The Paris Review - Fall 2016

They followed the exodus out of the store and across the Higgins bridge.
The group walked past the Wilma and the camera store where Marcus’s
exhibition was going to be, turned left at the creepy Western expansion
mural, skirted the creepy Christian coffee shop, skipped the creepy casino,
and entered the Rose. The bar was dark and nearly empty, a combination of
the early hour and the summer exodus of college kids.
“Shots?” Cal asked the group in general.
“Let me get this round,” Leslie said. “Or at least ours. You want the special?”
“You know it,” he said. Then, because he couldn’t help it, “Thanks, honey.”
There was a panic building in her as she ordered three sets of Jack Daniel’s
and Olympias, not because of the booze—though she was on her way toward
being in not ideal shape on that front—but because of how little she wanted
to see Cal just now. She didn’t want him to know about the unprovoked sea
changes in her feelings for him, but she also wasn’t sure she could, in good
faith, continue interacting normally. Everyone always told her that she was
moody, which she usually dismissed as, well, another way to dismiss her. But
she felt the force of her mood now, the physical demands it was making on
the people around her. She was mostly mood and only a little bit person.
She carried the three tallboys over to the table and went back for the
shots. As she arrived at the bar, she saw a haggard regular dump one of her
whiskeys into his own drink, then set the empty shot glass back next to the
two full ones.
“What the fuck, man?” she said.
“Excuse me?” he said. He was accessorizing his patchy gray goatee and
blotchy nose with an oversize black T-shirt.
“I saw what you did,” she said. “Not cool.”
“Drinks on the bar,” he said, as if citing a house rule. “I see a drink on the
bar, I don’t know whose drink that is. Could be my drink, could be somebody
else’s. I see a drink on the bar, I figure it must be my drink. I think, Oh,
somebody bought me a drink, guess it’s my lucky day. You bought that drink?
Okay. Thank you.”
“You’re lucky I feel guilty about a couple of other things right now,” Leslie
said. She collected the other two shots and brought them back to Cal and Kim.
“To a new century,” Kim said.
Leslie nodded and sipped her beer. That was Kim—toasting the new century,
not the last one. Kim was a wreck, too, but at least she was an optimist.
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