Liam spotted Zack Kran, his friend and neighbor, from across the room and gestured his head several times toward Allison.
The girls looked at each other through squinted eyes and Christine shrugged her shoulders.
Zack, a thin man with a groomed beard and tight button-down shirt, caught sight of Liam and gave him two thumbs up before he meandered over. “Oh, hey!” he said. “Happy birthday, Chris. Almost thirty!”
“Don’t remind me,” she huffed.
“Hey, I take offense to that. Thirty’s not so bad,” Zack said with a hearty chuckle.
Liam jumped in before either of the women could roll their eyes. “Zack this is Allison. Allison…
this
is Zack.”
The two shook hands awkwardly as Allison looked to her friend with pleading eyes.
Christine pinched the arm of Liam’s shirt and pulled him aside. “What are you doing?” she asked as she tried not to laugh. “You know Allison’s married, right?”
“No! Isn’t that something you should tell your fiancé about your best friend?”
Christine looked at him hard. “She is
not
my best friend. She’s just…my only ally at work.”
Allison looked over her shoulder at Christine while Zack laughed at his own joke, her brown eyes wide with animosity. Christine couldn’t help giving Allison a thumbs up in mockery. Allison slipped her middle finger up discreetly when Zack wasn’t looking. Christine laughed. Then, her face fell. Allison
was
undeniably her best friend.
“Oh, shit. When did that happen?”
“It’s only natural,” Liam answered in his best therapist voice, which he always used when proving a point. “She was your mother hen when you first arrived at the firm and since then you two have grown accustomed to relying on each other for comfort and familiarity in a place you both despise.”
“Yeah? Well your best friend rides a skateboard to the comic book store every day and has a beard like Grizzly Adams,” Christine retorted.
“Zack
owns
the store. It’s not like he simply hangs out there daily.”
They both broke out into laughter simultaneously. Having Allison as a best friend wasn’t the worst thing in the world Christine decided. Her short, brown bob always lay perfectly above her shoulders, never a hair out of place. She wore the most expensive high heels Christine had ever seen and never stumbled as she walked flawlessly in them. Her beautiful suits hugged her tight and made it look like she had curves on her thin, straight body. Not only was she Christine’s friend…she looked up to her. The last person she’d ever looked up to was her sister and she hadn’t seen her since she took off when she was eighteen and Christine was still in the tenth grade.
Christine’s mood sobered in the flicker of a heartbeat. “Hey, did you happen to invite my sister?”
Liam’s face fell. “I passed the invitation along for her to your parents, but they said she never responded. Last they heard from her, she was in California selling hats on the boardwalk or something. I’m not sure,” he said softly.
Christine stared for a moment at the carpet and blinked to clear her eyes. She looked at the small black butterfly tattooed on the underside of her right forearm. The ink of the crooked wings was faded from years of neglect. She touched a finger to it and then looked away. “It’s fine,” she assured Liam with a contrived smile. “It’s fine. I should know better by now.”
“She left a long time ago,” he said as he put a hand on her shoulder. Liam saw her eyes flicker to her arm again. “How about a drink?” He reached over to the buffet table and grabbed a bottle of wine and a glass. He filled it to the brim.
“Thanks,” she said, “I just need to go to the bathroom.”
He nodded his head slowly.
Christine shut the door behind her and set the glass of wine on the bathroom counter. As she stared at herself in the mirror, she thought about how different she and her sister had looked from each other as children and what she must look like now. Was she taller, thinner, heavier, tanner? Had her butterfly tattoo faded as much as Christine’s had? She shook her head and blinked a few times. None of it mattered. She was probably never going to see her sister again.
She emerged from the cramped bathroom and almost ran right into Sylvia Goldstein, the last person she wanted to see. Why had Liam invited her and her husband after their disastrous double date?
“Great party!” Sylvia said in her loud, nasally voice. “It’s quite a group you’ve put together. So many people here in this tiny apartment!”
“Thanks. It was all Liam’s—”
“And you still don’t look a day over twenty-one.
What
is your secret?” Sylvia interrupted as she raised a hand to her dark, bouffant hair to make sure it was still in place.
“Actually,” Christine said as she nudged her way past Sylvia. “Would you excuse me? I have to say hi to…” she looked around the room for someone available. She spotted an old woman with white hair sitting alone on the bay window seat. Christine pointed to her and walked away without another word. Once Sylvia’s back was turned, Christine changed her course for Liam.
“Hey,” she leaned in to whisper. “Who brought the Golden Girl?”
Liam stared blankly back.
“
The Golden Girls
? Blanch? Rose…nothing? Let me try again. Who brought the old woman sitting by the window?”
He turned to look and his green eyes lit up with recognition. “Oh, that’s Ralph Sherman’s mother-in-law. Her flat’s on the first floor.”
She smiled. Flat. His British accent got her every time. “And who’s Ralph Sherman?”
Liam gazed around the room until he spotted Ralph and his wife, Sally, who held their nine month old daughter in her arms while she talked to Ben and Sylvia Goldstein. Liam pointed them out with a slight nod of his head. Sylvia gave an enthusiastic wave before Christine could look away and pretend she hadn’t seen her.
“And how do we know him?” she asked.
“He’s the kid who installed our cable and internet when we moved in.” Liam raised his glass to Ralph when their eyes met.
“Oh.” She didn’t remember him. How could these people live in the same building as her for a year and she still had no idea who they were? And why did Liam know everyone?
As if Christine’s thoughts were written across her face, Liam looked at her with soft eyes. “You’ve been really stressed with work, staying late at the office…It’s hard to get to know people with those hours.”
She nodded, but was still lost in thought. Maybe it
was
her fault she didn’t have any real friends. She’d always preferred time alone as opposed to being surrounded by people. That was just who she was, until she met Liam during her last semester at law school. Then all she wanted to do was spend time with him when she wasn’t working. She didn’t have the time for much else.
Liam could tell his fiancée was stuck inside her own head by the glossy, vacant look on her face. He was determined to get her out to enjoy the party, maybe even make some new friends. “Yeah, I feel bad for the whole lot of them actually,” he said as he looked back at Ralph. “They don’t get out much because his wife is always at home with the baby or taking care of her mother. Seems like she could really use a companion. Someone to expand her horizons a bit, or just to talk to…” He trailed off when he saw the stern look on Christine’s face.
“You promised me no more blind friend-dates,” she hissed. “Not after
Sylvia Goldstein
.” She spat the name out like it was a rancid piece of meat. “You’ve lost all hook-up privileges.”
Liam laughed and threw his arm over her shoulder to reel her in. “How about another drink?” He turned to walk to the buffet table, but his path was blocked.
“Looks like we’re going to have to get going,” Dr. Ronald Conrad, Liam’s colleague, said with his wife at his side. Her cheeks were burning bright red and she kept tugging at the sleeve of his crisp blue shirt.
“Everything alright?” Liam asked.
“Yeah, it’s just Gloria, here, installed one of those nanny cams, y’know, to see what Olivia was up to when we’re not home. Turns out the minute we left she put the baby to bed and invited her delinquent boyfriend over.”
Liam stretched his mouth back and grit his teeth in a show of pained sympathy. “Sorry, mate.”
“No matter. It’s this one who’s all bent out of shape now because she caught this kid plowing her seventeen-year-old niece.”
“They weren’t having sex!” Gloria Conrad screeched. She turned to Liam and spoke to him directly. “They had their clothes on.”
He nodded his head and opened his mouth, but was at a loss for what to say.
“Great party,” Gloria said as she touched Liam lightly on the arm and then turned in a flurry to head for the door. Ronald scurried after her.
“She’s…” Christine said as the Conrads hurried off, “…passionate.”
“Right,” Liam laughed. “Well said.”
“When is Ronnie being transferred out to Stanford?”
Liam shrugged his shoulders. “He hopes soon. He hates it at the university’s lab.”
“Why’s that?”
“He thinks Dr. Hyde uses him like an errand boy. I mean, the man’s got a doctorate in microbiology. He shouldn’t be picking up the dry cleaning.”
“And Dr. Hyde is your new boss?”
“Correct,” Liam said with a nod. “He invited me to join his team to create a vaccine for that new strain of flu everyone’s on about.”
Christine nodded her head. She tried to remember when Liam had told her all this, but she couldn’t. She did, however, remember all the breaking news over the deadly flu. It was hard to miss. If they weren’t interrupting shows to update everyone with breaking news, it scrolled slowly across the bottom of the screen on every local channel.
“They project it to wipe out almost forty percent of the population if someone doesn’t make a working vaccine soon.”
“What’s taking so long?” Christine asked with a furrowed brow.
Liam gave a discordant laugh. “It’s not that simple. Every time we think we’ve got it, the flu strand changes and we have to start all over. That’s why almost every lab in the country is working around the clock to stop it. They just…can’t.”
Christine let Liam’s word drift in and out of her mind as the wine hit her all at once. Unexpectedly, a ball of panic dropped in her stomach and weighed it down like a bowling ball. Forty percent of the population could be wiped out in one year because of something as common as the flu. Maybe she should consider getting one of those disposable hospital masks, even though it looked creepy when she saw someone walking around in one.
Over the next twenty minutes people said their goodbyes. The crowd dissipated until it was only Liam, Christine, Luke Benson from upstairs, and Carolyn Bock left.
Luke claimed he wanted to help the couple clean up, but it was his anxiety over Carolyn cornering him at his apartment door that kept him there. She had jumped at the chance to offer to help once he had. Her eyes lingered on him whenever he bent over to pick up a dropped plate or napkin. She watched his dark skin tighten over his rounded arm muscles and sighed. Each time, he looked to Liam and Christine with wide, desperate eyes.
“Poor guy,” Christine cooed in a whisper to Liam. “We should help him.”
Liam nodded and opened his mouth to speak, but was cut off by the muffled sounds of shouting from the floor above. Everyone looked up in silence.
“I better go,” Carolyn said immediately and dropped the trash that was in her hand before she darted out the door. She left it open behind her.
The warm breeze from the open hallway wafted up Christine’s nose, bringing the scent of the Dunes and Lake Michigan along with it. A vision of her grandmother picking wildflowers along the Calumet bike path swam through her fermented mind. She missed her so much, even though she died almost ten years ago. The woman had practically raised her while her parents immersed themselves in their work.
A faint knock, only heard because of the door that stood ajar, brought Christine out of her reminiscent trance. A new slew of curses from Colt Hansen upstairs was now directed at Carolyn for interfering in the argument with his wife.
“Shit,” Liam said and put down the garbage bag he’d been filling. “Think we should help her out?”
Luke didn’t stop for a second to think about it. He continued to pick up paper plates with half eaten pieces of vanilla cake on them. “Carolyn’s tougher than she looks. She got this. It’s not the first time she’s stuck her nose in the middle of the Hansen’s business. Ever since she called the cops on him last month, he usually checks himself. He mighta learned his lesson if his wife hadn’t bailed him out right away. Don’t know why she did. She shoulda left him to rot. If I ever did that to my wife…ex-wife…she’da let me rot too. That’s for sure.”
A heavy silence hung in the room like a storm on the horizon. Christine couldn’t imagine what it felt like to be hurt by someone she thought loved her. No matter what she did, she couldn’t picture Liam ever raising a hand to her, even as an empty threat. He was a good, gentle man. If a bug got into the apartment, he was the one who cupped it in his hands and set it free out on the patio.