Christopher Hebert - Angels of Detroit

But he never got the chance. The moment they arrived, Fitch ripped the vodka from Holmes’s hands. The paper bag fell to the floor, and that was where Fitch left it. Still standing in the doorway, Holmes stared at the crumpled sack, debating whether to pick it up, feeling his mood grow even darker.

“We brought you something,” Myles said, handing McGee his latest offering.

She took the package, looked at it sideways. “Cookies?”

“Lemon!” Stepping over the dropped bag, Myles put his arm around her shoulders, and she turned her cheek into his kiss.

No How was jail . No You must be tired . Not to mention hungry . McGee just walked toward the kitchen, and everyone followed. April was already inside.

Holmes had always hated coming here. Two steps past the threshold was all it took to remind him. The place, when McGee and Myles found it, had been an industrial graveyard haunted by the ghosts of sad machines. It had fallen to Holmes to try to make the space livable. His reputation as a handyman had been built around a very limited repertoire, but it was more than any of the rest of them had. He’d never understood how Myles and McGee could possess so much energy and so few actual skills.

Holmes had picked up what little he knew from his father, a locksmith and drunk and general tinkerer. And his uncle, a halfhearted slumlord. Also a drunk. But their work was and had been mostly just fixing whatever was broken. They’d never built entire new rooms or routed new plumbing. So Holmes hadn’t either. He’d tried to tell Myles and McGee that he knew exactly as little about that stuff as they did, but McGee had said, “I have faith in you,” as if that and a tool belt were all he needed.

They got what they paid for: a shower stall squatting awkwardly almost in the middle of the room, surrounded by crooked walls. It looked like an outhouse. Every time Holmes walked in the front door, this depressing sight was waiting to greet him.

It wasn’t as if the city had run out of vacancies. McGee and Myles could have bought a whole house with the change in Fitch’s ashtray, but they enjoyed living like this. Or they wanted to enjoy living like this. Sometimes it was hard to tell the difference. Holmes sensed they liked imagining themselves storm chasers dashing into the eye of a tornado everyone else was fleeing. That Holmes himself had fled two years ago, when Fitch offered to let him freeload. Fitch’s parents had bought him a condo in Grosse Pointe Woods, and Holmes had packed up his stuff and moved into the spare bedroom, not giving a shit if anyone called him a sellout. If he wanted to, Holmes had a whole childhood full of shitty, derelict apartments in the city to feel nostalgic about. But why the hell would he? Of course, Myles did, too. They’d grown up down the street from each other. But Myles had McGee, and they seemed to feel some imperative to stay. So did April and Inez, though at least they had an actual apartment, with actual rooms and actual doors.

In the kitchen Holmes poured himself a coffee cup full of cranberry juice. Above his head, the fluorescent lights hummed.

“The men’s room was empty,” Fitch was saying, as Holmes took a seat next to him on the sofa.

April sat on the opposite couch.

“What the hell are you talking about?” Holmes said.

“Empty,” Fitch repeated as Myles came over to join them, “except for this one guy standing in front of the urinal on the tips of his toes.”

“Why are we talking about urinals?” Holmes said.

Fitch gave him a peeved look. But before he could answer, there was a jostling at the other end of the sofa; Myles seemed to be struggling to pull himself out of a pit.

“What are you doing?” Fitch said.

Myles was holding on to the arm of the sofa as if it were a life vest. “Broken spring.”

“It’s your own couch,” Holmes said.

Myles shrugged. “I forgot.”

“Why don’t you sit on the other couch?” Fitch said, interrupting his own story. He pointed to the cushion next to April, who sat all alone, her legs crossed like a swami’s. Between them was a steamer trunk they were using as a coffee table.

Myles scratched at his stocking cap. “It’s a love seat, not a couch.”

“I don’t care if it’s a fucking pumpkin,” Fitch said. “We were here first, and now you’re squeezing us out.”

Myles rocked forward and back, like a cork stuck in a bottle, and Fitch tried to help his vodka ride out the commotion by holding his mug directly above Holmes’s lap.

Once Myles was finally resettled, Fitch elbowed Holmes to move aside, and a few drops of vodka bloomed on Holmes’s thigh.

“He’s standing there on the tips of his toes—” Fitch said, drifting back into his story.

Holmes was chagrined to glance up from his juice and discover Fitch looking directly at him, as if this were all somehow for his benefit.

“What the fuck are you talking about?”

“He’s standing there at the urinal, on the tips of his toes,” Fitch said, even more dramatically now that he was sure he had everyone’s attention. “And he’s totally stiff—”

At the sound of the word, something caught deep down in Holmes’s chest, and the next thing he knew, he was doubling over, a mouthful of cranberry juice spraying out between his teeth in a fine purple mist.

April, sitting directly across from him, let out a shriek and shot into the air, but it was too late. The juice was splattered across the front of her white sweatshirt.

“Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit,” she said, flapping the fabric away from her skin, as if it were on fire.

Holmes waved his arms in surrender, feeling as though he’d swallowed gravel, and everyone — even Fitch — turned wincingly toward McGee, expecting the worst. She was in the kitchen, leaning over the table, making sandwiches, and when she saw what had happened, she turned away without a word, thrusting her hand into a bag of sandwich bread.

By now, April had wrestled the sweatshirt over her head, rushing toward the sink, whimpering, “Shit, shit, shit.”

“It’s just a crappy sweatshirt,” Fitch said. “What’s the big deal?”

April grabbed a balled-up towel from the sink and began dabbing at the purple spots. Even from across the room, Holmes could see it wouldn’t do any good.

“I borrowed it from Inez ,” April said.

“So it’s Inez ’s crappy sweatshirt,” Fitch said. “Who cares?”

April rolled her eyes. There was no need to answer. Everyone knew it was Inez who cared. Even Fitch knew, though he pretended not to.

“She’s going to kill me,” April said.

Holmes rasped, “Don’t tell her it was me.”

“It’s a fucking hoodie,” Fitch said. “She probably got it at the thrift store,” which everyone knew to be both perfectly true and completely irrelevant.

“And who the fuck buys a white sweatshirt,” Fitch said, glancing from one to the next, waiting for someone to echo his indignation.

Holmes rushed to the outhouse and returned with a wad of toilet paper. As soon as it touched the stain on the love seat, the tissue turned pink and began to stick to his hand.

“Maybe you can flip the cushion over,” Myles said, not bothering to get up from his seat.

“The thing was hideous anyway,” Fitch said as he made his way toward the bullhorn of vodka in the kitchen.

“Do you have any dish soap?” April said. The sweatshirt had turned into a fetal pink blob in the sink.

Fitch came up behind her, peering over her shoulder. “Seriously?”

“Laundry detergent, dish detergent,” April said. “It’s all the same, isn’t it?”

No matter how much Holmes dabbed at the cushion, it didn’t seem to make any difference. “Maybe it won’t look as bad when it dries,” he said with a sigh.