Moonlight Mile

“I have to get back to work.”

“Play hooky. They won’t know the difference.”

“I’ll know the difference.”

“Integrity,” she said. “How overrated.”

She flicked her thumb and the quarter tumbled toward the ceiling, then tumbled back to the table. It landed on the paycheck, equidistant between my water and her beer.

Heads.

“Shit,” she said.

When the waiter passed, I gave him his quarter back and asked for the check. While he rang up the bill, we didn’t say a word. She finished her light beer. I finished my water. The waiter ran my credit card and I did the math for a good tip. The next time he passed, I handed him the bill.

I looked across the table into her large, almond eyes. Her lips were parted; if you knew where to look you would see a small chip at the bottom of her upper left incisor.

“Let’s do it anyway,” I said.

“The room.”

“Yes.”

“The box spring.”

“Si.”

“Sheets so wrinkled they’ll never be ironed out.”

“Let’s not set the bar too high.”

She flipped open her cell and called the hotel. After a few moments, she said to me, “They have a room.”

“Book it.”

“This is so decadent.”

“It was your idea.”

My wife spoke into the phone. “We’ll take that one if it’s available now.” She gave me another giddy look, as if we were sixteen and borrowing her father’s car without his knowledge. She tilted her jaw back toward the phone. “Last name is Kenzie.” She spelled it out. “Yes. K as in ‘kangaroo.’ First name is Angie.”

***

In the room, I said, “Would you prefer I call you Angie? Or Dominique?”

“The question is which one do you prefer?”

“I like ’em both.”

“Both it is.”

“Hey.”

“Yeah?”

“How can we wreck the sheets from over here on the dresser?”

“Good point. You got me?”

“I got you.”

***

After we’d dozed to the distant honks and beeps of rush-hour traffic ten stories below, Angie propped herself up on her elbow and said, “This was crazy.”

“It was.”

“Can we afford it?”

She knew the answer, but I said it anyway. “Probably not.”

“Shit.” She looked down at the white sheets with their high thread count.

I touched her shoulder. “Every now and then, we should get to live a little. D-S pretty much assured me they’d hire me on permanent after this job.”

She looked up at me, then back at the sheets. “ ‘Pretty much’ isn’t ironclad.”

“I know that.”

“They’ve been dangling this fucking permanence in front of you for-”

“I know.”

“-too long. It’s not right.”

“I know it’s not. But what am I going to do?”

She scowled. “What if they don’t make a real offer?”

I shrugged. “I don’t know.”

“We’re almost out of money.”

“I know.”

“And we have an insurance bill coming up.”

“I know.”

“Is that all you can say? ‘I know’?”

I realized my teeth were gritted hard enough to snap. “I’m sucking it up, Ange, and doing jobs I don’t like for a company I’m not terribly in love with so that eventually I can get hired permanent and we can get insurance and benefits and a paid vacation. I don’t like it any more than you do but until you finish school and get a job again, I don’t know what else I can do or fucking say that will change things.”

We each took a breath, our faces a little too red, the walls a little too close.

“I’m just talking about it,” she said softly.

I looked out the window for a minute, felt all the black fear and stress of the last couple of years crowding my skull and revving my heart.

Eventually, I said, “This is the best option I see on the table right now. If Duhamel-Standiford keeps playing carrot-on-a-stick, then, yeah, we’ll have to reconsider what I’m doing. Let’s hope they don’t.”

“Okay,” she said and it came out riding a long, slow exhalation.

“Look at it this way,” I said, “the debt’s so big and we’re so financially fucked that the bonus money we just blew on the hotel room wouldn’t have made a dent.”

She tapped her fingers lightly on my chest. “Ain’t you sweet to say?”

“Oh, I’m a helluva guy. You didn’t know?”

“I knew.” She hooked a leg over mine.

“Pshaw,” I said.

Outside, the horns grew more insistent. I pictured the strangled traffic. Nothing moving, nothing even appearing to.

I said, “We leave now or we leave an hour from now, we’ll get home the same time.”

“What do you have in mind?”

“Shameful, shameful things.”

She rolled on top of me. “We have the sitter till seven-thirty.”

“Ample time.”

She lowered her head until our foreheads touched. I kissed her. It was the kind of kiss we’d taken for granted a few years ago-deep and unhurried. When we broke it, she took a slow breath and then leaned back in and we tried another one.

Angie said, “Let’s have a few dozen more of those…”

“Okay.”

“And then a bit more of that thing we tried an hour ago…”

“That was interesting, wasn’t it?”