Page 4 of Wrong Number, Right Grumpy Bouncer

"She owes me for June and July," I say, mostly to myself, doing math. "Two months, split fifty-fifty on a fourteen-hundred-dollar apartment, that's seven hundred dollars per month she just walked away from. If I drink this entire cabinet at forty dollars a bottle on average, that's maybe two hundred in recovered value, which isn't the full fourteen hundred, but it's something; it's a start. Better than nothing."

"Are you doing debt math with alcohol?"

"I'm doing restorative justice." I unscrew the tequila. It smells like a decision I'm going to have opinions about tomorrow. "This is the least I can do. For me. Compensation. She left me holding the bag; I'm going to hold this instead."

Sunny's laughing on the other end, the laugh that means she's given up trying to talk me out of something and switched to just enjoying the ride. "Okay, restorative justice queen. Pace yourself. I mean that."

I pace myself for one shot.

By the second, the packing slows down considerably, mostly because folding a fitted sheet requires coordination I no longer have access to. By the third, I've abandoned the fitted sheet as a lost cause and moved on to narrating my entire employment history to Sunny in a tone that suggests I think this is new information for her.

"Eight years," I tell her, sitting on the floor now, back against the cabinets, the tequila bottle balanced against my knee like a very tiny, very toxic pet. "Eight years, Sunny. I had a title. Senior. It said Senior right on the door plaque. You don't just hand a person a door plaque and then take it back in a conference room with a box of tissues on the table. That's not, that's not how doors work."

"I know, honey."

"I had a five-year plan, a ten-year plan, and a fifteen-year plan. I had the plans laminated." A thought arrives, fully formed and urgent. "Do you think the plastic sleeve thing is a red flag? Like, be honest. Is it a me thing?"

"I think it's extremely you, and I love you for it."

"That's not a no."

We keep going like that for a while, long enough that the tequila's somewhere past halfway and I've started rating my life decisions out loud on a scale I make up on the spot, long enough that Sunny says something gentle about getting some sleep and I agree, mostly because agreeing seems easier than the alternative, and we hang up with the particular softness of two people who've had this exact call a hundred times before.

The apartment goes quiet. I sit on the kitchen floor for a minute, tequila warm in my chest, half a fitted sheet still crumpled in my lap, and that's when I notice the little red numbers on my lock screen.

Two missed calls I sent to voicemail because who answers unknown numbers anymore. One voicemail. One text.

For one idiotic second, my heart does something hopeful and pathetic, like maybe it's the marketing director from that agency that never called me back, like maybe good news travels this late. It is not good news. It is, I remember with the specific dread of a woman piecing together her own crime scene, the man I screamed at for four minutes about a spreadsheet.

I play the voicemail with my thumb shaking slightly, which I blame on the tequila and only the tequila.

“This is the guy you yelled at for four minutes about a spreadsheet. Wrong number. I'm not your landlord; I don't have your file, and I definitely don't have the deposit you think I'm sitting on. You might want to actually dial the guy next time. Hope the eviction thing works out. For what it's worth. The blue rent thing. Solid system.”

I sit with that for a second. Then I read the text underneath it.

Unknown: Wrong number. Not your landlord. Figured you'd want to know before you lawyer up over nothing.

The horror arrives slowly and then all at once, the way it always does. I called a total stranger and workshopped an entire legal case at him. I gave him my employment history unprompted. And I used the word unconscionable on a man who never asked to hear it.

And he complimented my spreadsheet.

"Oh no," I say out loud to the empty kitchen, to Vicky's abandoned rice cooker. "Oh, that's so nice. Why was that so nice?"

The correct response here, the adult response, the response any reasonable sober person would choose, is to text back a short, dignified apology in the morning and never think about this again. I’m not a reasonable sober person tonight. I’m a woman on a kitchen floor with two hundred dollars of recovered restorative justice in her bloodstream, and I’ve never in my life let a wrong done to somebody sit uncorrected overnight, not even when the somebody is a stranger who thinks my rent color-coding is a solid system.

I call him.

He picks up on the second ring, voice low, a little rough, like maybe he wasn't asleep but was somewhere close to it. "Yeah."

"I would like to formally apologize." I enunciate very carefully, the way you do when you're aware your consonants have started drifting. "For the four minutes. And also for calling you again right now, which I recognize is objectively worse, timing-wise, than the original four minutes."

A pause. Long enough that I start composing a follow-up apology for the apology.

"You drunk?"

"I'm processing." I consider this further and decide honesty is the least I owe him at this point. "With tequila. My roommate's tequila. Well, ex-roommate. Ex as of tonight, ex as of a note on a mattress, extremely ex." I hear myself and course-correct. "That's not important. What's important is that I owe you an apology, and I’ve prepared several talking points."

"You prepared talking points. Drunk."