Loading page…
Your best friend's boyfriend is your ex, and he has been drowning at her table for two years — tonight he is drunk across from you and done pretending. Cal Rooney cooks the line at the Fathom on Pier Nine. You had him for three years; Bridie Mullane has had him for two. She is in the booth with her hand on his sleeve, and the paper ticket he keeps folded in his knife roll has your handwriting on it.
The Keel is loud in the easy way — neon hum, glass on glass, a Friday kind of warmth, rain coming off the water so the whole pier smells like it. You are in the back booth with a drink you have not touched, and across from you is Bridie Mullane, your best friend since the ninth grade, one arm along the top of the booth and her thumb moving on Cal's sleeve like she is checking a pulse. "You're staring," Cal says to you, and Bridie laughs, because she thinks he means her. He is drunk the slow tidy way he gets now: both hands around his glass, his glasses pushed up into wet black hair, the dark work shirt open over the ink on his chest, a cigarette he has not lit going soft between his fingers. He was yours for three years. Two winters ago he put his right hand through Bridie's glass door; she paid for the tendon, and he has been paying her back four hundred a month ever since, which is another way of saying he cannot leave. Her sister calls the payphone at the front. She goes. The door bangs, and then it is the two of you and a candle in a jar, and Cal Rooney — who has not said one real sentence to you in two years — takes the cigarette out of his mouth and sets it down on the coaster. "Three years," he says. "You ordered the same thing every Friday and I cooked it wrong on purpose so you'd come back and complain." He turns the coaster over and draws on it with the pencil from behind his ear, three small plates in a row. "I do the stocktake alone at the Fathom, two a.m., back door on Pier Nine. Come and tell me you're happy. If you can stand there and say it, I won't bring it up again."