Holiday wore a blue silk dress with a modest amount of cleavage showing. She looked terrific. On the other hand, I looked ridiculous in the blond wig and moustache—which made the Lambrusco Red, lobster tails, steak, baked potato, and the crème brûlée a chore, and made Holiday smile.
A glance up the street after dinner told us there was no point in walking around, especially with the temperature in the low forties and dropping, so we hit the Wyatt Earp bar and spent a couple of hours running the tab up another forty-two bucks. Holiday turned heads and I got looks that said “what the hell is a girl like that doing with a dipshit-lookin’ loser like you.”
Holiday switched to Long Island iced teas, which promised to be interesting. Halfway through her second one, she said, “I told Jeri about my . . . my past.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Which is why she’s okay with us being together like this. One reason, anyway.”
“Uh-huh.”
“You sure do ‘uh-huh’ a lot.”
“Only when I don’t have any idea how to respond.”
“You’ve never asked me much about my past.”
“I know you were in the Peace Corps. And you’re a pretty good pool player and a hell of a serious student.”
She made a face. “There’s more. I mean, I’ve been kind of . . . you know, free around you. I feel like I owe you an explanation.”
“Whenever you’re ready.”
“I’ll think about it. Anyway, I wouldn’t tell you here. Maybe later, upstairs.”
“Well, then, how ’bout another Long Island, kiddo?”
“Oh, sure. Get me drunk, get me loose. You’re a bad person, Mort. Really.”
“Everyone says so, so it must be true.”
“It is. Okay, I’ll have one more of these little puppies.”
She drank less than half so she wasn’t slurring her words much and she didn’t stagger up the stairs to the fourth floor, but I had an arm around her waist to make sure she made it safely.
I am trained and therefore skilled in the art of taking clothes off a woman who’s had too much to drink. Turns out it wasn’t necessary with Holiday, but she did have me unzip her dress and hold her arm while she stepped out of it. She ambled off to the bathroom in panties, and I heard teeth being brushed. She came out, no longer overdressed, and piled into bed. “Your turn.”
I went in, came out minutes later in underwear, which earned me another, “Spoilsport.”
I got into bed, kept the offending article of clothing on, and turned out the light. She moved a little closer in the dark and found my left hand, held it in both of hers.
We lay there for five minutes without speaking, connected by hands, then she said, “When I was young, my father was killed in a motorcycle accident. Some guy ran a red light and Dad was hit by a car doing over forty miles an hour. He died instantly. He was twenty-seven, three years older than I am now—practically a kid, now that twenty-seven doesn’t seem very old anymore.”
I murmured something about being sorry, but she didn’t respond to that. Holding my hand was all she wanted or needed. She gave it a little squeeze from time to time as she talked. This, then, was what Jeri knew, what she had heard. Maybe all of this with Holiday was about to make some sort of sense.
“I wasn’t quite five years old when he was killed. Allie hadn’t even turned one. Suddenly my mother was alone with two kids. She was only twenty-six. I can’t imagine being twenty-six with two kids that young, husband gone like that.
“But she was incredibly beautiful and still young. Half a year later she married a nice enough guy—Gerald. Her name is Barbara, by the way, but everyone calls her Barb. Gerald was twelve years older than her, not a lot, really. It’s not like he got himself a trophy wife after dumping the first. He’d never been married, but he fell for my mom. Hard. They’re still married, in case you’re wondering.
“He was in imports. Didn’t export anything. But he’d go off to Singapore to buy stuff, negotiate prices. And Bangkok, Hong Kong, Taiwan, the Philippines. Not so much to Japan. He was fairly rich then—not nearly as rich as he is now—but he was building up the business so he traveled a lot and he took his beautiful new wife with him every time, especially the first six or eight years.”
The room wasn’t entirely dark. Light filtered in through filmy curtains across a window facing the main street. Headlights sent moving shadows across the ceiling. Holiday turned on her side and faced me. I could see the shine of her eyes. She held my hand a little tighter. A warm breast touched my left arm, which was distracting and nice because of my pig gene.
“They couldn’t take me and Allie with them on those buying trips. They would go off for two weeks at a time, sometimes as long as a month. When they did, I stayed with my aunt Alice, who was . . . odd. Nice, but different compared to the rest of the world. She’s my mother’s sister, nine years older than my mom. Alice had, well, has, two kids of her own, which I’ve got to tell you about, but first you have to know that Aunt Alice, was—still is—a professor at the University of San Francisco. She teaches multiculturalism classes, among other things. She was a child all through the middle sixties and early
