Page 28 of Going Home in the Dark

“Vanilla Coke, cherry Coke, chocolate Coke.”

“Pussy drinks. I’ll have mine straight.”

That was when Bobby started to like her.

“And a meatball sub with a lot of red-pepper flakes,” Rebecca said, “and chopped pepperoncini.”

When Gia went away, Bobby the Sham addressed his companions with sudden enlightenment. “I think Rebecca wants to be an amigo.”

Spencer was so astonished that he clamped one hand to the crown of his skull as though to prevent his head from exploding. “I never thought—I can’t imagine—agirlwould want to be one of us.”

“Or another guy, for that matter,” Ernie admitted.

“Why?” Bobby wondered. “Why would anyone?”

“Well,” she said, “two reasons. First, I don’t expect I’ll ever have, you know, a romantic relationship. I’ll be old and die alone, and by the time someone finds me, I’ll be a disgusting, decomposedthing.I figure if I make a few friends, one of them will find me before I begin to rot. I know that sounds weird.”

“Not at all,” Bobby averred, and Ernie echoed, “Not at all,” and Spencer declared, “Eminently sensible.”

She said, “The thing is, you don’t have to like much about me, and I don’t have to like much about you. Friends often don’t like everything about one another, but they can be there for one another when it counts.”

“And it really counts,” Spencer said, “when you’re lying dead and about to rot.”

“You said you had two reasons,” Bobby reminded her.

“You guys laugh a lot.”

“We do?” Spencer asked.

“We’re nerds,” Ernie said. “We laugh at stupid stuff that a lot of people wouldn’t laugh at. That doesn’t mean it’s funny.”

Rebecca said, “My mother’s living in San Francisco with a man named Raoul something. I have no idea who my father is. I live with my grandparents, who pretend to be wildly in love but who despise each other and don’t hide it well. They actuallyenjoydespising each other. I’ve never heard any of them laugh. To be fair, I don’t know if Raoul laughs, because I never met him. I never met Frederico before Raoul, or Juan who came before Frederico. Maybe those guys laugh uproariously all the time. But nobody ever laughs where I live, and I’ve had more grim than I can handle. I’m done with grim.”

Ernie was moved. “I’m so sorry for you. That sucks. I never met my father, either. For your sake, if we become amigos, I’ll try to prevent my mother from meeting you.”

“I was a foster child,” Bobby said. “Taken in by a couple of potatoes. They never laugh, either.”

Spencer said, “I knew my mother, but last year she went away to find herself. I live in my father’s house, though he’s never there. He lives with a stripper in the rectory of a church he set up so that degenerates could have something to believe in.”

One by one, she made eye contact with the amigos. “So am I in?”

Bobby said, “We’ll need to talk about it.”

“So talk.”

“We’ll need to confer in private, overnight.”

“Confer, huh? Why don’t you go to Vegas, rent the convention center, and have a conference regarding the issue?”

Having already delivered the unadulterated Coke, Gia returned with the meatball sub. “Would you like a knife and fork with that?”

“No, thanks,” said Rebecca. “I’m good.”

The submarine sandwich had not been sliced in two because the contents might have spilled out of the cut end. She picked it up and held it in such a manner that Bobby had the impression she was a person of exquisite etiquette holding a canape. She proceeded to eat with the gusto of a lumberjack at the end of a long day of felling trees, and yet there was nothing gross about her manners. Even in her weird outfit and paste-white face, she was so poised that she made hogging down a one-pound hoagie seem like an elegant deed of great refinement.

The three amigos watched her. They sat very still. They said nothing. They were temporarilyincapableof speech.

Finished eating, wiping her fingers on a paper napkin, Rebecca looked up and saw the amigos staring. “So am I in?”

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