Page 56 of Back for Seconds

June: you make it home ok?

I wrote back like I was running out of time, anxiety pulling my already exhausted muscles even tighter.

Joey: sorry, crazy day. made it home in one piece. when can I see you next?

Chapter 18 June

The morning after Joey left, I woke early, feeling like I’d slept thirteen hours in a steaming hot bubble bath.

I took the old box of ornaments out to the trash and stuffed them, with great violence, into the can. For breakfast, I brewed a pot of my proprietary spiced coffee and cut myself a thick slice of sourdough bread and toasted the bread over my stove’s open flame—something my father had always done for us—and drizzled the bread with olive oil and rock salt.

Then, I donned my holiday sweater and a bold red lip and opened my laptop. The day passed in a blur of corporate holiday Zoom parties, “tying up” “loose ends,” and checking my phone—quickly, sure, but nevertheless continuously—to see if Joey had texted me.

He hadn’t.

Was I modern enough of a woman to reach out first?

Unfortunately, I was.

I shot him a quick text: you make it home ok? Then tossed my phone into the deep crevices of my duvet and got back to work, burying myself in some last-minute JIRA tickets about a model that kept predicting that dead customers were least likely to open a new line of credit in December.

“The model’s not wrong,” I explained to a beleaguered executive. “It’s just kind of rude.”

Between work meetings and checking my phone, I called my brother over and over. Of course, he was either still asleep or actively ignoring me. As foolish as Salvatore could be, he was smart enough to know I had nothing positive to say to him after his stunt. And if it wasn’t him behind the graffiti, I knew he at least was some sort of art director.

When the doorbell rang at four thirty, my lipstick had completely faded and I was ready to give up my private “no eggnog before five p.m.” pact. The sun had already set on Evergreen, and my typically quiet corner of town was particularly dead. So, I felt only mildly embarrassed by how fast I ran for the door and how hard I hoped Joey would be on the other side. It wasn’t completely impossible—we did always seem to find ourselves back in each other’s company. It was more likely than a dead man applying for a credit card.

I yanked open the front door and, before I could feel any disappointment, a pair of long, thin arms were wrapping around my neck, pulling me into a bone-crushing hug.

“Jujubean!”

“Mims!” I flung my arms around my best friend and roommate, yanking her in from the cold. “You’re home?!”

“And you decorated?!” She dropped her bag to the ground and turned in a slow circle, staring in awe at our living room.

“I tried.”

“You got us a tree!”

“Uh, I certainly helped!”

We crashed down onto our pink velvet sofa, side by side. Mimi looked and smelled like a flash of summer, the South Florida sun having given her olive face back a splash of vitality. The tip of her long nose was still a little pink, and her hair was freshly blown out in a shiny curtain of raspberry-chocolate brown. She’d dosed herself in a coconut-vanilla perfume that smelled exactly like August. I wanted to shove a straw in her head and drink her. “I can’t believe you’re back.” I grabbed one of her hands, still cold from the outside, and held it in mine. “I missed you so much. Why the hell would you come back to the dark and cold?”

“Ugh.” She rolled her sleepy hazel eyes—looking even more minx-like than usual—before swinging her legs up under her behind on to the couch. “My grandmother’s out of the hospital now—thank god. She has my mom to take care of her and she has all of my aunts. Believe me, they did not need another body in that itty-bitty condo. I was just in the way. I missed you.” She pulled her hand from mine and pinched my cheek.

I laughed and slapped her hand away. “No way you’re back here because you only missed me. You can tell me if there’s a boy, Mims.”

She scrunched her nose at me. “Two boys, actually.”

“Two boys? That’s two too many.”

“I know.” She laughed, jumping up and pulling her suitcase over. Like everything in Mimi’s possession, the suitcase was a little worse for the wear. Making a living as a jazz singer had necessitated a level of scrappiness that gave Mimi a lot of magpie-like qualities—she was a hoarder of shiny doodads, scrap fabric, partnerless shoes, and hand-me-downs. She could give you eighteen dollars in quarters and knew every bus route from here to Nashville.

Mimi sat in the middle of the living room and began unzipping her suitcase, unloading what appeared to be her dirty laundry. Great, I thought. Missed this. “After going radio silent for three days, Biff reaches out to me and is like, ooooh baby I miss you girl blah blah I want you to come to my penthouse for my family holiday party, I want you to meet my friends. I mean it, I’m a changed man.” Mimi rolled her eyes, pulling a ChapStick out of her makeup bag. “Ok? Whatever, don’t miss you but I do miss the penthouse. So, I agree. Then, he’s texting me—oh, never mind actually I don’t know if I have enough chairs, blah blah blah. But I’m already on the plane! So…I texted Sal.”

“Please.” I held up both my hands. “I love you and I love Sal, but I do not want any details about what you get up to together.”

Dennis “Biff” Biffle had been something like a complicated sugar daddy-turned-boyfriend that had dogged Mimi for years—I knew all about that—but whatever she’d been cultivating with my brother was none of my damn business.