by James Sperl
Clarissa hoped the smile she followed with came across as genuine as her offer, but she felt decidedly transparent in her attempt to socialize Andrew. If he saw through her, though, he did a stellar job of not showing it.
“No, thank you,” he said. “I have someplace to be.” He set down seven dollars and seventy-nine cents on the counter—the exact price of the meal, tax included. He grabbed the to-go bag. “Maybe next time.”
Clarissa squinted and jabbed a finger at him. “I’m going to hold you to it.”
Nodding, he made his way toward the entrance but had to wait to leave, as a party of nine filtered through the door.
Valentina was in Clarissa’s ear. “That is one strange dude.”
“Why?” Clarissa said. “Just because he doesn’t want to eat with a roomful of strangers?”
“No. Because he never wants to eat with a roomful of strangers. Seriously, how many years has he been coming here? Four? Five? More? And how many times have you seen him park his butt in a chair?” Valentina held up her thumb and index finger, forming a zero. “That’s how many. And I've only ever seen him smile when he talks to you. Hmm. You think he's feeling the feels for you?”
“What?” Clarissa said, recoiling. “Ew. No. Andrew's, like, in his fifties. Maybe even his sixties. He's old enough to be my dad.”
“Yeah, I'll bet he'll be your daddy.”
“Okay, now you're just being gross. Have you ever considered the possibility that he smiles when he sees me because I'm nice to him? Kindness does have a way of affecting people. You should try it sometime.”
“Hey, I'm nice...when I want to be.”
“Exactly.”
“All I'm saying is it’s strange. It’s not normal. Dude is not normal.”
Clarissa discreetly cocked a thumb at Dennis and his family, who were getting up to leave. “And accusing the government of running secret conspiratorial radio wave programs is?”
“Well, he’s a different type of not normal,” Valentina said. “But at least he’s sociable.”
Clarissa pursed her lips. “I’m so glad you have your priorities straight.” She watched Andrew slip through the entrance at last.
Valentina scooped ice into three glasses. “So we still on for tonight?”
“Tonight? Uh, remind me again?”
Valentina dropped her shoulders, her manicured brows dipping in mock disapproval. “The girls? Ladies night? Helloooooo? I’ve only mentioned it, like, five hundred times in the past week.”
Clarissa ripped herself away from Andrew.
“Yeah, no, I remember. Of course. Ladies night. Count me in.”
“You bet your ass I'm counting you in. Maybe I’ll even score you a stud to take home.” Valentina pumped her eyebrows.
Clarissa grimaced. “Eww.” She dipped her fingers into a tub of sink water and flicked them at Valentina’s face. “You’re such a trollop! Besides, who says I need your help in that department?”
Valentina stopped giggling. “You total slut. I knew that’s why you weren’t answering your phone last night. It was that guy from the coffee shop, wasn’t it? The barista?”
Clarissa clamped her eyes shut. “Don’t remind me.”
“No Mr. Right, huh?”
“He wasn’t even Mr. Right Now. Just…yeck.”
Valentina tilted her head sympathetically and rubbed Clarissa’s arm.
“Don’t worry about it. Everyone draws the short straw once in awhile.”
“Yeah, but his straw was really short.”
Valentina chuckled as she filled the glasses with juice—two grapefruits, one orange. “You’re overthinking things. Trying too hard. You can’t make something happen. It just has to do it on its own.”
“Yeah, I get that but…” she shouldered up to Valentina and whispered in confidence. “…I am starting to creep into my mid-thirties here. My window is rapidly closing.”
Valentina set the glasses down and took Clarissa by her arms, bumping Clarissa’s forehead with her own.
“It’ll happen. You’ll see. There’s a guy out there for you, and he’s awesome, I swear.” She released her and swept up the glasses. “In the meantime, be thinking about what you’re going to wear tonight. Make it something especially trashy.”
With a wink, Valentina darted into the dining room, leaving Clarissa to close out the bill for Dennis and his family, all of whom stepped up to the register.
“How was everything?” she said, emotionless.
“Wonderful as always,” Dennis replied. If any feelings of embarrassment lingered, it didn't show.
“Glad to hear it.”
Clarissa tallied Dennis’s bill. She smiled at his daughter, who hid behind her mother and offered a shy, toothy grin. Clarissa stuck out her tongue, the action eliciting an ear-to-ear smile from the girl. Clarissa smiled back, her eyes moving swiftly to Dennis’s wife then back to Dennis.
“Twenty-three eighteen.”
Dennis plunged a meaty hand into his wallet, and as he did, his wife reached out and stroked his back lovingly. The gesture was simple, and one both touching and indicative of true love as anything Clarissa had seen. Dennis may spend a tad too much time in conspiracy theory chat rooms, but it was evident that his wife loved him unconditionally, and his daughter undoubtedly shared in that love.
As Dennis doled out singles onto the counter, Clarissa trailed to the window facing the street. Through it, she saw Andrew cross the road to his truck. He climbed in, turned it over, and then he drove away by himself.
Returning to Dennis, Clarissa took his money. On the surface, the contrast between the two men's lives couldn’t appear starker. One was a recluse. The other was family devoted. Clarissa wondered, as she often did of late—particularly when she couldn't suppress the sound of her biological clock—which one she would turn out to be.
CHAPTER 4
The first round of drinks arrived within five minutes of placing the order. Clarissa didn’t think that was too shabby considering every table in all three parlors of Taps Alehouse was occupied, the overflow relegated to standing room only.
The waitress, who was a stunning young blond in a low-cut tank, push-up bra, and thigh-high, skin-snug shorts, commanded the eye of every man within a twenty-foot radius of her. She deposited two Cosmopolitans, a Long Island Iced Tea, and a pint of Newcastle to their respective owners at Clarissa’s table with the efficiency of a seasoned pro. In addition to being a twenty-something knockout, she also appeared to be excellent at her job. As if Clarissa needed another reason to hate her.
“Cheers!” bellowed Valentina, who swooped up her Cosmo and held it aloft.
Clarissa and Valentina's friends, Rachel and Stephanie, both of whom had arrived at the bar a full thirty minutes before anyone else, each grabbed their drinks—Cosmo for Stephanie, Tea for Rachel—and held them up. Clarissa was the last to hoist her beer.
“To us!” Valentina barked cheerfully, tossing a lock of flat-ironed hair over her shoulder to expose an enormous hoop earring.
“To us!” replied everyone.
“Oh, my God,” Valentina started, “I can't tell you how much I needed tonight. I swear, my feet have never hurt so bad. I don’t think I sat down all day.”
“I know,” said Clarissa. She looked around the packed bar. “And given how rocking this place is, I’m starting to wonder if everyone didn’t just migrate here from Aunt Mae’s.”
Rachel, who sat cross-legged in a short red party dress, sipped from her glass then set it down. “Well, there was no one at the salon today. I mean, other than my two regulars, no one came in. No one. I did one color and one cut. Talk about boring. I even had time to do my nails.” She held out a hand to reveal immaculately painted fingernails with butterflies centered in each one.
Valentina drank deeply then set her glass down. She adjusted her snug-fitting turquoise top, hoisting it up before she lowered it to reveal more cleavage.
“It’s because people need a larger venue when they get freake
d out. A salon’s for daily gossip, you know? Someplace small and intimate where people can whisper and talk trash. What happened this morning? That requires more than just a handful of blue-hairs to talk it out. That was end-of-the-world shit right there.”
“Oh, you stop,” Clarissa said, plucking a rock of ice from Rachel’s glass and pitching it at Valentina, who narrowly dodged it. Several drops of water dripped onto Clarissa’s jade-colored blouse.
“Well, I’ll tell you this much,” Rachel said, tucking lengths of raven hair over each ear. “It’s all they talked about on the news today. I mean, seriously. Every channel. Same thing. All day. It’s like nothing else happened.”
Clarissa had caught a glimpse of the cable and network news channels before she met up with her friends. Rachel wasn’t exaggerating. News anchors talked up the sound event until they were blue in the face, and when they had nothing left to say, they proceeded to interview a wide-ranging field of “experts” on the subject. Everyone from nuclear physicists to defense contractors and demolitions coordinators to your garden-variety meteorologist was asked to speculate on the sound’s origin. Their theories were as extensive as their occupations.
What made the nonstop coverage particularly fascinating, however, was the lack of accompanying video to support the conversation. How do you show a sound, and for a full day no less? The networks thought they had the answer in the form of a stitched-together video, which they ran in a continuous loop. The amateur videos were culled from seemingly every corner of the world. They showed people from a multitude of cultures standing around and looking at the sky while the eerie sound screeched in the background. Some networks even provided subtitles for the foreign language eyewitness segments to help bolster the sense of global mystery.
Valentina picked up her drink again and stirred it with the end of her finger. “It doesn’t surprise me,” she said in response to Rachel. “The apocalypse does have a way of monopolizing the news cycle.”
Stephanie leaned forward onto her bracelet-covered forearms. “It sure was scary, whatever it was. If I was still of the religious persuasion, I might think it was the end of the world.”
“Oh, don’t even get me started on that!” Rachel belted out. She immediately shrank back turtle-like when she realized how loud she had spoken.
Clarissa swallowed two big gulps of beer through an amused smile. Rachel. She had always been the queen of explosive outbursts, though they were never steeped in anger. She just had a problem with volume. She had been that way ever since Clarissa met her in high school. Rachel had transferred to Pastora from Chicago in her senior year. The move was tough, and finding friends in that final year of secondary education even tougher. But she and Clarissa clicked immediately. Clarissa often thought a person could never have too many friends, though, at the time, Rachel was probably glad just to have had one.
“What does that mean?” Clarissa said to her.
Rachel reined in her exuberance. “It means there was no shortage of doomsday cults out there claiming the end of days, that’s what. Every nut job with a direct line to God or whoever is using the sound as an opportunity to recruit followers. You know, just in case any of us poor sinners need to find salvation right at the end.”
Stephanie sat up straight and jutted out her chin. “And the seven angels which had the seven trumpets prepared themselves to sound.”
Clarissa’s brows crashed, her what-did-she-just-say? expression shared by Rachel and Valentina, who burst out laughing.
“What the heck was that, Reverend Stephanie?” Valentina said between giggles.
Stephanie lifted her shoulders and grinned sheepishly. “What? Didn’t you guys ever go to church?”
“No!” Rachel exclaimed. “And neither did you.”
“Not anymore. But I used to.”
“What was that from?” Clarissa asked.
Stephanie sat back and pulled the hem of her dress down over her thighs. “Revelations, King James version.”
“Revelations? Isn’t that the part of the Bible that talks about the end of the world?”
“Yeah, but don’t ask me to quote anything else. I only ever read Revelations. As you may remember, I was kind of a goth freak when I was younger. All the death and destruction in Revelations used to flick my switch. I read it obsessively. It was probably the reason my parents made me go to Sunday school all through high school.”
Rachel frowned. “You never went to Sunday school in high school.”
“No,” Stephanie said, smiling devilishly, “but my folks thought I did.”
“Demon child!” Clarissa brayed.
“I’m sure that’s what they thought when they saw some of the outfits I wore. But their attempts to ‘save’ me weren’t all bad. Revelations was good, scary fun. The perfect thing for a pseudo-anarchist to latch on to.”
Clarissa remembered well Stephanie’s foray to the dark side. Though they were good friends now, Stephanie was someone she avoided in high school. She wore black clothing and even blacker makeup daily and painted a portrait of a girl who wanted to convince the world her boyfriend was the Devil—and some started to believe it. But after high school, maturity and a reduced pool of people to shock forced her to reevaluate her goth-vamp image and start thinking about what she wanted to do with her life. Clarissa had thought Stephanie left Pastora after high school until she ran into her one evening years later at the ER. Not as a fellow patient—as her nurse. Now, some nine years since that day, she was one of her closest friends.
“So what’s this seven trumpets?” Valentina asked.
“Well, you’ve heard of the seven seals right?” Everyone looked at one another, clueless. “What? No one? Seriously? The symbolic seals of the apocalypse?”
“You mean it’s not an aquatic show at SeaWorld?” Clarissa joked. Rachel spit up a mouthful of her drink.
Stephanie smirked. “Ha ha. Come on, you guys. There’s even a classic movie titled after it. The Seventh Seal? Ingmar Bergman? Max von Sydow?” The table shrugged. “Fine, then what about The Seventh Sign with Demi Moore?” Everyone bobbed their heads and mumbled something agreeable. “You guys are pathetic. But that’s okay, that movie’s more in line with what I’m talking about anyway.”
Valentina sat back and crossed her legs. “Which is?”
“I don’t remember all the deets, and there’re tons of interpretations, but basically the Seven Seals are like this countdown to the end of the world. The opening of each one is supposed to be a growing acknowledgment of man’s rejection of or failure to honor God. There’s the anti-Christ and God’s wrath and all of that in there, but it’s when the seventh seal is opened that the seven trumpets begin.”
“This sounds like a movie,” Rachel said.
“You don’t know the half of it. Because now the real damage starts. After each angel sounds a trumpet—which occurs over some amount of time for all seven, but I forget how long—worse and worse shit starts to happen. Seriously. I’m talking blood raining down, burning mountains and boiling seas, darkness—the whole nine yards.”
“Jesus,” Valentina snarled.
“For real. Then there’re the three woes, which is the fifth through seventh trumpets, where each signals the beginning of some crazy-ass, months-long nastiness. I’m talking locust plagues and million men armies, you know, your basic holocaust to wipe out anyone who’s not sealed by God.”
“Locusts and armies?” Rachel said.
“I know, right?”
Clarissa grimaced. “And raining blood?”
“It’s completely horrifying, I know. But it’s okay. I checked the forecast this morning, and it’s supposed to be clear for the rest of the week.”
The girls spewed laughter, Clarissa prominent among them. It felt good to laugh. It was cathartic. So much pent-up anxiety had accumulated over the day, it was nice to vent it. Talking about any subject from sunup to sundown could wear a person out, particularly when it swirled around the speculative nature of an apocalyptic-s
ounding noise no one could explain. But, oh how cavalier she was now, laughing in the face of impending doom! What brazenness! What fearlessness!
“Oh my God,” Rachel said, dabbing her eyes with a cocktail napkin. “That’s funny. And people really believe that stuff?”
Stephanie shrugged. “You should talk to my grandmother. The woman lives by the code of the Bible. If it’s written in there, it either already happened or it will.”
“I think it’s fascinating,” Clarissa began, “though I wonder what Jews, Hindus, and Muslims think about it.”
“I don’t know,” said Stephanie. “I’ll let you take that one up with Nans. All I know is that with the noise this morning and that lady at the daycare center, this town’ll have plenty to chatter about.”
Clarissa stopped in mid-reach for her beer. “What lady at the daycare?”
“Yeah,” Valentina chimed in, her brows knitting. “Who’re you talking about?”
Stephanie’s eyes swept the table. “You guys haven’t heard?” Shoulders lifted, and heads shook. “Apparently, a woman over at the daycare on Stapley never showed up for work today. Moon And Back Nursery, I think it’s called. A guy I work with said it was a woman named Linda Fortner.” More blank stares. “Well anyway, she never showed up this morning, and her husband’s been beside himself trying to figure out what happened to her. Cops are involved and everything.”
Rachel stared wide-eyed. “Do they suspect foul play?”
“Don’t know,” Stephanie said. “Far as I know, she’s just gone.”
Clarissa opened her mouth to ask a follow-up question, but the chair that got pushed up to the table followed by the man who sat in it sucked the life out of it. Her cheerful mood dissipated—as did any desire to remain in the bar.
“She probably left her husband for another guy,” the man said, leaning back and pretending to be oblivious to the four women glowering at him.
Clarissa couldn’t believe her eyes.
Travis Austin.
It had been so long since she last saw him, she assumed he had moved away. Apparently, that wish hadn’t been granted.