“Why can’t we talk to them?” Phoebe demanded. “We like them. We need frieeeeeeends.”
“We get lonely,” Alice chimed in, looking mournful.
Ugh! I hated to admit it to myself, but Emmylou had been right. The twins were clearly craving more connection and community than I’d been able to provide since we moved to Boise. Without Emmylou on our side, our little household felt so small and sad, so broken. Perhaps I was denying my kids their actual family! After all, if Nate was their biological father, then technically, Principal Cruz was their aunt and Maricela was their cousin.
Blessedly the Land Cruiser pulled out of the parking lot and receded down State Street.
“Now who’s ready for some hot chocolate?” I said, forcing cheer into my voice.
“Me!” both twins said, but they sounded melancholy.
With all the joie de vivre knocked out of me, the depictions of local landmarks gracing the walls of Caffeina seemed aggressively ugly, especially the Idaho State Capitol cut from a potato sack and the Lucky Peak Reservoir made of soda can pop-tops. But the twins seemed to be cheered by the warm cozy space. I took off my scarf and sunglasses, confident Ralphie and Errol wouldn’t venture into a place on the far north side of town that sold seven-dollar oat milk matcha lattes.
While I waited for our drinks—sweater tied around my waist to hide my soggy rump—I spotted an abandonedNew York Timessplayed across a nearby table. The leering face plastered across the front of the Artssection gave me an electric shock. Mickey Larynx. As if in a trance, I picked up the paper and started to read.
Totally Depraved Comic Mickey Larynx Finds His Voice
Mickey Larynx believes in second acts and second chances.
“Should anyone tug their tug boat in a hotel hot tub?” Larynx asked as I sat across from him at a booth in famed Santa Monica hamburger stand Father’s Office. “Probably not. But find me a person who hasn’t made a mistake and I’ll never pick up a microphone again.”
After complaints last January that Larynx had committed lewd acts in the hot tubs at the Four Seasons San Francisco at Embarcadero and the Fort Sutter Hotel Sacramento, his fifty-city comedy tour was canceled. But less than a year later, he seems to have cracked the comeback code. For his sold-out Totally Depraved tour, he’s renting out arenas himself instead of going through bookers.
“Tilly!” the barista called.
In a daze, I shuttled our drinks to the twins, who sat engrossed in a game of Connect Four. Once I joined them at the table, I tried to scan the rest of the article but I’d basically blacked out, as if my unconscious mind wouldn’t let me absorb any more information about Mickey Larynx’s happiness and success.
Why should Mickey Larynx be allowed a comeback so soon after endangering public health? What he did was beyond disgusting, potentially traumatizing—and unsanitary! While he’d ruined my prospects with his public perversions, he’d totally recovered his own footing. Meanwhile, I was stuck at rock bottom in Boise, Idaho, with no career, no boyfriend, no babysitter, and a couple of sadistic bigots trying to hunt me down.
“Mommy!” Alice wailed, snapping me out of my mud bog of self-pity. “Phoebe is cheating.”
“Herfaceis cheating!” Phoebe snapped. “And I have to go to the bathroom!”
As I guarded the bathroom door, I studied the craft abomination hanging on the opposite wall. Hopefully no one would call the bunch of bottle caps strung together in the shape of Idaho “art.” It wasn’t a perfect rendering of the state either—the bottom southeast corner was missing, a few loose threads hanging down. As I mentally critiqued the piece, it finally soaked in that the bottlecaps were stamped with the wordBuckSnort.
Hands shaking, I reached into my purse and pulled out the BuckSnort bottle cap I’d found in my jacket pocket soon after I discovered Connor’s body.
The hole drilled in my bottle cap was a perfect match for the ones on the wall.
When the twins emerged from the bathroom, I hurried them to the front counter where a bored barista with algae-colored hair and a glistening silver beauty mark gazed off into the middle distance.
“Have you by any chance seen me in here before?” I demanded.
“People from your generation all look alike to me,” she said with a shrug.
“Were you working two Sundays ago, like at night?” I insisted.
“Nope.”
My heart flattened like an indecisive squirrel under a sixteen-wheeler as the barista spun on her heels and disappeared through the swinging door to the kitchen. But then she reappeared with a gangly blond wearing a jean jacket.
The gangly blond stared at me. “Ugh. You again.”
“You recognize me?” I said.
“You owe Ellen DiMarco eighty bucks for damages.”
“Ellen who?”
