Emma Straub - Modern Lovers

Zoe had texted Jane late that afternoon: DINNER TONIGHT? CHINESE, SUNSET PARK? It was what they used to do when they wanted to talk business over a meal. They couldn’t go anywhere in the neighborhood, because they knew every single person who owned every single restaurant (there were only half a dozen, after all), and eventually whoever it was would come over and sit with them, and they’d all be talking about purveyors and farms and about which servers had drug problems. Jane texted back, PICK ME UP AT EIGHT, and at eight o’clock on the dot she was standing in front of Hyacinth, hands in her pockets, waiting for Zoe to appear at the corner and then pull up in front. The car appeared at 8:03 p.m., not bad for her wife. Jane still loved saying “wife.” If that was the Long Island in her, so be it. She had no interest in being transgressive. She loved living in the only neighborhood in New York City that felt like the suburbs, and she loved living there with her wife and her kid and her garage and her walk-in pantry. Zoe slowed to a stop, the windows rolled down.

Jane got into the car and buckled her seat belt. “Hey,” she said.

“Hiya,” said Zoe. She was wearing a dress that Jane liked, a blue swirly thing that tied around her waist. “How are you?” They’d spent the day talking about vegetables and orders and menus, but that wasn’t what she meant.

“Not bad. This is a nice surprise.” Jane rubbed her hands on her knees.

“Yeah, well. I was in the mood for Chinese food.”

“Sounds great.” Jane crossed her arms over her chest, then shifted back to her hands on her knees.

“Relax,” Zoe said. She reached over and cupped her hand over Jane’s. “It’s just dinner.”

“If it were just dinner, we’d be at home.” Jane fiddled with the door lock. They’d turned up Coney Island Avenue.

“Fine, it’s a date,” Zoe said. “Happy?”

Jane let out a little snort. “If you must know, yes.” She slid her phone out of her pocket and plugged it into the car stereo. The night had cooled down, and the air that blew in through the car’s open windows was brisk enough to give her tiny goose bumps on her forearms. Jane scrolled through her music until she found just the right song and then turned up the volume. Zoe’s parents’ biggest hit of 1978, “(My Baby Wants to) Boogie Tonight,” blasted through the speakers, and Zoe laughed. They were having a good time already.

Ruby spent her evenings at Hyacinth pondering the future. It was a slow night, with only a few tables lingering over dessert in the garden. It was almost ten. Neither of her mothers had been around, which was nice, because it meant she could be terrible and lazy at her job. It was a cool night for the end of July, and she wished she’d brought a sweater. She stole Jorge’s hoodie from behind the bar and put it on, knowing that he wouldn’t mind. It didn’t exactly look professional, but it was deep Brooklyn on a Wednesday night, and so who really cared?

The way Ruby saw it, she had a few different choices: she could stay at home and apply for school again in a year; she could go on one of those intense semi-abusive programs where you hike through the desert for three months with no toilet paper; she could move to New Orleans and shuck oysters for tourists. At this point, she could do any of it — it was just a matter of deciding what she wanted. Harry would be in Brooklyn for another year, which was something, but not if they couldn’t be seen together without his parents losing their minds. Ruby wandered over to the door and pressed her nose to the glass.

Her pocket buzzed. She pulled out her phone: PARTY @ NICO HOUSE WHEN UR DUN WORKIN.

Dust had no plan, and he seemed fine with it. When they were dating, he had told Ruby that he never wanted to have a job that paid him more than fifteen dollars an hour, and that he never wanted to work more than ten hours a week. His only jobs had been at a skate shop and at a skate park, neither of which he’d done for more than a few months, and so he seemed to be doing a pretty good job of accomplishing his goals thus far.

If Ruby went into the garden to reclean already clean tables, which she sometimes did to try to hurry along customers, she might have been able to hear the party. Nico’s house was only a quarter of the block down, and when it was nice outside and people were in the yard, voices carried. Tonight, though, she wasn’t interested. She’d seen Sarah Dinnerstein traipsing down the street earlier that afternoon, wearing shorts that even Ruby would have thought twice about, and she really didn’t need to see how a few hours of sun and booze had added to the effect.

One of the couples from the back was chatting behind her, drunk on mediocre wine. “Sorry,” they said, squeezing past Ruby to get out the door.

“Come back soon,” she said, as monotone as possible. By the time she walked back to her post, the other couple was finally paying and, after a few long, wet kisses, up on their feet and walking to the door. The server on duty, a tall guy named Leon, rolled his eyes at Ruby as he ran their credit card.

“Let’s get the fuck out of here,” he said. “No offense.”

“None remotely taken,” Ruby said. She organized the menus and started piling the chairs on the tables, and Leon grabbed the broom. They got the garden cleaned up, as they’d already done everything else. She could hear the party, or what sounded like it, and the whole garden smelled like weed and Sarah Dinnerstein’s Rastafarian essential-oil perfume that she bought from a guy with a card table set up outside the Union Square subway station. Jorge and Leon closed the two registers while Ruby waited outside with the keys for the roll-down security gate. Once all three of them were outside, Ruby locked the padlocks. She would text Harry when she was closer, check and see if he was still awake. It was kind of cool that Elizabeth hadn’t turned them in, but it was also weird and sort of freaky. Ruby’s parents had always been relaxed, too relaxed, and she had always thought of Elizabeth as the Good Mom, the one who always knew where her kid was, and who had regular food in the fridge, and who knew all the best bedtime songs. Elizabeth was not supposed to be drinking a glass of water on Ruby’s beanbag chair, her eyes all crazy.

In the very back of the restaurant, something flickered. A firefly, probably. Ruby squinted through the gate. There was something red in the corner, along the wooden fence, but she couldn’t quite see what it was. It was probably nothing. It was late, and Ruby was tired. “Okay, guys,” she said to Jorge and Leon, giving each of them a high five. “See you later.” They walked toward the corner together, but instead of turning left, to go home, Ruby turned right and walked toward Nico’s house. When she was a few car lengths away, she crossed the street and slowed down. There were a few people on the porch, but she couldn’t tell who it was. The party seemed to have died down, at least out front.

Ruby squatted down in between two cars and leaned against a bumper. She could see the porch, and the little floating red dots of people’s cigarettes in the air. Chloe had texted her that morning — Paris was in some other time zone, and Ruby had no idea if Chloe knew that she was writing at six a.m., or cared. It just said HIIIIIII I MISS YOU! with a long string of hearts. It was bullshit. Everything was bullshit. All of Ruby’s friends were about to leave her forever. Who was actually friends with people from high school? Everyone loved to say that people who peaked in high school were stupid and lame, and didn’t that mean that by holding on to those people, you were also stupid and lame? Wasn’t everyone trying to trade up? Chloe would join a sorority and live in a house with a gaudy chandelier, and then she’d go to law school, and then she’d get married, and then she’d have three kids, and then she’d move to Connecticut, and then they’d see each other at their twentieth Whitman reunion, and they’d hug and kiss and pretend that one of them was going to get on Metro-North so they could see each other. Paloma was the same but worse — she might be interesting. At least Dust and Nico were going to stay the same forever. It made Ruby feel less pathetic about her own life choices, or lack thereof.