I turned and stared at my best friend. “You didn’t tell me there were seats in the back.”
“I absolutely did.”
“You steered me here.”
“I’d never.”
Finn had the wide, clear eyes of a man whoverymuchwould, andvery muchhad, and was enjoying the harvest enormously.
Ineeda watched the two of us with the dawning joy of a woman who had just realized the night’s best material was sitting in row one and had come pre-assembled. “Oh, this is good. This is a love story. No, hush, I can see it from up here.” She leveled the fan at Finn. “Look at him. He’s lit up like a chapel at Christmas, watchin’ you get taken apart. He didn’t bring you here for the charity, baby. He brought you for the show. And the show isyou,Sugar Cakes.”
“Oh, no, miss!” Finn offered, unprompted, because he had clearly decided to hand the woman every single thing she could want. “We tried datin’ once. It lasted about as long as a pint does in this place. So now I just mind him.”
“You mind him?” Ineeda repeated, savoring each word, as she steepled her fingers, eternal nails clicking.
“Somebody has to. He went to Atlanta once for a vacation. There was a pool filled with boys. He never got in.”
“He didn’t get in the pool!” Ineeda clutched ather sequins as though she’d taken a bullet. “Sir, that might be the saddest thing I’ve heard, and once I opened the show with a number about my third divorce. No. No. No. I won’t have it. Not on my stage. Not on a Thursday.” She drew herself up to her full, towering height, light bouncing off her sequins in every direction, and addressed the room like a general declaring war. “We are goin’ to fix this man if it’s the last thing this charity does. Somebody bring me my raffle tickets.”
I turned slowly back to Finn and hissed, “What did you do?”
“Nothin’.” He suddenly became deeply, suspiciously absorbed in the label of his beer.
“Finnigan.”
“It’sfor charity,” he said, in the exact tone that told me I was going to find out about what he’d done in approximately ninety seconds.
The truth was that I hadn’t wanted to come at all. I’d had a permit office that had been ignoring me for nine business days, a drywall subcontractor who had flaked on the Hargrove job twice, and a phone full of messages I could just as easily have ignored from my own couch.
I had said no.
In fact, I’d said no four separate times, each one firmer than the last.
Finn had simply kept turning up at my door with the patient inevitability of afternoon summer storms until I put on the cleanest shirt I owned, which was a work shirt, and let myself be walked eight blocks to a bar off the main strip in Ybor where a hand-glittered banner over the stage read, “SISTERS OF PERPETUAL FABULOSITY—CHARITY NIGHT.”
He steered us straight to the front, swearing the whole way they were the only seats left, and settled in beside me with the shit-eatingest grin ever to cross lips.
Now, I understood.
The front row meantIwas the show.
Finn had known that walking through the door.
He’d set me up.
“You bought raffle tickets?” I asked, resignation overtaking every other emotion in my voice.
“I boughtusraffle tickets,” he replied, dangling a strip of pink perforated paper.
“You boughtmetickets, you mean. This is part of your evil master plan, isn't it?”
“I boughtustickets. You’ll thank me for it, because the grand prize is genuinely mad.” He drew another folded strip of tickets from his pocket, gone soft at the creases from handling, and laid it on the table between us like a man setting down a winninghand he didn’t yet know he held. “It’s a week at an all-inclusive resort—flights and the lot. Some travel company donated the whole thing as a promotion. It’s worth more than my car.”
“Everything’s worth more than your car,” I said.
“That’s not the point and you know it.” He jabbed a finger at me, still flushed and glowing from the last five minutes of my suffering. “The point is, for twenty dollars to the youth center, there’s a chance you’ll get sent somewhere with a beach and be made to lie on it. If you don’t win, I’ve still had the best night of my life watching a queen dice you into pieces. I come out ahead no matter how it lands.”
On stage, Ineeda had produced a fishbowl from somewhere within the architecture of her gown and now was hoisting it high. A second queen, smaller and meaner-looking, introduced only as Sister Mary Frequent Flyer, worked the back of the room for last-minute sales.
