“Oh, uh, Heineken,” she says, and the girl nods and disappears into the sea of patrons that seem like giants next to her.
They end up sitting on stools at the high pub table next to the billiards area. His friends shoot games, and he is mostly invested in a football game playing on the many flat screens around the bar. He looks like a teenager in his backward UMass ball cap, fixated on the TV and stuffing loaded fries into his mouth. She stares at him, momentarily transfixed. Something about the hat makes her heart flutter. He looks back at her.
“What?” he asks, chewing a mouthful of food.
“N-nothing.” She smiles and nervously looks down at a cardboard coaster that she picks at until the drinks come.
She feigns interest and tries to make the right noises when something exciting or disappointing happens on-screen, but she was hoping for a little more conversation in a quieter place that would allow it. She can tell he’s getting a little drunk by the increasing amount of high fives he gives her. Also, he doesn’t notice her finding ways to dump her beer into other people’s empties every time a new round arrives. She needs to keep her wits about her.
Once the crowd thins and his friends leave, she realizes how late it’s getting. She has sort of just existed in the background of Alabama Slammer shots and bad referee calls all evening, and that was not the plan, but he doesn’t seem to be much of a conversationalist. She isn’t sure about the best way to do this. Too blatant an approach could be dangerous, but now that he’s nice and loose, she tries to flirt, even though she feels she may have forgotten how.
“I bet you played football in school,” she says and immediately wants to gag at how lame it sounds.
“Oh, no. I was a big theater nerd,” he says, and she almost spits out the sip of her drink she’s just taken. She feels it burn in her nasal passage as she snorts it back.
“Sorry,” she laughs. “That’s just not what I was expecting you to say. At all. Cora never mentioned that.” Damn, she shouldn’t have brought up Cora. The last thing she meant to do is remind him she’s friends with his wife.
“Oh, yeah. I was gonna be a movie star. Everyone always thinks it’s such a geeky thing, but most big actors started in theater classes,” he says matter-of-factly, and Paige just cannot picture it. She finds she’s staring with her mouth slightly open.
“What?” he counters with a smile.
“No, that’s...that’s great. I...” She finds herself at a loss. She has only ever seen him playing golf and pickup basketball and cheersing with cans of beer like a big buffoon the times he’s been over watching a game with Grant.
“I was inAnniein high school,” she says, for lack of anything else coming to mind.
“Were you, now?” he says. “What role?”
“Not exactly a role. I got to sit backstage for two hours every night and then walk across stage with a mop bucket during the ‘Hard-Knock Life’ number,” she says. “Kinda deterred me from the craft after that.” He laughs at this.
“So what happened to your acting career?” she asks, moving a little closer.
“Y’know, you try to major in the arts in college and then realize you’ll never actually have a career and you’ve shamed your parents, so you change your major to something responsible like business and computer science.” He raises his drink and his eyebrows at this, and she thinks she hears a note of bitterness behind his words.
“Right. Well, you’ve done well for yourself, so...”
He quickly raises his beer to clink bottles at this sentiment, the hundredth clink of the night, she thinks.
“And you. You own a restaurant,” he says.
“Past tense. I gave that up,” she adds, and his face makes that shape people’s faces always make when they remember her son and the way her life crumbled in the wake of his death. “Same, though,” she adds before the mood takes a turn. “I was on the business side, the entrepreneur. Grant was the creative, the chef,” she says, kicking herself yet again for bringing up a spouse. Finn doesn’t seem to notice, and they move on to talk about meaningless things: who would play them in the movie of their lives, why there are no good contractors for bathroom renos, and what’s with Janie Nowak a block over who hoards cats, but they laugh far more than she expected, and there are many moments that she forgets why she’s there and simply enjoys the company of this increasingly and surprisingly charming man. Then she remembers herself and feels a flush of shame redden her face.
An actor, she thinks, after he excuses himself to the bathroom. Makes sense. She watches him sway slightly as he returns to the table.
“Let me give you a ride home,” she suggests, knowing that Zach drove him to the pub and he planned on Ubering home.
“Oh, that’s okay. I don’t want to put you out,” he says.
“We live on the same block.” She smiles. “And yes, I’m okay to drive,” she adds. He makes a messyWell, okay, thengesture with the flick of his elbows and then steadies himself against the table to get his bearings.
A small woman with a missing front tooth and an ironicSay No to DrugsT-shirt makes her rounds from table to table, holding a five-gallon bucket of single roses wrapped in plastic.
“A rose for your rose?” she repeats to every guy she walks up to. Most wave her off. One guy in a tank top and a hipster beard buys one for his tiny girlfriend with an impossibly small waist and purple hair. When he goes in for a hug, his exposed armpit hair envelops the woman, and Paige suppresses a gag when she sees a dangling knot of white deodorant hanging from it, right beside the girl’s face. Her staring is interrupted when a crinkly plastic object appears in front of her face. Startled, she whacks at it.
“Jeez,” Finn says, pulling back the rose he was presenting her.
“Sorry, Sorry! I—You startled me. What’s this?”
“It has always been my belief,” he says, hand to heart, “that you never turn down a two-dollar rose from a vendor when there is a beautiful lady present.” He hands it to her, and she takes it but can’t hold back her laugh at the obnoxiousness of it all. She’s suddenly a junior in college again at a stinky bar dealing with drunk men who think they’re charming. She wonders how many of these roses wilted on her dashboard after nights out at the bar in those days.
