by Noir, Roxie
“It’s good,” I saidy, shrugging. “But it’s not on the menu.”
“So change the menu.”
“Menu’s not up to me,” I say. “It’s up to the bride and groom who, I’m sure I told you this before, decided on it months ago and aren’t even here to approve changes.”
“When do they get in?”
“The menu’s done.”
“When?”
Eli is quiet, intense, and he’s still standing tall and rock-solid in the middle of my office, not giving an inch. Not that I’d expect him to. As far as I know, the man’s never backed down from an argument in his life.
“They’re not interested in last-minute menu changes,” I finally say.
“Are you this sure about what everyone wants?”
Hell no.
“You’re acting like I haven’t been doing this for years already,” I say, finally in danger of losing my cool. “People don’t want to worry about picking appetizers the day before their wedding. Just make the mac and cheese balls. You’re not going to ruin your reputation or whatever it is you keep going on about. Sometimes people like bad things, just let them be happy.”
“That doesn’t mean I have to make bad things for them,” he says, uncrossing his arms.
“For fuck’s sake, it’s one appetizer.”
“Just tell me when they get in.”
I take a deep breath, my spine ramrod-straight, and remind myself that it’s a reasonable question from a coworker.
“Friday morning. They’re driving down from D.C.,” I say.
“Was that so hard?”
I resist the urge to throw a pen at his head, even though he’s being a dick.
“Don’t fuck this up,” I tell him instead.
One eyebrow twitches.
“By trading out appetizers?” he says.
“By doing something flashy and dumb to prove to everyone that you’re some amazing chef even though you’re running the catering kitchen at a wedding venue,” I tell him. “If you fuck something up and it comes back on me, Eli, I swear I’ll —”
Eli snags the plate off my desk, one fried ball still on it.
“ — hey!”
Still smirking, he pops it into his mouth whole.
“No promises,” he says, turns, and leaves my office. I jump to my feet, leaning forward on my desk.
“ — Shove those things so far up your butt that you’ll — “
Another head pops into my doorway. I stop short.
“Everything okay?” Kevin asks, looking half-puzzled and half-frightened.
I swallow hard. I smile. I compose myself.
“Everything’s fine!” I say.
Chapter Nine
Eli
The three of us all look down at the tiny glasses in front of us, concentrating for a moment. There are fifteen in total, five in front of each, and I’m not sure any of us was listening too well.
“Run through that one more time?” Silas says, eyebrows furrowed in concentration.
Standing across the table Daniel exhales, his hands on his hips in his classic slightly-annoyed-but-trying-to-look-perfectly-calm pose.
“It’s in the same order as any tasting menu,” he says, like that makes it obvious. “From left to right, you start with the Chardonnay, then you move to the —”
“Do you have anything we can write with?” asks Levi.
“It’s not that hard,” Daniel says.
“Chardonnay’s the bubbly wine you drink at celebrations, right?” Levi asks.
Silas, Levi’s best friend, is trying not to laugh. Daniel rolls his eyes, but he ducks into a back room and comes back with a few stubby pencils and some scrap paper. We each take one.
It’s Saturday night, and we’re at Loveless Brewing, standing around a high table off to the side of the main room because Daniel asked us last-minute if we could come sample some beers he’s been working on.
The real reason, of course, is that Rusty’s at her first-ever sleepover tonight and Daniel needs something to distract him.
“Okay, in order, from left to right,” Daniel starts again, slowly this time. “Chardonnay. Pinot Grigio. Merlot. Oak. Bourbon. Eli, you’re not gonna write this down?”
“I know how tasting menus go,” I say.
“How do you spell oak, again?” Silas asks.
Now Levi’s the one trying not to laugh.
“Never mind, figured it out,” Silas says, flashing Daniel a shit-eating grin.
“Let me know if you’d ever actually like to sample the beer,” Daniel says, forced calm radiating from every pore on his body. “Maybe sooner or later we can actually get around to —”
“Dan, she’s fine,” I finally interject. “Right now they’re probably eating ice cream, jumping on a couch and watching Frozen.”
“I’m not worried,” he protests, crossing his arms over his chest.
“Is that why you’re being an uptight prick about an informal beer tasting?” I ask, leaning both my elbows on the bar.
Daniel sighs. He shoves one hand through his floppy light-brown hair.
“Okay, I’m sorry,” he says. “I just thought that tonight would be a good time to get some opinions on this project.”
“Any time you want us to come drink your fancy beer for free, just let us know,” Silas says. “I’m happy to be a guinea pig.”
“Thank you for your service,” Daniel says dryly.
I hold up the first glass, the dark liquid inside it glowing faintly red in the light. It’s a stout beer that’s been aged for a couple of months in Chardonnay barrels, part of a new experiment that Daniel’s trying at the brewery.
“Here’s to Rusty’s first sleepover,” I say.
Everyone holds up their own tiny tasting glass. We clink them together. We each take careful, thoughtful sips.
I hold the beer in my mouth for a moment, thinking, before I swallow it.
“Not that one,” I tell Daniel.
“No,” agrees Silas. “That one’s weird.”
“I like it,” Levi says, contemplatively taking another sip. “It’s unexpected.”
“The fruity, sharp overtones from the chardonnay barrel clash with the roasted baseline of the stout, and instead of each enhancing the other, they just get in each other’s way,” I tell him. “The two flavors don’t really pair well.”
I take another sip, though. It’s free beer.
“Yeah, it’s weird,” Silas says. “What Eli said.”
“I think it’s a good weird,” Levi says.
“You can’t listen to him, though,” Silas tells Daniel as he drains the tiny sample-size glass. “He likes orange-vanilla Coke, too.”
“It’s refreshing,” Levi protests.
“It tastes like a melted popsicle that someone found beneath a Slurpee machine,” I say.
“And why do you know what that tastes like?” Daniel asks.
“It’s an educated guess,” I say.
“How educated?” Levi asks.
I drain my own beer glass and ignore him, but I’m glad I came tonight and not just for the free beer.
I’d forgotten how much I missed my brothers by being away. Sure, I’d visited while I was gone, and we kept up well enough, but it wasn’t the same. A phone call has nothing on Sunday dinner, or drinking lemonade on the back porch, or just shooting the shit while you’re ignoring the nightly news on television.
When I got back, I slotted right back into their lives like I’d never been gone.
“Okay, next up is the Pinot Grigio,” Daniel says, cutting off Levi and keeping us on track.
“Which one is that?” Levi asks.
Daniel just points and sighs.
* * *
When we’re done tasting, Daniel rewards each of us with a free beer that’s not experimental and we stay at the table while Daniel keeps an eye on things.
“So far, so good,” I say, in response to Silas’s question about my new job. “Well, except Violet Tulane works ther
e.”
“Who?” Levi asks.
“Oh, Jesus,” Daniel mutters.
“You know Violet,” Silas says to Levi. “She organized that charity auction for the firehouse a few years ago, the one where Kim Fortner and Mavis Bresley got into a bidding war over your mom’s blackberry pie?”
“Oh, Violet,” Levi says. “What’s wrong with Violet?”
“Nothing,” says Daniel.
I take a good sip of my beer.
“We don’t get along,” I say, as diplomatically as possible.
“You don’t remember?” Daniel asks him. “Every time Eli had a test in school, we’d have to hear for a week about how he wanted to get a better grade than her, and then God forbid she got a ninety-seven and he got a ninety-six, we’d hear for another week about how awful she was for that one point.”
“That’s because she was always awful about it,” I say, starting to feel defensive. “You’d think that the difference between an A and an A-plus was equivalent to rescuing a bus full of orphans —”
“Oh no,” Daniel says, holding up one hand. “Not today you don’t.”
“She’s always seemed perfectly nice to me,” Levi muses. “Smart, too. We had a very stimulating conversation about moss one time.”
I frown into my beer and take another sip. Something about Levi calling Violet stimulating really rubs me the wrong way.
“Well, yeah, she’s smart,” I say, because I think that much is obvious. “I’m not denying that. She’s just also the worst.”
“Because you were perfectly nice to her at all times,” Daniel says sarcastically. “You, Eli, were certainly never a dick.”
“I was a dick in self-defense,” I say.
Daniel just snorts. He’s only a year younger than me, so he got the full brunt of my high school angst. Levi, on the other hand, is two years older and apparently wasn’t paying us much attention.
“Is she the girl who got into the National Junior Honor Society when you didn’t?” Levi asks.
I swear I have a full-blown flashback to eighth grade when every day for at least two weeks, Violet waved around her National Junior Honor Society invitation letter and asked if mine had come yet. It hadn’t, because it never did, because I didn’t score quite highly enough on a test.
“Yes,” I say tersely. I drink some more beer.
“I do remember that,” Levi says, still sounding contemplative. “How odd. She’s always been very nice to me.”
“And me,” Silas volunteers.
“That’s because Violet’s nice,” Daniel says.
“You’re all wrong,” I mutter into my beer.
We’re all quiet for a minute, the low buzz of the brewery filling the silence. It’s not crowded, but the main room is about three-quarters full of people sitting at long communal tables, drinking beer, some playing board games. Along one wall, there’s shuffleboard and pool tables. Outside there’s cornhole and croquet.
Basically, it’s a chill place to spend a Saturday and have a beer, and plenty of people from Sprucevale and the surrounding areas take advantage.
“Question,” Silas says, after a bit. “Is that Violet playing darts over there? My contacts are kinda dry.”
My heart stomps at my chest. I hold my beer glass a little tighter, scanning the opposite wall as I half hope that it’s her and half hope that it’s not her.
It’s her. She’s laughing, her hair in a high, messy bun. She’s with a redhead who I’m fairly certain is Adeline Mathers, another girl from our high school class.
Violet’s got a beer in one hand as she grabs darts out of the dart board with the other, saying something over her shoulder to Adeline.
Then she bends down to grab a dart off the floor. It takes a split second but I swear my mouth goes dry, and then she’s upright again, strolling back to where Adeline’s standing.
Everything about her is entirely familiar and entirely alien, all at once. She’s still Violet. She still looks like Violet and sounds like Violet and God knows she still acts like Violet, but in some indefinable way, she’s different.
I never wanted her before, even a little, but now the same movements as ever have me wondering what it would be like to take her by the hip and push her against the wall. She looks at me the same way as always but now there’s a challenge in it, like she’s daring me not to wonder what her skin tastes like.
“…entered some sort of angst-fueled fugue state — oh, he’s back,” Daniel is saying.
I shoot him a glare. He gives me a perfectly neutral look. I don’t like it.
“Yeah, that’s her,” I say, and shrug. My knuckles are still pale around my glass.
“That’s already been established,” Levi says. “The conversation has moved on, Eli.”
“To what?”
“I was asking after Silas’s sister, June,” he says. “Apparently she’s doing well for herself, down in Raleigh.”
“I can’t stand her boyfriend, though,” Silas says.
Levi makes a sympathetic noise. Across the room, Violet takes a sip of her beer, leaning against the bar-height table, one leg cocked under her. Adeline says something and Violet laughs, spreads her fingers, then says something back.
She cocks the other leg, shifting her hips. It’s perfectly casual, just a girl standing around, talking to her friend, but I have to tear my gaze away before I get any further down this rabbit hole.
“ — Can’t just tell her that, though, you know how June is. Besides, she’ll just think I hate him because I’m her big brother —”
“I gotta take a leak,” I say, standing and putting my nearly-finished beer on the table.
“Do you?” Daniel asks.
As I walk away, I turn and give the table a winning grin.
“Of course,” I say, and leave.
Chapter Ten
Violet
The dart bounces off the board and falls to the ground.
“ — Last time I ever take Cash’s suggestions, I swear,” Adeline says.
I’m silent for a moment, focusing as I throw the last dart.
It sticks in the sixteen wedge of the dartboard. Good enough.
“I should have known when I saw the truck nuts,” I say. “I’m pretty sure their existence makes it my own fault. Like, if I somehow took this to court, the judge would throw it out on the basis that I should have known he was terrible because his vehicle had testicles.”
I walk to the dartboard, yank my darts out and pick the final one up from the ground.
“No,” Adeline says. “How are you supposed to find someone to date who doesn’t have truck nuts around here? You make a ‘no truck nuts’ rule and there goes at least fifty percent of the eligible population. Maybe sixty.”
I sigh and lean on the table.
“Adeline,” I say. “I think I’m ready.”
She’s got a dart between her fingers, about to throw, when she looks over at me.
“For truck nuts?”
“For spinsterdom.”
“Oh, good Lord,” she says, and throws a dart. It lands on the twenty.
“It doesn’t seem so bad any more,” I say. “Yes, sure, a life companion sounds nice, but at what expense, Adeline? At what expense?”
She throws another dart. Seventeen. She’s absolutely smoking me at this game.
“Statistically speaking, there have to be at least a few guys with truck nuts who are also perfectly decent people,” she says, readying the third dart. “Maybe some of them just think truck nuts are funny.”
She pauses, considers the dart board, then looks over at me.
“I mean, they’re kind of funny,” she says, and throws her final dart.
It’s a bullseye. I have no chance of winning.
“No, they’re not,” I call after her as she retrieves the darts.
“Yes, they are,” she shouts, grabbing the darts, then returning and putting them in my outstretched hand. “Violet, that’s, like, rule number one. Testicles are always funny.
Unless they’re abscessed or something, that’s not really funny.”
I give her a horrified stare, and she wrinkles her nose.
“Everything okay at work?” I ask. Adeline’s works the night shift at the county hospital, so abscessed testes are, unfortunately, a possibility in her workplace.
“Oh, that was a couple of years ago,” she says, waving one hand. “It just stuck with me. Anyway.”
I walk to the line for the dartboard, weighing the darts in one hand as I try to visualize the perfect throw and also not think about abscessed testicles.
“Anyway,” I echo, “Todd was a jerk who both had truck nuts and had opinions on wine vintages, which should be illegal, and then he left without paying and screwed me over. And I had to get a ride home from Eli Loveless, and now I’m just going to embrace hairy legs and microwave dinners for one,” I say, and unleash a dart.
It sticks in the cork right outside the dartboard.
“At least Eli was there,” she says, as if that helps.
“I didn’t even know he was back,” I say, throwing another dart.
“I’d have told you but I didn’t know you cared,” Adeline says.
“I don’t care,” I say, and throw the last dart, which hits the number seventeen. Finally. “I just like to know when evil is lurking.”
Adeline and I went to high school together, but we were barely acquaintances at the time: I was in the National Honor Society and co-captained the debate team; she was on the cheerleading squad and got invited to parties. A couple years ago we reunited at the DMV — the number-giving system was down, and we took it upon ourselves to prevent total chaos in the line — and have been friends ever since.
“He used to help me with my trigonometry homework,” she says. “I’m pretty sure I only passed because of him.”
“Did you have to pay him in blood?”
“No, but I invited him to one of Tony’s field parties once,” she says. “I don’t remember whether he came.”
Field parties are, as the name suggests, parties that take place way out in a field. There’s usually a bonfire, lots of pickup trucks, and beer.