Page 90 of The Love Losers

He nods firmly. “I don’t keep secrets from Claire, so I’ll have to tell her eventually, but it can wait. I’m still having a private talk with Nicole, though.”

I nod.

“Are you coming to New York?”

The thought makes me feel broken, like a toy someone stepped on, but I know he’s only trying to support me the best way he knows how. “Maybe. I’m not ready to decide.”

It’s not until we rise from the bench that I think to ask, “How’d you know I was out here, anyway?”

He laughs and wraps his arm around my shoulder. “Get used to life in a small town, Rosie. Two people texted me to say you’d been standing here and staring at the Christmas tree for fifteen minutes.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

ANTHONY

It turns out Christmas Eve is an inadvisable day to get hurt. We’re in the emergency room for five hours before they even take me back, and then another hour more before a doctor inspects my hand. My phone’s dead, so I spend the time sightlessly looking at a bunch of old magazines while my mother and sister alternately talk to each other and pay homage to their phones. When my time finally comes, I’m given three stitches, told to be less of an idiot, bandaged up, and sent away.

When we get out to the car, Emma hands me the keys to our mother’s sedan. “You should drive.”

Her breath smells slightly of whisky.

“Were youdrinkingat the hospital?”

“What was I supposed to do?” she asks. “ReadHighlightsmagazine? I had a flask in my bag. Big deal.”

But it is a big deal. Emma can hold her alcohol, but she’s never been the type of the person to drink alone, in a public place, in the middle of the day.

My mother hiccups.

Okay, so she didn’t drink alone.

“How did I miss the part where you both got tipsy in the waiting room?” I ask in an undertone.

“You were sulking,” Emma says, giggling. That’s also unlike her. I can’t remember the last time I heard my sister giggle, but it must have been when she was six or seven.

“What’s going on with you?”

She waves a hand dismissively. “I’m fine. Let’s deal with your personal crisis. Bring us to that shitty bar.”

“Are you sure—”

She gives my shoulder a gentle shove. “You’re not my father, thank God. My father’s a tree.”

This leads to another bout of giggling. Nodding through it, she points to the car again. “Come on. We’re going to that shitty bar to make a war plan. Or maybe Anthony shouldn’t be part of the war plan. What do you think, Mother? Should he have plausible deniability?”

“We’re not going to do anything that’ll require it,” I insist, using the keys to open the doors. I get in the driver’s side, and my mother slides in beside me, putting Emma in the back right, the same position she used to sit in when we were kids.

“The Peanut Bar,” she insists.

I drive us to The Peanut Bar. The lights are on, but there’s only one car in the lot.

“Let me make sure it’s open,” I say.

I try the door, but it’s locked. I’m about to walk away when Dom’s face presses up against the glass.

He brightens when he sees me, and a second later, the door comes whooshing open. He draws me into an unselfconscious hug. “Oh, man, thanks for coming by, Sir…Anthony. No one came in this evening, so I decided to close up shop. It’s just me and Gene in here, shooting the shit.” And smoking pot inside the bar, apparently, because the whole place smells like a hotbox.

It’s only then that I acknowledge to myself that I was hoping Rosie would be here—that we’d be drawn to the same place like two magnets, the same way we were that first night. But she’snot, and there’s no way my mother will consent to having a subpar drink in a place that has peanut shells on the floor and smells like bad weed.

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