Page 161 of On His Mind

“This,” Stanley says, “is my best idea.”

I finally ask, “What’s in the bags?”

He looks at me like I’ve yelled at him, and he says, “You told me you’d trust me.”

“I never said that.”

“You said, and I quote, ‘Do whatever you want, Stan, just leave me out of it.’ In my professional opinion, that’s trust.”

“I was talking about Christmas break.”

Stanley and I stare at each other because he knows I’m right.

Rowan opens the fridge and glances at me. “You sure you want him in charge of this?”

I’m not. I never said he could be in charge of this. He’s supposed to be planning the vacation, not whatever this is.

Stanley pulls out wine glasses from the plastic bag. Four of them, boxed, the cheap kind with the thick stems.

Blue looks at them. Looks at me. Looks back at him. “What are those for?”

“These, gentlemen, are for the lady who likes wine.”

“How do you know she likes wine?”

Stanley jerks his head back hard. “Do you not listen to a single word your girlfriend says? Not one? Last night, at the table, in front of your face, she said Penelope loves wine. Said she’s been drinking it every night.”

Benson rubs his mouth. I shake my head. Blue keeps staring at the glasses.

“Don’t you think,” Blue says slowly, “that maybe it’s a bad thing that she’s drinking every night, and we shouldn’t be encouraging it?”

The kitchen goes quiet.

She’s been drinking every night.

Stanley shrugs, and he doesn’t look at me when he does it. “The girl likes wine. Relax.” He drops a bag of something onto the table that shifts and sparkles when it lands—rhinestones, hundreds of them, in about nine colors. “G’s bedazzling them.”

He sets a glue gun next to the rhinestones. Then he throws the empty bag on the floor, which is how Stanley always handles groceries.

“Fuck. What’s this now?” Blue says, leaning back so far his chair creaks.

A pile of white T-shirts hits the table. Plain. Cheap. A dozen at least.

“No,” I say, because I have to lay a line somewhere. “That’s too much.”

He ignores me as he pulls out something in a flat cardboard sleeve, and I snatch it out of his hand before he can hide it.Heat Transfer Paper.Print something, iron it onto a shirt.

“My girl’s on that one,” he says, plucking it back out of my fingers and setting it aside. He peers into the next bag and grins. “And this one’s Lucy’s.”

“What’s Lucy’s?”

He ties the handles of the bag together. “Don’t worry about it.”

There’s one bag that is bigger than the others. It’s black, doubled up so you can’t see through it, and the top’s twisted and knotted twice. He picks it up off the table without opening it, carries it across the kitchen, and sets it down in the corner behind the trash can, and then — I swear to God — he moves the trash can eight inches to the left, so it blocks the bag.

Four of us watch him do this.

“What’s in the bag, Stanley?” Benson asks.