“No, I’ll order in,” he insists, but she’s already in rain boots and out the door before he can protest, because the real reason she’s rushing out has nothing to do with dinner. If Drew says he’s hanging out at Blanc’s, she wants to see if he’s lying. If he is actually there, she wants to see his demeanor. Is he subdued, acting off with his friends? Will she even be able to tell? She hasn’t seen him since she found the stuff in his room. Ever since they got him a car for his sixteenth birthday a fewmonths ago, she lives on more of a hope and a prayer that he’s doing the right thing, trusting him without any reason not to. Until now. Now it’s time she starts finding out for herself.
As she drives the short distance to Blanc’s Barbecue, she feels like she’ll never get used to actually being a “Blanc.” It was different in New York. Tom and his father and brother have a restaurant in Manhattan and had another in Baton Rouge where it all started, so Tom was the one who ran the New York location alongside his father, and his brother ran the Baton Rouge store until it closed some years ago due to family drama they don’t talk about. Even though Sasha and Tom have been married for seven years, she never gets used to the semi-famous last name. Tom’s family grew a multimillion-dollar business off their first endeavor, “Blanc’s Brisket,” which made a killing in the frozen-food space. After selling the company for a stupid amount of money, his dad started the first two restaurants, and now they’ve opened a Cloverhill location. Guy Fieri from the Food Network even came to film an episode there and called it some of the best barbecue north of the Mason-Dixon.
Maybe it feels weird since it’s not Sasha’s success, but it makes her immediately defensive when people comment on it—like she didn’t have her own successes and a whole life before she met Tom—but she supposes that’s her own baggage to sort out. In New York it was different because nobody knew who the hell she was outside of her close circles. Here, however, she can’t hide the association with the name. When Tom’s dad wanted a slower pace of life in his golden years, he thought it would be nice to have a Blanc’s Barbecue location in Cloverhill Lakes—one of the Northeast’s safest and most sought-after communities.
She thinks he mostly wanted to give Tom permission to move his family out of the city, and Sasha sort of leaped at the chance when Tom proposed the idea. She would have preferred Baton Rouge or somewhere warmer, of course, but it was still a good move since they thought it would be better for Drew—not that they were trying to manufacture his popularity at school or anything, but they figured the restaurant could be the place all the teens hung out—they’d create a back room with pinball machines and a soda fountain, andbam. And it worked. All the teens do hang out there, but Drew still skulks around mostly by himself. He’ll be angry at Sasha about his father the rest of his life, but there’s really not much she can do to change that at this point.
And he does have friends, of course. He has a couple boys from band he hangs out with—a tuba player and a bass player—and that’s great. They’re good kids. It’s all fine, she tells herself. Everything is going to be okay. He’s a good kid, too, at heart. She knows he is.
She decides to enter the restaurant through the side door by the kitchen to pick up the order she called in on her way over—that way she can canvass the dining room quickly and look for Drew before he spots her. Wally smiles from the kitchen and brings out two large bags of barbecue chicken with all the sides as soon as she steps inside, so she’s standing in the back hall hugging the giant bag while trying to look nonchalant at the same time. She spots Drew right away in a corner booth and breathes a sigh of relief. He’s there like he said. Not somewhere planning bomb threats. Of course not. She does not see tuba guy, Brian, or bass player, Elija, with him as expected, though. Instead, he sits looking across the checkered tablecloth and drippy candles at Roxie, Andi’s daughter,whom she figured would be on a short leash at home while all the Tia stuff is being sorted out, but there they are.
She’s sitting at the edge of the booth with her coat still on, holding a take-out bag of food. Drew pulls apart a bread roll mindlessly, and she grabs a piece of it and shoves it into her mouth. They laugh. Oh, my God, they’re flirting. Sasha’s not sure how to feel about this. She edges around to the hall where the restrooms are and gets as close to their booth as she can to see if she can catch just a sliver of their conversation.
“I should probably go,” Roxie says. “My mom already texted twice. She’s totally freaking out over all this.”
“I thought you said she hated Tia. Why is she freaking so much?”
“Right? Tia is fine and everyone knows it. She’s trying to get attention. Her and my dad had some big fight after my mom dropped us off and she’s just making my dad pay for it. That’s what I think. That’s what happens with gold diggers.”
“What do you mean?” Drew asks her.
“She’s half his age and looks like Malibu Barbie. It’s not a huge surprise she only wants money. I wouldn’t be surprised if a ransom note turns up and when he pays it, she takes off with a fortune.”
“Jesus. You really think she’s faking all this—like, that she’d do that?”
“Maybe.” Roxie shrugs. “Come on. Didn’t your mom marry Tom for the money? Don’t they all?” she says, and Sasha feels a surge of adrenaline rush through her. She didn’t even know Tom had money until well into the relationship,you little twit, she thinks but doesn’t say, of course.
“I never thought about it,” Drew says. He deflects but doesn’t exactly stand up for his mother.
“I mean, no offense,” Roxie adds. “Just sayin’. Must be nice to be a hot chick and get whatever you want.” Sasha hears an awkward pause in the conversation.
“You don’t think you’re a hot chick?” Drew asks, and as offended as Sasha feels by where this conversation has led, she also feels a little inner cheer that Drew sort of knows how to say the right thing to a girl. She’s never seen him interact with one before, so it’s all a little surprising, and a bit weird.
“Oh, shut up,” Roxie says.
“No, you are. You shouldn’t doubt that,” he says.
“Yeah, whatever,” she giggles insecurely, and from where Sasha is listening, it sounds like Roxie’s standing up now, so Sasha inches back a little bit farther in the hallway.
“I gotta get back before she reports me missing,” she says.
“Ha-ha,” Drew says. “Later.”
“Later,” Roxie repeats, and Sasha sees the back of her as she walks to the front glass doors, pushes them open and disappears into the dark parking lot. She’s about to go over to Drew, but something makes her stop. She peers around the corner and sees him dropping some crumpled ones onto the table for tip money, taking one last bread roll from the basket and shrugging on his coat.
Sasha doesn’t hesitate—she just slips out the side door and into her car, which is parked inconspicuously by the dumpster near the back kitchen entrance. Then she watches him. She watches him get into his birthday-gift car and back out, and as soon as he pulls out of the lot, she is right on his tail.
As he makes his way to the main road, Sasha stays a few car lengths behind and follows him. It’s not like him to go home before curfew and he has a little time, so wherewillhe go? She follows him, nervous, palms sweating.
He takes a left on Crestridge. Okay, he’s probably headed home. After a while he passes the turn for home and keeps driving east. Then, he takes a quick right onto First Street. She tries to think where he could be stopping. First Street leads to the interstate. It heads out of town. There are very few undesirable establishments in Cloverhill Lakes, but this weird stretch of road leading out of town has a liquor store, a sex shop, some bail bonds places and also a few beat-up gas stations. She watches Drew pull in and park under the awning of a closed-down burger joint called Hefty’s. It’s dark and abandoned. What the hell could he possibly be doing there?
She pulls into the gas station across the street, drives up to a pump and turns her car off. She opens the camera on her phone and zooms in until she can get a clear view of him. He sits in the car a few minutes, but then he gets out and looks around, side to side, with an incredibly paranoid expression. Then he knocks? For some godforsaken reason, heknockson the door of a place that has boarded-up windows covered in graffiti.
Her heart just about stops as she sees a figure open the door. Someone is in there. Why? She doesn’t see any more than the side of a hood and an arm, but Drew talks to the person for a moment. Then she watches Drew take some money out of his pocket and hand it to the figure, who counts the bills. Then the figure hands Drew a bag—something the size of a small backpack, but it’s hard to really make it out clearly. It just looks like a dark mass. It’s all she can glimpse before Drew tucks it into his coat, gets back in the car and drives off in the direction of home.
Fuck.
Chapter Six
