Amy:I could come to Manhattan part-time, I guess.
Amy:Harrogate might be nice. You know, more space. I could be closer to the flowers. I would have a real bed.
Elsie:Our standards are so low.
Sophie:You might not want to make any decisions until after the town hall meeting. You always say you’re not moving back to Harrogate after you’ve been through a town hall meeting.
Amy:At least they serve free alcohol.
10
Sebastian
There was a special level of hell reserved for the small-town town hall meeting.
And below that level was another level of small-town-meeting hell in which everyone in attendance was inebriated. While one might think the addition of alcohol should make the usually tedious process quaint and kooky, it instead put the town meeting in the realm of existential crisis.
“You have a choice of a cosmo or a Ginger Rogers,” Zoe said when I walked up to the food table.
“Can I have a whisky?” I asked hopefully.
“What part of cosmo or Ginger Rogers did you not understand?”
“I’ll take the Ginger Rogers.”
“I used to know a gal named Ginger Rogers,” remarked Ida, a local senior who knew everything about everyone and seemed to be active in every facet of town life.
“From the movies?” I asked as Zoe poured the drink into a paper cup.
“What happened to the glasses?”
“After the fight last month, we aren’t using glasses,” she informed me.
“Give the man a little more alcohol in that cup,” Ida ordered Zoe, who rolled her eyes.
“Now, I’m not that old,” Ida continued, piling a plate high with food for me. “No, I knew her during my stint in porn.” She looked at me expectantly.
I sighed. I didn’t want to know, but there we went.
“You did porn?”
“I didn’t do it. I produced it during the Wild West days of the early internet,” Ida said proudly. “You could literally put anything remotely sexual online and charge out the wazoo for it! That’s how I got the money to renovate my general store.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Hey, stop blocking the snack table!” someone yelled.
“Cool your tits, Dottie!” Ida hollered.
“Don’t mind her,” Ida said, patting me on the arm. “The guy she’s been seeing has night terrors after he eats too much shrimp. He woke up one night screaming and put a giant hole in her bathroom wall. Broke her toilet. It was a custom pink model from the seventies. You can’t get it anymore. She’s pretty salty. Don’t forget your town-meeting canasta card.”
In a daze, I went to my seat.
“Why am I here?” I asked, staring at the crowd.
“I ask myself that same question,” Hunter said, sitting beside me. “Then I remember that I come to stare at my extremely sexy fiancée.”
“Canasta!” someone yelled.
