Beginnings and Ends (Short Story) Read Free

only those people I trust, and I can’t ask them to do that, because AA
has
to be open to everyone, and
that’s
not even touching on the fact that it’s a pretty major problem for everyone else in the meeting when there’s an armed FBI agent in the back of the room. It kinda deals a death blow to the whole anonymity thing and—”
    Jules interrupted his rant. “Why don’t you start with the bad thing that happened,” he suggested. “With the … new PA …?”
    Robin looked up from his misery, and his eyes were very, very blue and surprised. “Oh, shit,” he said. “You think—No! Jesus! God, Jules, no! That’s not … The new PA—his name is Grant, and he’s, like, twelve years old and completely clueless, and totally king-of-dungeons-and-dragons het, by the way. But when Enastacia gave him the job of refilling the whiskey bottles on set, he didn’t use tea. He used …”
    “Real whiskey,” Jules finished for Robin. Oh, shit.
    “In the scene we filmed …,” Robin told Jules. “It was in Richie’s office, and my blocking was to pick up the bottle and chug from it, you know? I don’t use a glass—if I had, I would’ve smelled it.”
    Richie West was Joe Laughlin’s ridiculously smarmy manager, and they were no doubt arguing about his suggestion that Joe marry the starlet he was currently “dating.” Jules hadn’t read this week’s shooting script, but he knew the story was moving in that direction.
    “How much did you drink?” Jules asked, working to keep his voice even, because WTF? If it wasn’t clueless Grant’s fault—and Jules could argue about
that
—then it certainly was Enastacia’s. How had something like this happened?
    But Robin was shaking his head. “I didn’t,” he said. “Drink. I spit it out. All over Quincy and the set.”
    Jesus, that was a relief, except … “Uh-oh,” Jules said. Mark Quincy, who was a raging diva, played Richie.
    “No, Quince was great about it,” Robin told him earnestly. “He realized, right away, what had happened. I mean, it was all over him, so he could smell it, too. He had a bottle of water in his desk drawer, and he helped me rinse out my mouth while everyone else was just standing there, like idiots, with their thumbs up their asses.”
    This wouldn’t’ve happened if Dolphina had been there. But Robin and Jules’s incredibly efficient personal assistant was on vacation this week. She and her husband, Will, had gone camping. Which was still a little surreal to imagine. Dolphina, in a tent, cooking over an open fire, wearing boots instead of heels, her Bollywood-perfect hair pulled back in a ponytail threaded through the back of a Red Sox baseball cap …
    Robin was thinking close to the same thing. “Dolphina’s never going to take another day off,” he said with a sigh.
    “Dolphina will be fine,” Jules told him. “Let’s focus right now on you. What do you need? How can I help?”
You should have called me, right when it happened
. Not the best way to express
that
sentiment. He adjusted. “I wish you’d called me.”
    Robin nodded. “I wish I had, too. But I knew you had that big meeting at the State House, and I just kept trying to convince myself that it wasn’t that huge of a deal.”
    And even though it wasn’t as huge of a deal as it would have been had Robin actually swallowed the whiskey, it was still something. Recovering alcoholics made a point to never even use mouthwash that contained alcohol, because it could be absorbed through their skin. Robin stayed away from hair care products made with alcohol for the very same reason.
    “What do you want to do? How can I help?” Jules asked again.
    “I’m weirded out that I slept so long this afternoon,” Robin admitted. “Shades of passing out.”
    “You know that I’m not qualified as an expert,” Jules said, “but it seems really unlikely that you absorbed enough alcohol to—”
    “I know,” Robin said. “I do. It’s just what I’m