Hiding a girl here—especially a girl like Josie—would be about as easy as pissing up a rope.
Yet once Carl had looked at it all, he turned his gaze on me and said, “I’ll make it work.”
“You can’t do—”
“It’s what I want,” he said with some strength in his voice.
I opened my mouth to argue more, but Chef Anderson had come to fetch our plates. He slid them onto his tattooed forearm and stood there, waiting for me to harass him, because that’s how I usually spent the first thirty minutes after breakfast. Today, I kept my mouth shut and my head down.
He nudged my chair and said, “What’s up, chief?” in a deliberate way, like a challenge.
I didn’t answer.
Anderson set the plates down and squatted, so that his head was table-high and impossible to ignore. He’d recently had a haircut and shave, effectively carving out his square jaw and his round head. The only thing that offset his symmetry were his thick eyebrows, which never synced up—even now, as they pinched together in concern. “Is it the food? Because you know I wish Sharon would let me stock my own kitchen like I used to, but . . .”
I glanced at him. His chef’s shirt, rolled carelessly at the elbows, bore our last three years together in stains. Seemed wise to act like this was any other day, and the only thing that ever changed about our postbreakfast natter was what I bothered him about. If he got a new tattoo, I’d find something wrong with it. If he flexed, I’d wave my bingo wings in the air and tell him not to get too attached. If he talked about getting laid, I’d talk about the clap. He always came back for more too, like a stray cat to scraps, and I fed him because I liked the kid.
I said, “Anderson, who was the seventeenth president of the United States? We’re trying to remember.” Trivia was a staple in my ball-busting toolbox, because it allowed me to passively shame him into going back to college. In my humble opinion, he was a hard worker who was working hard on the wrong thing.
He studied me. “Weren’t you there for the inauguration?”
“Andrew Johnson,” Carl blurted, taking my lead.
I said, “Right, well, good. That’s settled. We can get on with our day now. Carl, should we head to exercise?”
I moved to stand, using the tabletop as a guide. Carl did too, while Anderson hopped up to place his walker in the best position. But before he’d angled it just right, he froze and stared past us at the front door, and then his big-eyed ogle tracked toward the welcome desk, prompting me to look with him.
“Anderson, move it a little closer,” Carl said. “I can’t reach—”
The way Carl’s voice hiccupped to a stop, I could only guess we were all seeing the same thing now: our dear Josie, backside to us. She was bent over the counter to reach the desk bell, all legs past the fray of her cutoff jeans.
She waited a moment, and once it became clear no one would come, she turned toward us. She no longer had on her apron, and the daylight flooding through the window lit her up in such a way that you couldn’t tell she had a black eye. Sun-drenched like this, she was an unquestionable beauty. A beauty who wore a pair of Carl’s shoes.
“Jesus Christ,” I said.
Carl dropped back into his chair.
Anderson instinctually, and without taking his eyes off Josie, grabbed Carl’s arm to soften the fall. “Look at you two. Especially after all that talk about your glory days.”
We stared at him, silent.
“Don’t get me wrong, guys. She’s hot. But you need to play it cool if you want to get some. Watch and learn.”
He ducked out of his apron and left it in a ball on our table, then walked to Josie with a stride reserved for men with motorcycles who refused to wear helmets. The kind of men who meant all sorts of trouble, and the kind we all, at some point, were.
“Oh God,” Carl said, as if just now realizing he hadn’t thought this through. “What now?”
“Smile,” I advised, doing the same myself. “You have a visitor.”
3
I’d no sooner blinked and there Josie stood, leaning over our table with her hand extended, introducing herself to me as Carl’s “grandbaby.” I shook it because I didn’t know what else to do. Her cropped T-shirt had fallen off one shoulder and given me an eyeful of more cleavage than I’d seen in decades, and it was distracting enough that Anderson took a long look at it instead of her black eye. Carl just stared at the ceiling.
“Nice to meet you,” I managed.
Anderson joined us, swinging a chair around and straddling it backward. “Carl, you don’t look old enough to be a grandpa.”
“I’m eighty-six,” he said, thrilled and chagrined at the number all at once.
I snuck one last bite of breakfast from Carl’s plate while they were talking, since it was still around and it’d be easier keeping my mouth shut if it was full.
Josie took the seat next to me. “I call him Peepaw.”
“Peepaw?” I sputtered before it could be helped. What a hustler she was, granddaughter or not. I opened my mouth to say so, but somehow a chunk of reconstituted egg lodged itself in my throat. All of a sudden, it felt like I was sucking air through a plastic Stop-N-Shop sack. After a few failed attempts to draw a breath, I looked to Anderson, who gave me an unaware smile until I made this noise—this horrible noise—that sounded like a scream in reverse.
Immediately, Anderson jumped to, pushed his chair out of the way, and raised my arms high above my head. It hardly helped, and I started thinking—very briefly, as Nora hightailed it across the room and my eyes watered past the point of seeing—that this was how it would end for me. Not with heroics. Not with dignity. No. I would leave this world as an old coot who couldn’t clear his own goddamn throat during breakfast. Maybe it didn’t sound as bad as passing away in a piss puddle like my uncle, but that was a sliding scale I preferred not be on.
As my vision gave way, someone, from somewhere, gave my back one meaningful crack on just the right spot. And that was it. I coughed proper, and the offending chunk of egg, no bigger than a damn corn kernel, popped onto the tablecloth.
Crisis averted.
Though in the seconds that followed, while staring down the tiny morsel that almost took me out, I experienced an entirely different crisis. The existential kind. What good did it do me to die here, among my best pals like I dreamed of, if I went out with all the fanfare of an emptying balloon—which started its exit with a shrill wheeze and had a grand finale that sounded like a flatulence?
I frowned and looked up, only to find Josie standing over me, her hand poised for another karate chop. Valencia, our resident buttinsky, sat a few tables over with her fake-chinchilla-fur stole clutched near her ears. Nora leaned on Anderson, catching her breath.