?"
"It's been a rough month. Possibly a rough decade.
I'd have to check the file." I lean my head back against the cabinet, tequila bottle rolling against my knee, and something about talking to a total stranger at one in the morning feels, for reasons I'm too drunk to interrogate, easier than any conversation I've had all week with someone who knows me.
"Thank you for calling back. And leaving the message.
And not being weird about the spreadsheet thing. "
"The spreadsheet thing was the best part of my night."
"That's deeply sad for you."
"Been a slow week."
I'm smiling now, sitting on a kitchen floor that won’t be mine much longer, talking to a man whose name I still don't know, and it isn't until Sunny's second call comes through twenty minutes later, worried I've gone quiet too long, that I even think to ask.
"Wait," I say, sitting up fast enough that the room tilts a little in protest. "I don't even know your name."
There's a pause on his end, short, almost amused. "Didn't seem important at the time."
"It's important now. I'm apologizing to a stranger at one in the morning; I'd like his name for the file."
"Archer," he says, and something about the way he offers it, easy, unbothered, like it's the least complicated thing that's happened to either of us tonight, settles into me somewhere I won't understand until much later.
"Archer," I repeat, testing the shape of it, filing it away next to the blue rent and solid system and the specific quiet kindness of a stranger who didn't have to call back at all. “I’m Maya.”
"Get some water, Maya," he says before we hang up, and my belly does this weird flutter thing, which has to be the tequila, but there it is anyway. The way he said my name, in his voice as if it already belonged there.