Annie bought a fifth of whiskey from the liquor store beside the Starbucks because money was imminent, and because Vera’s addendum had knocked something loose that needed fixing, the image of her lips against Tom Selleck’s mustache, again and again, over and over. She prepared to call Maria about her dad but couldn’t bring herself to do it. And there was a wickedness creeping inside her, just as it crept inside Vera.
Actors, dancers, the entertainer. All imprudent and something worse, mercenary. After a few nips from the bottle, she picked through the racks at a Salvation Army.
She must have worn an extra degenerate, hungry look because the cashier hawked her from the counter. She found a tank top printed with a busty cartoon moose with long, spidery lashes, holding a beer stein. Get Wild in Hope, Alaska, it read.
The cashier softened after she took the money from Annie’s hand. She parked the LeSabre in front of a Chinese takeout place with blackened windows and fell asleep for an hour; when she woke, the sun was low, as was her mood, the whiskey worn off and a sludgy guilt moving through her, toward what or whom she couldn’t place. The day manager greeted her at the club, still in his shiny vest but now well lubricated and nearly slurring his words.
It turned out he was also the night manager and a self-proclaimed workaholic. He’d become aggressively chatty, being of the overfamiliar type even in sobriety. He escorted Annie to the dressing room with one hand on the small of her back.
She politely told him she knew the way, but he insisted on introducing her to the girls of Girls, Girls, Girls. She walked fast to outpace his hand, but he was Velcroed. She eluded him briefly in the restroom where she drank deeply from the bottle, but when she exited he was waiting outside the door to reprise the journey.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
