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“Hold on, don’t get ahead of yourself. I never said I was going to make this a habit or anything, okay? Let’s just take it one night at a time.”
“Sure, we can do that. Only do me a favor, will you?”
“Maybe,” I answered slowly, knowing Courtney well enough to know that accepting her requests for favor at point blank was right on level with writing a blank check for a bank robber. “It depends on what it is.”
“Nothing big, I promise. Just look over at the bar, will you? A quick look, nothing long and languishing. Just look over there, and tell me what you see.”
I did so, on the verge of telling her she was a crazy person when I stopped cold and felt my mouth drop open. If Courtney hadn’t reached out and physically turned my face away, I would probably have just gone on staring like a total idiot. Instead, I looked down at my hands, saw the second shot sitting there waiting for me, and slammed it back.
“Neil,” I said in a flat voice that sounded very far away from where I was. “It’s Neil. I should have known.”
Chapter 8: Neil
“Hey, man,” I said. “Remind me to drink here more often, will ya?”
“What, at Elie’s Place?”
“No,” I laughed, three whiskeys in and starting to feel pretty fine. “In Alaska. You have no idea how much cheaper this shit is here than it is in Connecticut.”
“Brother,” Eli said around a shockingly loud belch. “If I never go to Connecticut, not once in my whole goddamn life, I think I’ll be able to die a happy man.”
“Nah, come on. Don’t get me wrong. Everything is stupid expensive there, but it’s a great place to live.”
“Oh yeah?” Eli asked, giving me a sideways glance that made it clear he didn’t believe me for even a millisecond. “Why don’t you give me one good reason? Give me one good thing Connecticut and New York and all of those fancy places have that we don’t have here in Ashville.”
“Well, for starters, we’ve got more than one bar.”
“We’ve got two, actually, but I get your point.”
“See?” I asked, laughing. “There you go. Easiest thing I’ve ever done.”
“Hold on there. I didn’t say I agreed with you. For starters, you only need one bar to get the job done. Second off, you already said the bars in your new neck of the woods are stupid expensive. So why would I want to go and drink there?”
“Alright, fine. Point taken. But there’s more of everything, Eli. There’s more restaurants and movie theaters. The apartment buildings. Pretty much everything. Anything you think of that you could get here, you can get somewhere else, but ten times better.”
“I hear ya. I do. But tell me. If we were to go outside and take a look at what there was to see, would you be able to say the same thing?”
“I’m not sure I follow you,” I said slowly, although I was almost sure that I did and knew that he’d managed to find an exception to what I considered to be a hard and fast rule. “Every place you go has air, Eli.”
“Nah, brother, not the freaking air. I think you know that, too. I’m talking about the view. You look out there and tell me there’s land that pretty every place you go. An
d shit, why not throw the air into the package, too? You can’t tell me that the air in New York City is anything close to as sweet as this. Not even in your fancy Connecticut. Go on, try it. You tell me it’s as good, and I’ll tell you that you’re a liar.”
“Well, I did go to law school,” I answered with a grin, willing to back down when I was beaten, but not wanting to have to come right out and say it. “So lying is kind of what I’ve been trained for.”
“I gotcha. At least I think I do.”
“What about you, man?”
“What about me? I just run my little barber’s shop, like I told you earlier.”
“Sure, I know that. I just meant, shit, I don’t know. Do you ever think about getting out of here? Do you ever think about getting out of Ashville?”
“Me?” he asked me with such a genuine look of surprise that I almost felt stupid for asking the question in the first place. “Why would I want to do a thing like that?”
“I don’t know. Because there’s a whole world out there. There’s plenty worth seeing, worth doing, outside of Alaska. Believe me, I’ve seen enough of it to know it’s basically endless.”
“I don’t think that’s the way it would work for me, man.”
