Page 64 of Play Nice

She gives me a quick closed-lip smile. Limited eye contact.

“Dawn,” I say, reaching out and tapping her mug. “You can tell me. Whatever it is. I want to know. I can handle it. I’m tougher than I look, but you know how that goes.”

A real smile this time. Though a bittersweet one. “You’re a real spitfire, aren’t you?”

“A blessing and a curse.”

She takes a slow, ragged breath. “I think…I might have been the last person to see Alex alive. I don’t think she was well…at the end.”

“What makes you say that?”

“She came over earlier that day. I went out to get the mail. It takes me a while to get up and down the driveway. She saw me and came hurrying over. She seemed out of sorts, but I didn’t want to say anything. She was sensitive to people thinking she was a nut.”

“ ‘Out of sorts’?”

“Disoriented. She was slurring her words. She might have been drunk. I’m sorry, Clio. Maybe I should have called someone. I don’t know.”

“Who would you have called? It’s not like her getting day drunk was a rare occurrence,” I say. My reassurance is genuine. My resentment unfounded. Yet they exist in tandem, threads of the same rope. It’s not Dawn’s fault that my mother is dead. But if she had acted on her intuition, her concern, maybe things would have turned out differently. Maybe not.

“I asked her if she was all right, and she said…she said, ‘Our demons get us all in the end.’ Then she told me she would see me later and walked off. Turned around and went home. I didn’t follow her. I wish I would have. I keep thinking about it.”

Austin comes back into the room, hands in his pockets.

“I was going to help Clio paint tonight,” he says, his clever excuse for us leaving.

“Oh,” Dawn says. “Oh, all right. That sounds like a very productive evening.”

I get up and give Dawn a hug. “It was so lovely to meet you.”

“You, too,” she says.

When we get out to the garage, Austin reaches for my hand. I pull away.

“Take me somewhere,” I tell him. “I don’t want to go home just yet.”

20

We get stoned and have sex in the back seat of his car like we’re sixteen. Then he takes me to the local diner, and we order breakfast even though it’s nine p.m. We sit quietly across from each other in a booth, waiting for our food. He makes a pyramid out of those little packets of jam. I fidget with my necklace, make the snake dance.

I could attempt conversation, but I’m beginning to wonder if there’s anything left for us to talk about. Maybe we’ve exhausted our chemistry. Maybe we’re too high. Maybe I’m too tired. Maybe I’m busy wishing I could think about something other than Mom’s demons, both figurative and literal.

“Here we go,” says the waitress, dropping off plates of pancakes and eggs and bacon and a giant Belgian waffle. “Enjoy.”

“This is a ridiculous amount of food,” I say to Austin, who looks disappointed at the destruction of his jam pyramid, which was knocked over by the plate of scrambled eggs.

“Well, seemed like a good idea twenty minutes ago,” he says. “Now I want disco fries.”

“Shh. Don’t let the bacon hear you. You’ll hurt its feelings.”

“Sorry,” he says. “Didn’t mean to offend.”

“We made our choices and now we must live with them,” I say, stabbing a pancake. “Be adults.”

“Nothing about this is adult,” he says. “We’re eating breakfast after dark at a shitty diner because you don’t want to go home. Don’t want to deal with what’s there.”

“That took an unexpected turn to earnestness,” I say, reaching for the syrup.

“I’ve grieved a parent,” he says, looking me in the eye. I wonder if mine are as bloodshot as his. He’s so pretty, even with his red eyes. His natural lashes look like the ones girls I know pay for. “You can talk to me. Tell me what’s wrong.”