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Perhaps it would’ve been more accurate to say tassels were staring at him—from the valances, the corners of the comforter and throw pillows, the fringe of the bed skirt. They were making him nauseated.
He’d gotten Ruby, Deborah, and Mason back into their house earlier, and all three had requested, with hospitality bordering on insistence, that he stay the night before catching the jet out at the first crack of morning.
Rather than hurt their feelings, he’d been lying here staring at the ceiling.
It did not seem like a reasonable choice, and yet that was the choice he’d made.
A screech emanated through the floor from downstairs.
Evan sighed.
Another teeth-wobbling screech. And then another.
When he came down, Ruby, Mason, and Deborah were clustered around the smoke alarm in the kitchen. The off-white puck was up high where the ceiling slanted to a peak. Mason stood on a barstool waving a wooden pasta spoon at it, Deborah and Ruby holding the seat to keep it from spinning. They were all talking over one another, shouting instructions, and they didn’t hear Evan come up behind them.
“I could just shoot it,” he said.
The barstool rotated a few degrees, and Mason almost went down. He crouched awkwardly and stepped off, defeated.
The detector screeched again for good measure.
Ruby stomped off to the mudroom and came back wielding a field-hockey stick. She hopped up onto the kitchen table, careful to straddle the jigsaw puzzle, and swung, knocking the detector to the floor, where it issued a woeful, static-fuzzed bleep and died.
Ruby slid off the table, set down her hockey stick, and dusted her hands.
“Bravo,” Deborah said. “Bravo.”
“Sorry it woke you,” Mason said.
“I was up,” Evan said.
“We were, too,” Deborah said. “I was … not smoking.”
“And I was about to make root-beer floats.” Mason nodded to the counter where the fixings had been laid out. Two liters of A&W and Mug waited, ready to pour. The parlor glasses were still frosted from the freezer, a vanilla scoop dropped into each.
There were four of them.
“Might you join us?” Mason asked.
Evan looked at the four glasses. Then at the family of three.
“What the hell,” he said.
Mason reached for the A&W, but Ruby said, “Uh-uh-uh!”
His hand reversed course to the other bottle. He filled all four glasses with Mug and handed them around. He caught his daughter’s eye, hoisted his drink for a toast. “Root-beer truce.”
“Root-beer truce,” she said, and they all clinked.
Evan took a sip.
It was one of the finest things he had ever tasted.
Almost as good as vodka.
But also: sugary.
He indulged himself in another sip. When he set his glass down on the kitchen table, something caught his eye.
