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Lila: That’s actually adorable.
Serena: We are going to drink cheap wine in a recreation hall and paint the same landscape as approximately twenty senior citizens.
Calla: HE WANTS TO DO COUPLES ACTIVITIES WITH YOU
Serena: He wants to interrogate the elderly.
Lila: Both things can be true.
Serena: I just don’t really know if he meant actual date, or if he really wants to go on a date, or if he felt obligated to do something like this with me because we had sex.
Lila: YOU HAD SEX WITH BARYN?
Calla: AND YOU WERE PLANNING TO TELL US WHEN?!
Serena: I wasn’t aware I had a reporting obligation.
Calla: WAS IT GOOD
Serena: I am not submitting a performance review.
Calla: oh it was GOOD good
Serena: Anyway.
Calla: THERE IS NO ANYWAY
Lila: Oh, god. Baryn is going to be my brother-in-law.
Serena: I have no intention of making my personal relationships a matter of public record.
Calla: he’s SO going to be our BIL!
22
MIXED MEDIA
SERENA
The rec hall is exactly as advertised: a squat cinderblock building divided into two wings, with the entrance tucked between them beneath a shallow arch. A pair of flagpoles stands out front, their metal dulled and the concrete around their bases cracked with age.
The parking lot is more crowded than I expected, which still only amounts to maybe twelve cars scattered across enough asphalt for fifty.
A battered compact. Two mud-splattered pickup trucks, one of them old enough to vote. A minivan with a stick-figure family slowly peeling itself off the rear window. An aging station wagon unloading three women, each carrying a bottle of wine. Nothing newer than five or six years. Nothing expensive enough to be remarkable.
Baryn’s car already looks mildly ridiculous among them.
“Your vehicle is lowering the average property value of the parking lot by making everything around it look worse.”
He looks offended. “I think you mean raising it.”
“No. I meant what I said.”
Near the entrance, the three women from the station wagon are now arguing over whose job it was to remember the corkscrew.
It appears Stillwater has been waiting all week to test the relationship between alcohol consumption and declining artistic standards.
Inside smells like furniture polish and a faint undercurrent of mildew that says this place floods at least twice a year. We check in at a folding table, where a woman in a crocheted vest and three pounds of costume jewelry hands us each a name tag and a stack of coupons for the town’s only liquor store.
