“I tried,” I admit. “He sent it to voice mail. Three times.”
Lachelle winces, as though she’s picturing the same thing I have—Reid looking down at his phone, seeing my name pass across the screen. Pressing the button that readsDECLINE. Helvetica Neue. Cold as ice.
“What’d you say in your messages?”
I blink at her. “Nothing, since I’m under fifty and this is the twenty-first century. Who leaves messages?”
She laughs. “Fair. But I think you should try again.” She lifts a hand in acknowledgment of the Uber she called pulling up at the curb. “Maybe what’s wrong with him is that he likes voice mails.”
When she’s gone, I stand under the restaurant awning for a few seconds, my phone in my hand, wondering if nine thirty on a Friday night is too late to start practicing. I’ve got no doubt I’ll get sent to voice mail again, but this time, I have to listen all the way through his crisp, short message. I have to wait for the beep, I have to—
The phone I’m holding rings.
For a second I stare down at it as though it has some kind of magical power. Since I don’t recognize the number it’s probably a telemarketer, but I guess all my cruel imaginings related to hitting the decline button have warned me against doing the same.
“Hello?”
There is an unholy amount of noise on the other end. I have to move it away from my ear.
“Meg?” A woman’s voice shouts through the clamor. “Meg Mackworth?”
“Hi, yes, this is Meg.” I try to make my voice loud enough to compensate for wherever she must be. A shouting convention, by the sound of it.
“Hey, I’m Gretchen. I tend bar over at Swine? You know it?”
“Uh . . .” I don’t have much of a nightlife these days. And if I did, I’m guessing a place called Swine would not be part of it.
“Brooklyn!” she yells. She tacks on an intersection to narrow it down for me.
“Okay?”
“Do you know a guy called Reid?”
“I do!” I press a finger to my ear, now desperate to hear better, a bolt of anxiety landing straight in my stomach. “Is he all right?”
She laughs. “He’s fine and dandy. Probably he wouldn’t want me calling you, but I think he might’ve lost his phone or something.”
“Oh,” I say, confused. Who would ever describe Reid as “dandy”? Why is he at a bar called Swine? And, for the purposes of my absolute selfishness in regard to this particular matter, did he lose his phone before or after my attempts to reach him?
“I don’t—I’m not sure why you’re calling me?”
“Well, honey,” Gretchen says, laughing over a loud clatter of ice being put into a glass. “He just tried to pay his bar tab with your business card.”
It isn’t where I’d want to have my first fight practice.
Swine is the kind of bar that might make a tourist happy, that might make it into a guidebook for its gimmicky theme, its eagerness to attract a crowd. Oddly enough, the exterior is something Reid and I might’ve snapped a photo of on a walk—a white brick wall with bold, black block lettering, a big drop shadow with diagonal grading, a crude but clever outline of a pig, its various good-for-food parts blocked out and labeled in a thin slab serif. Over an arched opening in the wall there’s a curving script indicating a “Biergarten,” a patio from which plumes of woody smoke rise into the night sky.
But outside of its clever lettering, everything else about this place tells me Reid—and I—would’ve wanted to keep on walking. So far as I can tell, there’s about ten million people in that Biergarten, and every man I can see is wearing some version of the same outfit: boat shoes, no socks, cropped-style khakis or slim-cut shorts, pastel-colored shirts. I almost check my phone to see if I’ve teleported out of Brooklyn into some college town’s rush week.
It’s so incongruous to imagine Reid here that I don’t let myself wonder at my surroundings for long. I push through the heavy front doors into the non-Biergarten part of this sideshow and am met with a wall of noise. The crowd in here is different, more skinny jeans and beards, even a few leather bracelets.
So it’s pretty easy to find the man I came for.
He’s at the end of the long, dark-stained wood bar, wearing his weekend jacket over his weekend T-shirt and jeans. To anyone else, I’m sure his posture looks out of place: upright, overly formal. But I realize I know Reid’s body so well that I can see how his broad shoulders hunch, ever so slightly, over the short glass of amber-colored liquid in front of him, the fingers of one hand curled around it.
That doesn’t look right, I think, ridiculously.It should be a cup of tea.
It’s this final incongruity that propels me forward, no thought to whether this’ll end in a confrontation. I only want himoutof here, out of this place where he doesn’t belong. I take the empty stool next to him and right away he turns his head to me, his eyes widening briefly, those barely hunched shoulders straightening immediately.
