Jenna wasso closeto not coming tonight, she’d felt that out of sorts. She’d forced herself to because it would be her last trivia night. She wasn’t going to let Yaya’s woo-woo prediction or her pathetic obsession steal her final Trivia Night. Especially since they’d yet to dethrone The Quizney Princesses, the reigning champions.
She walked in and glanced around the bar. It was packed. All the usual suspects were there, but she didn’t see any of her teammates. It was strange, because typically, Robbie and Kiki were the first to arrive. Jenna checked her phone to make sure she hadn’t received any messages cancelling tonight’s festivities. There were none. Kiki had the day off, but Robbie had been in. They lived together, were roommates, but she hadn’t heard anything from either of them.
JT’s Roadhouse was an institution in Hope Falls. If Main Street had a beating heart, JT’s was the left ventricle, pumping light, noise, and whiskey through the town. The blueprint for every “authentic” small-town mountain bar Jenna had ever seen in a movie or TV show, a fever dream of burnished wood, neon beer signs, and the smell of fried food clinging to every surface like an existential truth. It was a barn-sized rectangle on the edge of the highway, a place where the parking lot filled with mud-streaked trucks and ancient sedans even on weeknights, where the air always vibrated with the echo of last night’s karaoke and the low hum of chronic heartbreak.
Jenna paused inside the vestibule, letting the wave ofwarmth and sound roll over her, the heated rush of old jokes and half-fueled arguments, the clang of pool balls, and arguing with someone about the Niners’ playoff chances. There were several couples on the dance floor enjoying Niall Horan’s “Slow Hands” playing from the juke box that lined the back wall. The dining tables were crowded with trivia teams, some in coordinated outfits, with themes ranging from matching bowling shirts, tiaras and boas, to Inspector Gadget cosplay looks. Her team was not that organized, which was nice since she was going to be quitting and would have felt guilty if anyone had invested money or time into it and then she let them down.
Without much else to do but wait, she signed in her team, grabbed a table, shrugged out of her jacket, and let herself slouch, feeling the tension in her shoulders start to uncoil, onto a chair. The server tonight was Libby, a sweet college student with the face of an angel, purple-tipped hair, an eyebrow and lip piercing, and an edge that told everyone she came in contact with she would just as easily stab you with a fork as serve you if you crossed her. Jenna loved that energy. She wished she’d been born with more of it, then she might have been able to pass it down to Blake.
Jenna ordered a Dr. Pepper a large order of sweet potato fries and continued to go through the mental Rolodex of every man she’d ever met from her past to try and suss out which one was her soul mate because what if Yaya was psychic? She knew she should let it go, but that conversation was the most action her personal life had gotten in the past eighteen months.
As she waited for her order and for her team to arrive, her phone vibrated. She glanced down, sure it was going to be Tiana, Robbie, or Kiki cancelling, and saw a message from Blake.
Every time she got a call or message from her, she couldn’t help but smile. Her daughter randomly changed her contact in her phone one day when she asked to borrow it to look up directions to where a boutique they were going to in Sacramento was because her phone was “dead.” When they got to said boutique, and Jenna saw that she’d changed her contact from Blake to Peanut (BDITW), she knew what Peanut was, that’s what she always called her, but she asked what the initialism stood for. Blake looked at her like it was obvious and said, “Best Daughter in the World.”
Of course, why hadn’t she thought of that?
Jenna then asked her daughter what she was saved under in her phone, and Blake quickly showed her, on her phone, that was not dead after all. She was saved as Wonder Woman (BMITW), and because Blake knew how much Jenna hated photos of herself, her icon was Wonder Woman.
Having a teenage daughter was like being strapped to a rocket-boosted emotional roller coaster with no brakes. In the span of an hour Jenna could be accused of ruining her daughter’s life and, within less time than it took to do a load of laundry, could be credited with saving the world. It was difficult not to get whiplash from the constant flip-flopping.
Peanut (BDITW)
mom where is my charger?! I left it on the counter!!!
Jenna sighed. Whenever she started a text with mom, she knew she was in trouble. And three exclamation points was an accusation thatshehad moved her daughter’s charger. Which she had, but only out of necessity.
Jenna quickly replied.
Wonder Woman (BMITW)
you left your charger in your gym bag. again. I had to unravel it from your dirty clothes so it didn’t get washed. again. it’s above the dryer.
About thirty seconds later Jenna got another text.
Peanut (BDITW)
tysm ly
Thank you so much, love you, was not exactly sorry for accusing you of moving my charger, but Jenna would take it. She messaged back to her daughter that she loved her more and waited.
And waited. Once the food and her drink arrived and none of her team had, she sent out a group text asking where everyone was.
Within fifteen seconds she got a text back from Tiana saying she was on her way. She took a drink of her Dr. Pepper and ate a few sweet potato fries when she spotted Shelby Dorsey getting accosted in a darkened corner of the hallway, that only she had the angle to see from her seat, by her husband, Levi, who owned the bar. He couldn’t keep his hands off of her, he was grinding up on her and grabbing her ass like he was at a ’90s middle school dance and a Jodeci song just started playing.
Shelby was the Trivia Night MC, and although Jenna couldn’t hear them or read lips, she would put money on the current situation being Levi trying to talk Shelby into going in the office for a quickie and her telling him no, that she needed to get ready for the Trivia Night.
Oh boy, he was really putting in work. Jenna could seehe was wearing her down. The way his hands were roaming her back, he was nuzzling her neck. Shelby was shaking her head no, but the look in her eye was saying yes.
She watched as he whispered something in her ear, Shelby’s lips parted on a gasp, and her eyes shut as she nodded. That was it. A second later, the office door was opened, he had his wife whisked inside, it shut, and the hallway was empty.
No one would have any idea the two were in there, but Jenna knew. She wished she didn’t, because she actually felt envious of them.
She’d always jealous of people who were in relationships, people with families but nothing else. She was never jealous of anything material or physical. She was five foot two, curvy, blonde, with blue eyes. Did she wish she looked like Gal Gadot? Sure. She’d love to have legs a mile long, a bone structure that you could cut glass on, and flawless, roll-out-of-bed, magazine-shoot-ready skin, but she was never jealous of her.
Would she like to have a nicer house, or car, or not stress about living paycheck to paycheck or how she was going to afford to pay for Blake’s living expenses when she was in college? Of course, but she never felt envious of people who had that luxury.
But when it came to people who had true love, who had a strong family unit, you might as well paint her green and call her the Jolly Green Giant, or she guessed the Hulk would be more appropriate to compare her to than the Jolly Green Giant, cause she wasn’t jolly. She knew her feelings of jealousy stemmed from her childhood. All she wanted as a child was a family. All she wanted as an adult was the same thing. So seeing happy couples and happy familiesall around her was hard. She wanted to be happy for them. She knew she should just appreciate her little family with Blake, and she did. She was blessed. Very blessed. Why did she feel like a terrible person for envying her friends?
