Funny Story(17)

“I needed somewhere cool, to impress Ashleigh, and it leapt out of my subconscious,” I admit.

“Was she impressed?” he asks. “Does she like our wine?”

“No idea,” I say. “But she thinks one of your bartenders is a drug dealer. Or plays a lot of Tom Petty.”

He frowns. “She must not have tried the pinot.”

I laugh in surprise. “Are you offended?”

“A little,” he admits, shrugging. “It’s a double gold winner. Make sure she tries it tonight.”

“I’ll do my best,” I say.

For a second, we just stand there.

He waves toward the doorway, which I’m blocking.

“Right!” I step aside, and he breezes past, his warm, vaguely spicy scent hitting me. “I’ll see you later,” I call over my shoulder, shutting myself in my room to continue my—so far unproductive—outfit selection.

Wool, tweed, satin posing as silk, every piece of it easily matched to every other piece, and all of it a bit stodgy professor, even my casual summer clothes. Sadie used to say my look sat at the intersection of Personal Style as a Statement About Personality and Don’t Look at My Body, which is essentially accurate.

A quick Google search of “what to wear to a winery” reveals a plethora of the kind of bright and airy clothes that could be plucked from an Elin Hilderbrand novel. My own wardrobe is mostly creams, tans, camels, browns. I could just go with a pair of jeans and a T-shirt, but I suspect that between showing up overdressed and underdressed, the latter would be the greater sin to Ashleigh, and I want to make a good impression.

So I swallow my pride, and put on the slinky backless black dress I bought for Peter’s and my engagement party.

I haven’t worn it since, which is stupid, because it cost way more than I would ordinarily spend (Peter bought it) and it’s extremely flattering.

Fifteen minutes after seven, someone knocks on the door. I’m not surprised she’s late. I am surprised she came to the door. I thought I’d have three flights of stairs to get over my hanging out with someone new nerves before I was face-to-face with her.

It’s been years since I made a new friend. I mean, actually made a new friend, not just inherited one from Peter, or from Sadie, who’s always been more of a social butterfly than me.

I smooth the front of my dress, a nervous sixteen-year-old about to find out whether she really scored a date to the prom, or if the other kids are about to dump pig’s blood on her.

When I open the door, Ashleigh jumps a little, because she’d been looking at her phone.

“You didn’t have to come up,” I say. “You could’ve texted me from the car.”

“I drank a Pedialyte on the way over here, and my bladder’s bursting,” she says. “Plus I know basically nothing about you, so this was a good chance to find out if your house is full of surveillance equipment.”

I blink. “Surveillance equipment?”

“Landon and I have been taking bets on whether you’re in the FBI,” she provides helpfully.

I squint at her. “And you think I’m in the FBI because . . . ?”

“I don’t,” she says. “Landon does. My guess is witness protection.”

There’s being bad at small talk, and then there’s being so reticent that your coworkers assume you’ve recently testified against a mob boss, and I never knew how thin the line between the two was.

In my defense, Landon is nineteen years old and nearly always listening to shoegaze in his AirPods at the decibel of a launching rocket, so it’s not like there have been loads of opportunities to bond.

“Bathroom’s this way,” I say, leading her inside.

She gawks as she follows, apparently unbothered by the lack of surveillance equipment.

We pause in front of the entrance to the hallway, where Miles’s room, the bathroom, and my room are tucked off of the living room. “Cute place,” she says.

“Thanks,” I say, though honestly, this is all pretty much Miles, a funky mix of thrift-store pieces from the fifties to seventies, Laurel Canyon chic.

She shuts herself in the bathroom—quite possibly, I think, to dig through my medicine cabinet—and I go back to the kitchen for another glass of water. In college, I really took the posters that littered our dorm rooms to heart: ONE TO ONE, IF AT ALL, they read, with an illustrated beer bottle beside an illustrated glass of water. The habit stuck.

From the kitchen I hear the bathroom door whine open, and I pad back into the living room, but Ashleigh isn’t there.

“Do you snowboard?” she calls from around the corner, down the hallway.

“What?” I pass through the doorway and see her not on the right, in my room, but to the left, in Miles’s. She’s wandering through it like it’s a museum, moving from the snowboard and battered hockey sticks in the corner to the plants and incense holders in the windowsill.

“This is my roommate’s room,” I tell her.

She’s reading the tiny text around the edge of a framed show poster, but I’m fixated on the framed photograph of Miles and Petra on his dresser. They stand in front of the lake, her arms slung around his waist, a less scruffy version of him looking down at her adoringly. She’s waifish and cute, and he’s rangy and winsome, and it’s impossible to hate this version of her, the one who made him so happy. Until it occurs to me that now she’s making Peter this happy.