Andy Abramowitz - Thank You, Goodnight

“I doubt I’ll get a better dinner invitation than that one.”

I stood. “It’s so good to see you, Mack, and I’m relieved that your memories of our adventures together, that your memories of me, aren’t totally unpleasant.”

She rocked her head in contemplation. “Look, maybe you’ve been a bit of a sore subject in my mind all this time, but the band never has been. I wish what happened between us hadn’t happened. We shouldn’t have done that to each other, and to your wife. But you did invite me into your spectacularly successful rock band. You were a little self-important and you took rock ’n’ roll a tad too seriously for my taste, but what kind of a brat would I be if I didn’t look back at that time as being pretty special? I got lucky and I know it.”

“I invited you into a band that was playing fraternity formals. We went nowhere until we were a foursome. We all got lucky.”

Mack said she had some work to finish up, but would make a dinner reservation and text me the particulars. I was practically out the door when I remembered I hadn’t come alone.

“By the way,” I said, pivoting. “Just as a warning, I might have a surprise with me later on.” And the surprise’s father.

She eyed me warily. “I hate surprises.”

“Yeah. So do I. You’ll hate this one too.”

“How’d it go?” Jumbo asked.

I was in the passenger seat, catching my breath and taming my temper over the fact that Jumbo had just nearly run me over with my own car. They were late coming back—they’d stopped into a drugstore for some antifungal cream to quell the itchy business in Jumbo’s nether regions, then purportedly had a celebrity sighting at Dunkin’ Donuts (I lacked the energy to explain how unlikely it was that they’d seen the actor who played Captain Kangaroo, he being dead and all)—and came howling through the parking lot right at me. Only a last-second swerve saved me from being swallowed by the front tire.

“It went fine,” I said.

“Is she in?”

“We didn’t get that far. Let’s just focus on the task at hand.”

That being the dispiriting process of hotel hunting amid deserts of drab commercial sprawl.

“So, what’s the plan, Mingus? How are we going to land her?”

“We’re having dinner tonight. I’ll raise it then. But honestly, I’m not optimistic. It doesn’t seem like the kind of thing she’s going to go for.”

“What did you tell her?”

“About the band? Nothing yet. It’s kind of a delicate subject.”

“But you told her about me.”

“Not exactly.”

“You didn’t tell her I’m out here with you?”

“Exactly.”

I’d come to Pittsburgh on business, so went the lie. Why would I have brought along the guitar player from my long-defunct band? Or his father, who had jumped in the car to honor a custody arrangement that had expired sometime in the eighties?

“That hurts, man. You’ve got your biggest selling point eating doughnuts just down the street, and you don’t even tell her.”

“It was a judgment call,” I said, though it was nothing of the sort.

Jumbo maneuvered through the late-afternoon traffic, grunting with approval or rejection and sometimes fascination at the Five Guys and the Famous Dave’s, at the Outback, Hooters, and Pei Wei that lined the road like crooked teeth.

“Where are we all going for dinner?” he asked.

I looked over at him. “I assumed you guys were heading back to Dunkin’ Donuts, hoping to run into Mr. Rogers.”

“You’re not letting us come to dinner?”

“Don’t start, James. I told you back in Philly that you could ride out here with me if you wanted, but a seat in my car didn’t get you an invite to every item on the itinerary.”

Jumbo and his old man could unwrap chimichangas in front of the TV, for all I cared.

“You know, you don’t own Mackenzie,” Jumbo stated with reflection. “She was my friend too.”

“Well, I’ll tell you what. When you drive out here to talk her into joining Jumbo Jett and His Ragamuffin Daffodil Band or whatever the hell you call yourselves—”

“It’s Ragtag Honeysuckle. Get it right.”

“—then I’ll stay out of it.”

If, by some miracle, Mack did not walk out on me when I revealed my grand plans, then maybe—maybe—Jumbo would get the nod to come out and say a brief hello. It would be like the dinner party hosts who allow their pajama-clad children to flurry down the steps to greet their guests and steal a spring roll before scampering back up to watch another video.

But we weren’t going to get that far. Mackenzie was not going to think re-forming the band was a good idea. It certainly didn’t sound like a good idea. She was going to stare across the table at me tonight like a guidance counselor weary of the sixth-year senior. Is this really what you want to be doing at this stage of your life? her pitying look would say. And my answer would be the same one I was once accustomed to dispensing, the answer with which people like me must always be equipped.

Let’s not talk. Let me just show you.

As the evening sky splashed out all kinds of blues and pinks, Elmer celebrated the splendor of it all with another coughing fit, this one of greater intensity than the first. Jumbo seemed to have the matter in hand, so I left them in the Best Western parking lot and lugged my overnight bag inside to see about rooms.

There wasn’t much to the lobby. A reception counter to the right, a pair of functional chairs to the left, all lit by the unforgiving kind of fluorescence that makes every zit and every wagging nose hair visible from twenty yards out. The fraying chairs were occupied by two guys who stared dumbly into the distance, as if awaiting a ride to anywhere.

Dropping my bag onto the linoleum tile, I requested two rooms. The girl behind the counter typed and clicked and every so often emitted a soft, drawn-out “Ooooo-kay.” She was cute but in a way that tended not to last. She should bask in the bounty of her youth, for the lustrous hair and flawless complexion would soon lose interest in her and move on to another canvas, leaving her to run out the clock with a chips-with-lunch type of body.

Nonsmoking rooms ran $109 each, a price that hardly foretold opulence and luxury. I handed her a credit card.

“Dad’s fine,” Jumbo announced, parading through the automatic sliding front doors. “Just catching his breath.”

“One oh nine plus tax,” I told him.

He bellied up to the desk and proceeded to rifle through a fistful of fives and tens. I shook my head at my companion’s piggybank payment method, anticipating all the new hotel memories Jumbo would manufacture to go with my old ones. The trash can urinations. The complaints about the “broken” shower that was not broken at all but merely beyond his technical grasp. The insistent sliding of his key into room 2270 at the Marriott when his things were down the street in room 2270 at the Westin.

The young woman accepted payment and returned to typing and clicking. A dot matrix printer somewhere behind her sprang to life with a robotic buzz.

“So, what’s her deal? Is she married?” Jumbo asked.

“Who? Her?” I pointed to the young hotel employee, who looked up skittishly.

“Mack,” Jumbo clarified.

“No, she’s not.”

“That’s interesting,” Jumbo mused.

“Why? You’re not married. I’m not married.”

“True, true. But Mack was different. I always pictured her with a husband and a bunch of kids.” Somehow that lifestyle earned Jumbo’s designation as “different.”

“I don’t know what to tell you, Jumbo. For all I know, she could be a lesbian now.”