Page 39 of How to Walk Away

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I WOKE Acouple of hours later to Kitty at my bedside, whispering, “Hey. Hey! Wake up!”

I opened my eyes in the pale darkness. Kitty was leaning over me in a sleep shirt with R2D2 on it. I was out of breath.

“What’s going on?” I asked.

“You were having a nightmare.”

She wasn’t wrong. “I was drowning,” I said. “I was trapped in the plane—underwater.”

“I figured it was something bad.”

I squeezed my eyes closed and took a second to catch my breath.

My hair—what remained of it—was damp with sweat, and I was shaking. Kitty got a nubby white washcloth from the bathroom and pressed it to my forehead. Then, without a word, she crawled into my bed beside me—careful not to touch my neck. She was slender enough to fit. She curled on her side and stroked my hair. “Your hair’s a mess,” she whispered.

“The fire burned it off,” I said.

“Well, that’s kind of lucky,” she said, “because guess what I’ve been doing since the last time you saw me?”

“Tell me.”

“Cutting hair.”

I frowned. “You’re a barber?”

“Ahairstylist. I’m famous. I have forty-six thousand followers on Instagram.”

“You’re famous?”

She nodded. “I also do tattoos. I have a place called the Beauty Parlor in Brooklyn. And we do piercings.”

“You do the tattoos yourself?”

“Yep. Tattoos and haircuts. I’m amphibious. Guess what else? I’m sleeping with the manager. Or maybe he’s sleeping with me… Either way, it’s one-stop shopping.”

The manager’s name was Ethan, but he had a handlebar moustache that he waxed at the tips, so everybody just called him the Moustache. Even Kitty.

She told me all about him in soothing tones while I waited for my body to settle down and stop shaking—his motorcycle, and his cooking skills, and his favorite books.

At last, after letting her talk and talk, I asked, “Do you always use the article? Like, do you say, ‘Hey, the Moustache! Come here!’ Or, ‘What’s for dinner, the Moustache?’”

She thought about it. “Actually, to his face, we call him ’Stache, like it’s a name. But when we’re talking about him, we call him the Moustache, like it’s his title.”

“What does he call you?”

“I can’t repeat it,” she said. “It’s X rated.”

The last time I’d seen her, she’d been temping as a receptionist. She’d been wearing pumps and an ill-fitting gray suit that she’d refused to have altered. “You’ve really changed a lot,” I said.

“For the better.”

“Maybe. Except for that nose ring.”

“You don’t like it?”

“You look like Elsie the cow.”

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