Page 84 of Brewbies
Scratch that. The woman was very,verygood.
The first mellow strains of the song began as a woman wearing the tasseled dress of a flapper sashayed over to them. Her charcoal-smoked eyes flicked from Caryn’s fresh martini to Darby’s empty glass. “Bring you anything, doll?”
Darby stole a glance at Caryn to gauge how she might feel about the idea of Darby’s squatting at her table for a drink. The former first lady only gazed toward the stage, a strange smile lifting the corners of her lips and a faraway expression in her eyes.
“Dirty gin martini,” she said. “Three olives, please.”
“Sure thing,” the server said, and moved off.
When Caryn turned her attention back to the table, Darby cleared her throat. “I gather from the stink-eye that I don’t need to introduce myself.”
Caryn twirled the slim stem of her martini glass in perfectly manicured fingers. “You gather correctly.”
“So you’re familiar with Brewbies, then?”
Lifting her glass, Caryn took a sip of her drink. “I’m familiar with the seven o’clock news.”
Shit.
Darby dearly wished she could slither under the table like a slug.
It wasn’t that she was ashamed of her and Ethan’s heated tryst in her camper. It was that she’d have preferred it not be broadcast to the greater Seattle area and subsequently made into thousands of TikTok videos and Facebook reels by amateur videographers who artfully assembled clips of the camper rocking followed by Darby and Ethan emerging hand in hand to an endless variety of sounds featuring Cardi B and/or Marvin Gaye.
And then, there were the hashtags. #sheriffzaddy #sexysheriff #sheriffsnack
Saints be praised, the server chose that precise moment to arrive with Darby’s drink. “Thanks,” she said, then took a healthy slug and set it on the table. “Where was I?”
“You were going to explain how you managed to completely destroy the reputation it took my son decades to build in a period of fifteen minutes,” Caryn replied coolly.
Had it only been fifteen minutes?
To Darby, the memory had taken on a timeless quality previously reserved for core memories. Like weddings, or the annual spring clearance at Bergdorf Goodman.
“Well, you see,” she began. “It’s sort of a long story.”
Caryn glanced down at the Cartier watch circling her wrist. “You have exactly ten minutes to tell it.”
“And then?” Darby asked, attempting to keep herself from visibly bristling at the ultimatum.
“And then I leave for my UV therapy green-tea sea-salt bath at Soak on the Sound.”
“That sounds fucking amazing, actually.”
“It is.” Caryn locked eyes with the bass player during a lull in the music. “So kindly get on with it.”
How to put this? Was there any good way to inform a mother that her son routinely drove to Canada in search of anonymous, illicit sex? Unlikely.
You don’t need to make her like you. You just need to get her to talk to Roy.
From her present vantage, Darby wasn’t sure which one sounded more difficult.Everybody’s got an angle, darlin’,she heard Tony Two Toes say in a voice made gravelly by decades of vice.
As quickly and expediently as she could, Darby summarized the circumstances of her and Ethan’s meeting. Heavily edited, of course. Caryn was silent for a moment when she’d finished, slowly and methodically smoothing the damp ring her cocktail had left on the art deco napkin.
“You met my son at a bar in Canada,” she repeated.
“That’s right,” Darby said.
“And he had no idea you were the owner of the business the petition targeted?”
