Jo Piazza Read Free

Sunday afternoon and not four hours past midnight with one of us in a stolen municipal vehicle.
    “Hi, Annie,” I said back with the same nonchalance. “Whose car is this?”
    She looked back and up, and I realized she didn’t have a clue how she got there. She was just coming out of a blackout. Annie had been drinking a lot lately. She was the owner of the town’s most beloved bar, so it didn’t seem out of character for her to have more than ten cocktails in an evening and, unfortunately, more often than not, still drive herself the two miles home from the bar.
    Her job, after all, was to entertain customers and keep them happy so they came back and kept drinking. No one liked a sober bar owner. They were the pedophile priests of the hospitality industry.
    At that moment I finally felt the unmistakable buzz of my iPhone, coupled with my ringer, turned to loud, in case I had dozed off and nearly missed this last stream of communications. Now was not the time for “Rump Shaker,” in the classical stylings of Wreckx-N-Effect, to be playing at maximum volume. I yanked it out of my pocket and stumbled through the pool of puke that had started to harden a little around my feet.
Eric (cell): You need to move on with your life. I’ve moved on with mine.
    I instantaneously thought of a dozen things I could reply with. I could tell him I didn’t need to move on with my life since I could forgive him and we could get through this and move on with our lives together. Before my fingers could stroke the buttons, an aftershock rumbled through Annie and she dry heaved—and then retched out of her mouth and onto my phone. Sometimes a higher power does give you signs.
    “Come on.” I pulled Annie’s shoulder and dragged her out of the car, half carrying her into the house, tears streaming down my face and other bodily fluids down hers. She threw herself onto the couch I had just vacated, forcing a plasticky POOOOOOT sound. I went to the bathroom to clean my feet and phone and change into an appropriate pair of pajamas. I grabbed a damp towel and de-puked Annie as best I could, then perched on the floor, my back against the plastic. I picked up the phone to read the message again, and as I composed and recomposed exactly the perfect thing to say that would make Eric fall madly back in love with me the instant he read it, my eyes became heavy and I fell asleep with the phone in my hand.
    The morning sun hit the east-facing living room windows around 6:30. If my eyes were puffy and my head pounding amid the smell of dry vomit I could only imagine what Annie was about to experience when she opened her eyes to greet the day. There was no point in postponing the inevitable. I prepared to wake her with a swift tug of her big toe when Eleanor’s bellowing brass doorbell did the work for me.
    “What the hell?” Annie gurgled before grabbing a pillow and pushing it down over her eyes. I managed to stand and looked out the window to see the police cruiser still parked askew in the driveway and two very pissed-off officers on my doorstep to match it. Apparently they had driven over in Annie’s abandoned car.
    “Get up, cowgirl. You’re about to be corralled and you might want a change of clothes for this,” I yelled over my shoulder. I knew these cops. I had known these cops since the third grade when Sergeant Chris Zucker had these horribly smelly feet that he let air out at his desk in Teva sandals, and everyone called Sergeant Alan Bress, Alan Breast, something that still made me giggle because Alan had an unfortunate pair of man boobs, impossible to conceal even in his blue uniform.
    “Morning, Sophie,” Chris said, crinkling his nose a little at the smell when I opened the door. “I think you have something that belongs to us.” I had seen Chris a few times since I came home a month ago. He had been at Eleanor’s wake. He came with his grandfather, who kissed my hand and told me the world, in Eleanor’s passing, had lost