At my cousin’s engagement party, the bartender slid me a drink and asked, are you the…

At my cousin’s engagement party, the bartender slid me a drink and asked, are you the…

At my cousin’s engagement party, the bartender slid me a drink and asked, Are you the one he paid me to keep drunk all night? I looked down at the glass. Pink, ice, a lime wedge on the rim. I had ordered a cranberry soda. The bar was set up at the corner of a big cedar deck overlooking the bay. A folding table with a white cloth over it and bottles lined up in rows.

And the bartender was a woman about my age with a buzz cut and a nose ring and forearms like a line cook. She was wiping her hands on a towel. She wasn’t smiling. She was watching my face. Who paid you? I said. She tipped her head toward the other end of the deck. in the navy blazer she said gave me 200 bucks when i was setting up said you’d ask for soda all night and i should make them strong because you’d never taste the vodka through the cranberry i turned around the guy in the navy blazer was standing by the railing with a beer in his hand laughing at something with his arm around a pretty brunette in a white sundress he had a sunburn on the back of his neck and a

haircut that cost more than my truck payment it was my cousin blake it was his party i didn’t know standing there with that glass in my hand that in the next hour i’d find out blake had been setting this up all summer i didn’t know what he was or why it had to be tonight. I just knew somebody I’d grown up with had paid $200 to get me drunk.

I have been sober four years and two months. Everybody in my family knows it. I have a coin in my wallet, a bronze one with a triangle on it, and I’ve carried it every day for four years. I have not had one sip since the night I drove my car into a ditch on M72. It was June of 2021.

I’d been at a bonfire on the beach at a friend’s cottage, and I’d been drinking since noon, which was a pretty normal Saturday for me at the time. At about one in the morning, I decided I was fine to drive home. I wasn’t. About four miles east of town, the road curved and I didn’t, and my Jeep went down into the ditch and rolled onto its side in somebody’s cherry orchard.

I don’t remember the crash. I remember waking up in the ER at the hospital in Traverse City with a cut across my forehead that took 11 stitches and a deputy standing at the foot of my bed with his hat under his arm. He wasn’t mean. He was very calm. He read me my rights while a nurse was picking glass out of my hairline.

He was about 50, with a gray mustache and very tired eyes, and he said, You’re lucky, ma’am. You didn’t hit anybody. The last one I pulled out of that ditch, she hit a family. I have never forgotten his face. I see it sometimes when I’m driving that curve. In August of 2021, I stood in front of a judge in the district court on Boardman Avenue and pleaded guilty to operating while intoxicated.

First offense. My lawyer had told me what would happen, and it happened exactly the way he said. Probation, fines and costs, community service. My license suspended for six months, then restricted. An alcohol education class on Tuesday nights at the community college. The judge was an older woman with short gray hair and a tired voice.

Before she sentenced me, she asked if I had anything to say. I said, I was sorry. I said I knew I could have killed somebody. I said I’d been sober 48 days and I was going to keep going. She looked at me over her glasses for a long moment. 48 days is a good start, she said. I see a lot of 48 days in here, Ms.

Hollander. Come back and tell me when it’s four years. My grandmother was sitting in the second row in her church dress with her purse in her lap. She’d driven me there. She drove me home. She didn’t say anything the whole way, and when we pulled into the marina lot, she turned off the engine and sat there looking at the water.

Four years, she said. You heard her? My hands went cold around the glass. The bartender’s name tag said jazz she watched me for a second then she leaned across the table a little my brother’s been sober nine years she said quiet i’m not doing it i told the guy sure and i took the money because i’m not stupid but i’m not doing it i just figured you should know who you’re related to here’s what i knew about blake he’s my cousin he’s 33 two years older than me our dads were brothers we grew up on the same docks at the same marina running up and down the same boardwalks in the same life jackets the marina is hollander’s marina on the west arm of grand traverse bay

my great-grandfather built it in with two docks and a bait shop. Now it’s got 140 slips, a service building, a sales office, a fuel dock, and a little store that sells sunscreen and beef jerky and bags of ice. In the summer, there are more boats in that harbor than cars in the parking lot. My grandma owns it. Dot Hollander.

She’s 79. She runs it out of a tiny office at the top of the dock stairs with a window that looks out over the whole harbor, and she still walks every dock every morning at 6 a.m. with her coffee, checking lines. My grandpa died in 2019. Heart attack in October. on the fuel dock while he was fueling up a sailboat for a couple from Chicago.

He was 80. The couple from Chicago did CPR on him until the ambulance came. They still send grandma a Christmas card every year. The morning after the funeral, I found grandma on B dock at 6 a.m. walking the lines with her coffee. Like always, I walked with her. We didn’t say anything until we got to the end of the dock where you can see all the way out past Power Island.

This place is the only thing I’ve got left that he touched every single day, she said. 52 years, every board on these docks he stood on. She looked down at the water. I’m not going to hand it to- somebody who’d sell it to a condo developer the minute i’m dead she said and there are a lot of those developers shelby they call me every month since then grandma’s been saying she’d pick one of us to run the place she’d been saying it for years this spring she finally said when labor day she told us both at sunday dinner in april i’ll tell you both on labor day and then i’m going to go sit on my porch and

let one of you worry about it i remember that dinner it was at her house on the bay the white farmhouse up the hill from the marina with the pot roast and the carrots and the green jello salad with pineapple in it that nobody under 60 Blake was there with Mara. I was there alone. Grandma waited until the pie. She said it plainly, the way she says everything.

She said she was 79 and her knees were done. She said she’d watched both of us for years. She said she’d decided she’d pick one of us, not split it, because splitting a business between cousins is how you end up selling it to a condo developer. She said she’d tell us on Labor Day.

Then she said, and I want both of you to know, I’m going to be watching this summer, not just the numbers, how you treat people, how you handle things when they go wrong. Blake laughed and put his arm around my shoulders. May the best Hollander win, he said. Under the table, I felt his other hand. It was drumming on his knee, fast, the way it used to when we were kids and he was about to get caught for something.

I didn’t think anything of it. I thought he was excited. It was going to be me or Blake. Me, because I’ve run the service dock for six years. I rebuild engines. I winterize 100 boats every October and put them back in the water every May. I know every customer by name and every boat by the sound of its motor, or Blake, who runs the sales office. He sells new boats.

He’s good at it. He’s got a big smile and a firm handshake, and he can sell a $40,000 pontoon to a rich… retired dentist in 20 minutes flat. He has a business degree from Michigan State. He wears boat shoes without socks. Labor Day was nine days away. After the ditch, a lot of people would have fired me.

The marina has its name on the side of every truck. A granddaughter with an OY isn’t great for business. My grandma didn’t fire me. She drove to the hospital the morning after, and she sat by my bed, and she didn’t say a word to me for about an hour. She just held my hand and looked out the window. Then, when they discharged me, she drove me straight from the hospital to an AA meeting in the basement of a church on Front Street in her old Buick with my stitches.

still bleeding a little through the bandage she parked she turned off the engine you go in there she said i’ll wait i went in she waited two hours in the parking lot with the windows down when i came out she said same time tomorrow and i said yes there was a woman at that meeting named lolly she was 62 a retired cherry farmer’s wife with arms like popeye and she’s been my sponsor ever since i’ve called her from parking lots and bathrooms and the end of the fuel dock at two in the morning she has never once not picked up blake never said anything about the ditch to my face not directly

he’s too smart for that blake is charming Everybody likes Blake. He remembers your kids’ names. He sends Christmas cards. He’s the one who takes Grandma to the Cherry Festival every July and buys her a pie. But whenever there was a drink around, he’d look at mine, he’d look at my water, or my Coke, or my club soda with lime, and he’d smile.

Still on the kiddie drinks shell, he’d say, brave, brave, like I was bungee jumping. Like it was a funny thing about me, the way some people are afraid of spiders. Everybody would laugh a little. It was just Blake being Blake. On my three-year anniversary last June, Grandma took me out to dinner at a steakhouse downtown to celebrate.

Blake came along, he said he wouldn’t miss it. At the end of the meal, when the waiter brought out a little slice of cake with a candle in it, Blake reached under his chair and pulled out a gift bag with tissue paper sticking out the top. He handed it to me with a big smile. Inside was a bottle. It was one of those fancy non-alcoholic sparkling wines in a real champagne bottle with gold foil on the top.

And on the front of it, over the label, he’d stuck a little printed sticker. It said, almost the real thing. He laughed. He said, congrats, Shell. Three years. Now you can pop the bubbly like the rest of us. Sort of. Grandma didn’t laugh. She looked at- the sticker for a long time i said thank you i put it back in the bag i left it in the back of my truck and a few weeks later i dropped it off at the church on front street for their fundraiser raffle sticker and all because i couldn’t think of what else to do with it that was blake he never said one mean thing you could point to he said a hundred little things that each one by itself was a joke that summer things

started going wrong at the service dock in june a customer named mr abrams called the office screaming he’s a retired surgeon from grand rapids with a beautiful old wooden criss craft he’s owned for 30 years and i’d done a full tune up on its engine in May. He said he’d been charged twice. Once when he picked up the boat, and again two weeks later.

Two charges for the same service. $1,800 each. He’d called grandma directly. When I got up to her office, she had the invoice pulled up on her computer. It had my initials on it. Both charges. I pulled out my paperwork order. We still do paper at the service dock. Carbon copies in a big binder. I’d written it up once, and he’d paid once in cash at my counter.

I had the receipt stapled to it. I only charged him once, grandma, I said. I swear. Look. She looked at the paper. She looked at the com- she took off her reading glasses and rubbed her eyes i’ll look into it she said her face was tired it was the face of somebody who was tired of looking into things in july somebody told grandma there was a wine bottle in my truck i don’t know who she wouldn’t say she came down to the service dock on a tuesday afternoon and asked me very quietly to walk out to the parking lot with her i didn’t know what it

was about in the bed of my work truck lying on its side next to a spare tire and a coil of dock line was an empty bottle of red wine the cork was pushed back into it halfway i’d never seen it before in my life the truck sits in the marina lot all day with the bed wide open. Anybody could have put anything in it.

That’s not mine, I said. Grandma didn’t say anything. She just looked at it. That’s not mine, I said again, and my voice was shaking. I’ll take a test. Right now. Today. I drove myself to an urgent care clinic in town that afternoon. I asked for the test that shows alcohol for three days back. It cost me $110. I handed grandma the results two days later in her office.

Negative. Nothing. She read it. She said, okay, Shelby, and she put it in her desk drawer. That night, I went to the Tuesday meeting at the church on Front Street. Same basement, same folding chair. Same coffee in the big silver urn that tastes like it was brewed during the Carter administration. She’d walk right past the bay door.

on her morning rounds. For the rest of July and most of August, I ate my lunch by myself at the end of the fuel dock with my feet hanging over the water on an upside down bucket. I’d hear things. Two of the dock boys whispering by the ice machine. A customer asking the girl in the store if it was true about the service manager.

Mrs. Kellerman from Slip 40, who’d known me since I was in diapers, walking past me on the dock with her eyes on the boards. I kept my head down. I rebuilt engines. I winterized the early birds. I told myself the truth would come out on its own, the way Lolly always says it does. She says, the truth is like a bobber. You can hold it under, but not forever.

I didn’t believe her. I just didn’t have anything else to do. One evening at the end of July, Blake came down to the service dock after closing. He had two cans in his hand, a beer for him and a root beer for me. He sat down on the bench outside the bay door and handed me the root beer and cracked his beer.

Shell, he said. Can I be honest with you? I said, sure. You know she’s going to give it to me, right? He said, Labor Day. He said it gently, like he was breaking bad news to a kid. Nobody’s going to hand the keys to the whole place to somebody with a record, the insurance alone, the bank. It’s just the reality.

I didn’t say anything. I drank my root beer. Here’s what I’m thinking, he said. You step back, gracefully. Tell grandma you’re happy on the dock, that you don’t want the headache. And when it’s mine, I’ll keep you on. Service manager, raise even. You won’t have to worry about anything. It’ll be better for everybody. He clinked his can against mine.

Think about it, he said. And he walked back up the dock, whistling. I sat there by myself with the root beer until it got dark. I remember thinking, why is he so worried? If it’s already his, why is he down here asking me to step aside? I don’t want you to think it was all bad that summer. I was good at my job.

I was the best I’d ever been. In the middle of August, a family from Ohio came in at dawn with their boat on a trailer and a dead engine. A mom and a dad and two little girls in matching sun hats. They’d been planning this week at the lake for a year. Their outboard had eaten its lower unit on the drive up, somewhere around Cadillac.

Water in the gear oil. The lower unit is the part that sits under the water and turns the propeller. And theirs was toast. They had a cabin booked on Torch Lake starting that afternoon. Every other shop in town said two weeks. Parts on order. I had a used lower unit off a wrecked boat sitting on a shelf in the back of the service building.

It was the right model. I’d been saving it. I spent four hours on my back on the concrete floor rebuilding it, new seals, new gear oil, new water pump impeller, while the two little girls ate powdered donuts on the bench outside the bay door and watched me through the window. At 11.

30, I dropped their boat back in the water at the launch and turned the key, and it started on the first try. It purred. The dad shook my hand so hard it hurt. The littlest girl gave me the last powdered donut, which was a big deal because she’d been guarding it all morning. That’s the kind of thing I did every day. That’s what I thought would matter. not proud of this part there was a night in july right after the wine bottle when i got in my truck after work and didn’t go home i drove to a bar out on the highway a little place with neon beer signs in the windows and a gravel lot i parked i turned the engine off and i sat there for 40 minutes with my hands on the wheel watching people go in and come out hearing the jukebox every time the door opened i

kept thinking what’s the point if they’re all going to look at me like i’ve already done it what’s the point of not doing it at 40 minutes i took out my phone and called lolly she picked up on the first ring she didn’t ask where i was she said tell me what I told her. The neon signs. The gravel. A guy in a Carhartt jacket smoking by the door.

Okay, she said. Now start the truck. I started the truck. Now drive to my house, she said. I’ve got a cherry pie and nobody to eat it. I drove to her house. We ate the whole pie. I never told anybody else about that parking lot. Not grandma. Not anybody. It’s the closest I’ve come in four years. Blake got engaged in the spring to a girl named Mara.

She’s 30. A physical therapist at the hospital. Sweet and a little shy. From a nice family on Old Mission Peninsula. I liked her. I couldn’t figure out what she said. saw in blake but i liked her at their engagement dinner in april at a restaurant downtown everybody at the table ordered wine i ordered a sparkling water blake said still on the kitty drinks shell and people laughed and then an older man at the end of the table a big bald man with a white beard held up his own glass it was sparkling water too with a lime 20 years he said he

smiled at me clinked his glass against mine you four i said good for you he said it gets easier not a lot but some that was mara’s dad doug i didn’t know then how much that one clink was going to matter after dinner we ended up standing next to each other in the parking lot waiting for our cars and he told me his whole story in about four minutes the way people in the program do vodka and coffee mugs a good job at a bank in grand rapids gone mara’s mom leaving with mara when she was eight and coming back when he’d been sober a year the morning he woke up in a hotel parking garage and couldn’t remember which

state he was in 20 years in may he said you know what the hardest part is it’s not the drink it’s the people who don’t believe you you can go 20 years and the minute you look tired at a party somebody’s counting your glasses i laugh because it was true and because nobody had ever said it out loud to me before.

Anybody counts yours, he said. You come find me. The morning of the party, I was at the service dock at 6 a.m. Like always, changing the impeller on a pontoon when I heard footsteps on the boards outside the bay door. It was grandma on her morning rounds with her coffee. For the first time in five weeks, she didn’t walk past.

She stopped in the bay door and looked in at me. I sat up on my creeper. I had grease up to my elbows. She didn’t say anything. She looked at the pontoon. She looked at the new impeller in its box. She looked at me for a long moment with her mouth in that. thin line then she walked over to the bench by the bay door and set down a thermos her old green stanley thermos the one that’s been dented since before i was born she set it on the bench and she turned around and she walked back out onto the dock and kept going on her rounds i got up and opened it it was coffee black with one sugar the way i take it the way she’s made it for me since

i was 14 years old and started drinking coffee on the docks to feel grown up i didn’t know what it meant i stood there holding the thermos in the bay door and watched her walk down b dock checking lines and i couldn’t tell if it meant i’m sorry or it meant I’m still watching, or it meant nothing at all.

I drank the whole thing. The engagement party was on Saturday, August 23rd, nine days before Labor Day. It was at Mara’s parents’ house on Old Mission. It’s one of those big old farmhouses on the peninsula with cherry orchards on both sides and a lawn that runs all the way down to the water, with a cedar deck built out over the slope so you can see the whole bay.

There were 40 people. Easy. String lights. A catering truck. A bartender at a folding table in the corner. When I walked up the steps onto the deck, Blake was right there by the top step, like he’d been waiting for me. He looked at the cranberry soda i’d just gotten from jazz he grinned still on the kitty drinks shell he said brave and then i turned around to go talk to grandma and i didn’t get very far because jazz said my name and handed me the next glass and asked me her question are you the one he paid me to keep drunk all night now i stood at that folding table with the glass in my hand and the lake behind

me going gold in the sunset and i thought about the chris kraft invoice and the wine bottle in the bed of my truck and labor day nine days away i could have walked away i could have gone straight to grandma and told her and it would have been my word against blake’s the drunk against the salesman i knew how that would go i’d already watched grandma put my negative test in her desk drawer i slid the glass back to jazz can you keep making these i said just no vodka she looked at me for a long second then she smiled for the first time all night it was a big crooked smile honey she said i’ve been waiting all night for someone to ask me that she showed me

something under the bar a cocktail napkin folded in half tucked under a stack of plastic cups there was handwriting on it in blue ink he gave me this with the money she said in case i forgot which one you were she didn’t unfold it she put it back So for the next hour, I drank cranberry soda, and I got loud.

I laughed too hard at a joke a stranger told me by the grill. Way too hard. I leaned on the railing like it was holding me up. I put my hand on Mara’s uncle’s shoulder and told him he had very kind eyes. I let my words go a little soft at the edges, like somebody had rounded off all the corners. I said, oh my gosh, a lot.

I kicked off my sandals and left them by the stairs. I’d seen a lot of drunk people. I used to be one. I knew exactly what it looked like from the outside. Blake couldn’t have been happier. Every 20 minutes, like clockwork. A new drink showed up in my hand. Jazz would catch my eye across the deck and bring it over herself.

Pink. Ice. A lime. Cranberry soda. Six of them by the end. I had to pee so badly I thought I was going to die. Around the fourth one, I went inside to find a bathroom. When I came out, Mara was waiting in the hallway outside the door. She was holding a glass of water. Here, she said. She held it out. Drink this. Please.

I took it. She looked so worried. She had these big brown eyes and they were full of something that looked a lot like pity and a lot like kindness and I couldn’t tell the difference. Blake says you’re ha- Having a hard time, she said softly. He says you’ve been struggling. I just, I want you to know I’m not judging you.

My dad went through it. I know it’s a disease. If you need to go home, I’ll drive you myself. Right now. Nobody has to know. I almost told her. Right there. In that hallway. With the family photos on the wall. I almost said, Mara, your fiance paid the bartender to spike my drinks. I almost did. But she’d have gone straight to Blake.

Of course she would. She loved him. And Blake would have laughed and said, see, she’s paranoid. That’s what happens when they start again. And the whole thing would have been over before it started. So I just. said thank you mara you’re really sweet and i drank her water and i watched her walk back out onto the deck toward the man she was going to marry and i felt sick about what was going to happen to her because i already knew some of it would and blake was filming me i saw him he was standing across the deck by the hot tub with his phone held low down by his hip pointed at me every time i laughed too loud

or leaned too hard he’d lifted a little he thought i didn’t see then he put his phone in his pocket and went and got grandma she’d been sitting at a table near the house with mara’s mother eating a plate of shrimp blake came up behind her and put his hand under her elbow gently and helped her up and walked her across the deck toward me holding her arm walking slow like a nurse walking a patient down a hospital hallway grandma he said loud enough for the people nearby to hear i didn’t want to say anything i really didn’t but look at her she’s been drinking all night i’ve been watching i’m worried grandma looked at me i looked at

the floor i let her see me look at the floor i held the glass in my hand like it was the only thing keeping me standing then blake said it right to my face in front of her he didn’t even lower his voice this is who you want running the marina he said She’s relapsing at my engagement party, Grandma. She’ll wreck it the same way she wrecked her car.

That one hurt. I didn’t have to fake that. I let it show. I felt it go right through me, and I let my face do whatever it did. Grandma’s mouth went thin. A flat, straight line. She didn’t say a word. Not to me. Not to Blake. She just looked at the glass in my hand for a long, long time. A few minutes later, Blake tapped a fork against his beer bottle and took the microphone from the little speaker set up by the grill.

The DJ turned the music down. Forty people turned around. Mara came and stood next to him in her white sundress, holding his hand, glowing. Her parents stood behind her. Before the toasts, deck in a straight line in my bare feet and i took it out of his fingers before he knew what was happening and my voice when it came out through that speaker was not soft at all i’ve had six drinks tonight blake i said want to know what was in them blake’s smile stuck on his face jazz walked out from behind the bar she was holding two things up over her head in one hand a folded stack of twenty dollar bills ten

of them in the other the cocktail napkin she walked right through the crowd with them people moved out of her way mara’s dad doug was standing closest jazz handed him the napkin he looked at it and then he unfolded it and read it out loud In a big, slow voice that carried all the way down the lawn to the water.

Blue dress, he read. Make her strong. She’ll say soda. He looked up from the napkin. He looked at Blake. Then he looked at me. 20 years sober myself, Doug said. Every person on that deck heard it. Cranberry soda, I said into the microphone. Six of them. Jazz never put a drop in. Not one. I’m stone cold sober, Blake.

And you paid $200 to watch me fall down in front of grandma. Blake’s face went gray. Not red. Gray, like old dishwater. It was a joke, he said. He laughed. He looked around the deck at everybody. Everybody, come on. It was a joke. I was just messing with her. Nobody laughed. Then grandma spoke. She didn’t need a microphone.

She’s been yelling across a harbor at boat captains for 60 years. Blake, she said. He turned around. The accountant called me Thursday. Grandma said, Mr. Eckert, he’s been doing our books for 30 years. There’s $31,000 missing out of the sales account. The whole deck went dead quiet. You could hear the waves on the rocks down at the bottom of the lawn.

Deposits, grandma said. People put down deposits on new boats in the sales office, and then the system says the deposits got refunded. 11 refunds since March. to 11 customers. Mr. Eckert called four of them. Not one of them ever asked for a refund. Not one of them ever got one. She took a step toward him. I was going to let you explain it tonight, she said.

I was going to take you aside after the toasts and let you tell me. Now I understand why you needed her drunk before Labor Day. Every piece of it clicked into place in my head at once. The filming, the brave comment, the rush to walk Grandma over by the elbow before anybody else could talk to her, and Mr. Abrams, his Chris Craft.

He’d paid me once, at the service counter, in cash, and then he’d gone to the sales office two weeks later to ask blake about trading it in for a new boat and blake had charged his card for the same service again and put my initials on it and pocketed the second payment and when mr abrams called screaming it looked like i’d done it the drunk double billing the customers and the bottle in my truck anybody could have put it there anybody who wanted grandma to think i was drinking before she picked he’d been building it all summer one little thing at a time so that when he stood up at his own engagement party and said i’d relapsed nobody would even be surprised mara took off her ring she

did it very quietly she slid it off her and she stepped over to Blake and she put it in the breast pocket of his navy blazer, right over his heart. She patted the pocket once. Then she turned around without a word and walked inside the house with her father. Doug held the screen door for her. He didn’t look back.

Grandma turned to the guests, all 40 of them. She squared her shoulders. The marina goes to Shelby, she said. I heard somebody gasp. I think it was me. Blake, you’re done at the sales office Monday, Grandma said. You’ll clean out your desk and you’ll pay back every dollar, every single one. Or I’ll call the sheriff myself. Blake looked around the deck one more time.

At the string lights, at all the people who’d been laughing at his jokes an hour before. Not one person would look back at him. He walked down the deck stairs and across the lawn to the parking lot, alone, in his navy blazer with Mara’s ring in the pocket. I watched him the whole way until his headlights came on and swung out onto the road.

People started drifting off after that. Nobody knew what to do at an engagement party with no engagement. The caterers started packing up. The DJ unplugged his speakers. Grandma came and stood next to me at the railing. She put her hand on my arm and she squeezed it. Her hand was cold. I watched him all night.

She I watched him walk you around like a show pony. She was looking out at the water. I knew about the money Thursday, Shelby. I didn’t know what he’d do. I didn’t know it would be you he’d do it to. I thought you were looking at me, I said. That whole time, with your mouth like that. She shook her head. I was looking at him, she said.

I’ve been looking at him since Thursday. Then she took her hand off my arm and went to find her purse. I went back to the bar to get my sandals. Jazz was packing the last of the bottles into a milk crate. She saw me and stopped. She reached for a clean glass. She scooped ice into it and poured cranberry juice and topped it off with soda.

from the gun and she dropped a lime wedge on the rim and she slid it across the white tablecloth to me. Pink. Ice. A lime. Cranberry soda, Jazz said. Nothing in it. She tipped her head toward the empty parking lot. He already paid.