From the kitchen pass-through, Rod asked, “What did you replace it with?”
“Coconut-argan, the good stuff. It’s twelve dollars an ounce.”
Rod whistled. “You spent twelve dollars an ounce on another man’s conditioner? What’s he softening, the hair on his balls?”
Jacks dropped his knife.
Finn snorted.
Even Ruthie lifted her head and panted.
“I spent twelve dollars an ounce on an intervention. His hair was a disaster, Rod. His hair was a war zone. His hair was—”
“His hair was fine,” Finn said with his Irish pleasantfuckingness. “I’ve met the man. His hair is fine.”
“His hair is better now. That’s my whole point. I made it better. I improved his life through the medium of hair care products, and he acknowledged it, Rod. He wrote ‘the conditioner is acceptable’ on a Post-it note, which in Peter Loupier language is basically a marriage proposal.”
The bar went dead still.
Ruthie lowered her head and closed her eyes.
It wasn’t the comfortable quiet of a slow afternoon.
Oh no, it was the specific, pointed quiet thathappens when someone says something revealing, and everyone in the room hears it, and the person who said it hasn’t caught up yet.
I rewound and replayed my sentence.
“Oh, come on, guys. That was hyperbole, obvi,” I said quickly. “That was comedic exaggeration for narrative effect. I was using ‘marriage proposal’ as a metaphor for ‘mild approval.’ It’s a scale. At one end of the scale is ‘Peter hates it’ and at the other end is ‘marriage proposal,’ and ‘the conditioner is acceptable’ lands somewhere in the middle. It’s a spectrum . . . filled with colors . . . like a rainbow.”
Jacks had retrieved his knife and was cutting a lime with extreme, preternatural focus, as though the lime required his undivided attention, and he could not possibly spare any of that attention for my unraveling.
Rod retreated fully behind the pass-through window, though I could see his shoulders shaking.
Finn, who had stopped counting bottles and was leaning against the shelf with his arms crossed, said, “Benji.”
“What.”
“You bought him conditioner.”
“An intervention, Finn. Nothing more. Nothing less.”
“Twelve-dollar-an-ounce conditioner. That’s aged whiskey for hair.”
“His hair was sad and mopey, Finn.”
“And you’ve been timing his showers.”
“I havenotbeen timing his—” I stopped.
I had, at some point during the shelf narrative, mentioned the twelve-minute shower duration. I had mentioned it casually, as background detail, the way a person mentions the weather or the time of day. I had not considered until that exact moment that knowing the precise length of one’s roommate’s shower routine was not, in fact, normal background information.
“The bathroom shares a wall with the foster room,” I said. “The water is very audible. It’s loud water, an acoustic situation.”
Thank God, Mia walked in before Finn could recite some limerick or sing some stupid hobbit song about water and love and whiskey-conditioner, which I was sure Tolkien had written because that man had way too much time on his hands for too many decades, hence the whole elf language thing.
Mia didn’t work Tuesdays, but she’d developed a sixth sense for moments of maximum Benj-tastrophe.
“What did I miss?” she asked, settling onto a stool with her phone already out.
