Several times a month, usually on the weekends, Barb and her girlfriend, Aimee, played host to a rotating crew of restaurant workers and other people with shifts that finished after midnight. Barb would make a giant pot of pancit with the recipe her grandmother handed down to her mom back in the Philippines, or defrost arroz caldo, and everyone else would either bring something （mostly liquor） or make something （often experimental）。
Charlie used to show up regularly, back when she and Barb worked together. But then there’d been a con in Worcester, then the even weirder thing in Albany, and then she’d gotten shot. By the time she’d met Vince, her attendance had grown spotty. Still, Charlie should have thought to check the Slack where the dates were posted. If she had, she wouldn’t have been caught by surprise.
“Oh, come on,” Barb said. “Aimee misses you.”
That seemed unlikely. Aimee was about ten years older than Barb, skinny, and so quiet that even when she spoke, it was in a whisper. Charlie couldn’t tell if she secretly enjoyed the extreme extrovert energy of these gatherings, or if Aimee just loved Barb so much that she was willing to put up with her girlfriend’s nightmarish idea of fun. Either way, Charlie had never gotten the impression that Aimee had fully committed her to memory.
“If you don’t mind me being empty-handed.” Maybe it would do her some good to have a night out. If she went home, she’d just think about whether Adam had Salt’s book and if she could get it, or argue with Posey about acquiring DMT. “Vince can pick me up when he gets off work.”
“Tell him to come in,” Barb said. “I want to meet this mystery guy. Do you know how hard it is to find someone in the Valley that a friend hasn’t already gotten with?”
Charlie sure did.
Fifteen minutes later they pulled into the crowded driveway of an old farmhouse in the shadow of Mount Tom and backing into the Oxbow part of the Connecticut River. It had been in Aimee’s family and come to her after the death of a great-aunt. The place was sprawling, with the last significant updates having been done in the fifties. A finicky mustard-colored electric stove occupied a corner of the kitchen, and a burnt-orange shag rug ran through everywhere else, including the bathrooms.
They entered to music from a Sonos that at least three people were trying to control at the same time. The air smelled like ginger, fried onions, and pizza.
Aimee, in leggings and a tank that showed off tattoos of koi running down both her arms, half hiding behind butt-length brown hair, drifted over to kiss Barb. She whispered to Charlie that the drinks and food were in the dining room, and that they were out of ice.
Charlie thanked her and, deciding that she couldn’t follow Barb around like a duckling, wove through the main area toward the booze. She passed Angel and Ian on the rug, playing what appeared to be chess with a mix of snack food for the pieces. Ian had a vape pen hanging on one corner of his mouth as though it were an old-timey cigar. Both of them worked over at Cosmica, a diner-style restaurant that served buffalo-meat burgers and a lot of cocktails. When Ian noticed her, his mouth opened far enough for the vape pen to fall on the board and send a cheese puff rolling into a potato chip.
She and Ian had slept together late one night, when neither of them were making good decisions. She hoped that wasn’t going to make the evening awkward.
A guy was sitting on the couch, head buried in his sketchbook. She recognized him as a webcomic artist. He’d been creating a surprisingly explicit and sprawling story of a mouse warrior for years, but it had only recently started gaining a big readership. There was a rumor that he’d begun making serious money.
The long-haired man sitting next to him must have thought he was doing well, since he was trying to convince him to invest in a weed truck, like an ice cream truck but selling edibles and joints and creams. It would drive around neighborhoods and, Long Hair Man insisted, be really good for older people with mobility issues. There was some question from the people sitting nearby about whether this was legal, but the really heated debate was around which celebratory weed song the truck should play.
That led to the subject of rolling bliss, which several of them had done. “I went to this alterationist, Raven, out in Pittsfield,” Long Hair Man said. “And she got me so joyed up, I almost walked out in front of a semi. Worth it, though. It was like that feeling you get when you’re a kid and summer’s just started combined with all the optimism of first love.”
In the kitchen, Don argued with his girlfriend, Erin. They were a dramatic couple, prone to tears and shouting about which had been mean to the other first. Don was a bartender at Top Hat, a nice place, one of the first Charlie had been fired from.