Page 1 of A Taste of Vanilla

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Suzy Homemaker Would Have Blocked Him

HALSTON

“Doyou think Suzy Homemaker ever got cheated on?”

Oliver doesn't look up from the pint glass he’s drying. This is his first mistake. The second is sighing like I had asked him to define the meaning of life instead of simply engaging in a very normal, very important, and very alcohol-assisted philosophical discussion.

“Suzy Homemaker,” he says, “is not a real person.”

I lift one finger from where I’m currently slumped over his bar, because pointing feels necessary in this moment and quite frankly, standing feels just a bit dangerous. “That was not the question.”

“It should have been.”

“The question was whether she got cheated on.”

“The answer remains the same. She’sfictional.”

“Exactly.” I slap my hand on the bar top, and the regret is immediate. The bar in Saints & Sinners has very old wood, and my palm now has very new feelings. “Fictional women have better odds.”

Oliver finally looks at me.

He has the kind of face that always looks like it has been designed for disappointment. Not in an unattractive way. Unfortunately for him, Oliver is handsome. Moody, dark-haired, sharp-jawed, and broad enough to look useful in an emergency and yet emotionally unavailable enough to make half of the people who come into his bar attempt to fix him.

They never do.

Oliver was born grumpy. Since high school, I’ve always imagined him as a newborn, glaring at a nurse for holding him incorrectly.

Kind of like the way he’s glaring at me now, except baby-like.

“You’re drunk,” he says with a grimace.

“I am grieving.”

“You are grievingloudly.”

“I have always had volume,” I argue. And it’s true. Oliver, Marley and I spent way too many lunches in the library getting yelled at because I couldn’t keep my voice down.

“I know. The walls know. The man by the dartboard knows.”

The man by the dartboard raises his beer without looking over.

I point to him. “He supports women.”

Oliver glares. “He has no idea what we’re even talking about.”

“What an ally.”

Oliver sets the pint glass down and reaches for another one, because apparently he intends to dry every clean glass in the city of Baltimore before he says something emotionally useful.

Which is fine. I have never required Oliver to be emotionally useful on command. He was practically useful. Dryly useful. Useful in the way a crowbar is useful.

The man would pry you out of a burning car and then tell you your scream was pitchy and gave him a headache.

Saints & Sinners is dim, warm, and moody in the way old Baltimore bars are. Dark wood, exposed brick, brass lights, scuffed floors, and a long mirror behind the bar that makeseveryone look just a little prettier but also a little more doomed. The front windows are fogged at the corners from the humid summer night, and the neon sign above the whiskey shelves with the Oliver-coded phrase, “Repent later, Tip now,” buzzes like it holds everyone’s sins and they’re begging to be let free.