I drive to my shitty motel room. I eat. I text Love: Still nothing and yes I am the asshole who got sucked into a blackjack table for hours

She writes back: I’m not your parole officer. You don’t have to report to me! I know you’re working hard. I’m helping my dad with some Pantry stuff.

This was the wrong time for her to use the phrase parole officer and I don’t want to talk to her until I’ve destroyed that mug of piss. I wish I could change things. I wish I had taken care of this mug before we met.

Miss you, she writes, and most girls would throw hissy fits if their boyfriend went into silent mode in Las Fucking Vegas for several hours, especially while said girl was in the middle of a family crisis.

My phone buzzes and now she’s calling me.

“I just wanted to hear your voice,” she says when I answer.

“How you doing?” I ask her. She starts in about a difficult woman at work, Sam, and I yawn and the room is cold and I walk to the window to close the blinds and I left my headlights on. “Fuck,” I say.

“What’s wrong?” she asks. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah,” I say. “I left my lights on. It’s fine.”

I grab the keys and go outside—the bitter cold—and I turn off the lights and I run back inside and Love asks me where I am. “A diner,” I say. “The Peppermill.”

She says she’s glad I’m eating and she wants me to rest. She says I sound tense. I tell her I sound tense because I am tense. She tells me that when they were in college, Forty disappeared for two months. “Right after I got married,” she says. “Two months, Joe. You know you can’t stay in Vegas for two months.”

“I won’t, but I can’t give up yet,” I say.

“Promise me you’ll take care of yourself,” she says.

I promise her. And then I make shitty motel coffee and go on Tinder. Fortunately, there aren’t that many girls in the area. I swipe and I swipe and I swipe. I swipe while I piss and I swipe in the bed and I swipe in the car and then I find her. Jessica Salinger. I recognize her from a picture of the family in the article. She’s a prettier version of Peach and she’s less than a mile away. This is what I needed to know, that she was still here; her fucking Facebook and Twitter are private but her pussy, apparently, is open. Humans. I will never understand.

I shower. I shave. I dress. I run out to my car and thank God I noticed the lights because my battery works and I need it to work, I need to get to Scuppers now, the place I went with Supercunt. It’s the only joint in town, really, this time of year and I go in and the first thing I notice are the tall chairs at the bar, brown as opposed to the white leather chairs at the Bellagio. And two chairs are of particular interest to me because one contains Jessica Salinger, the other has the friend I was banking on, and there is plenty of room for me at the bar.

It’s quiet—some fucking Sade in the background; really, Rhode Island?—and I have no competition. There are two other dudes here, construction workers I think, they’re both wearing rings, more interested in the news than the girls. There’s no band to get in the way of things and tease the young girls, there’s no crowd, not even with all the excitement involving the dead girl. New Englanders are stingy and they hibernate at night, as if going out makes you into some kind of whore.

Of course I am not gonna go for Jessica Salinger. That would be too creepy since I was just at their house today. I have to put the moves on the friend, the one I knew she’d be out with, because girls like Jessica always have a friend around, and she’s always a little shorter, a little more drunk, a little more down to earth, literally. This friend is tapping her straw and removing it from her cocktail. This friend is bored. This friend is gonna be mine. Easy.

It’s been so long since I hit on a girl in a bar, but I know how it works. All you do is stare into the girl’s face, reflected in the mirror ahead. You let her friend notice you staring. You don’t look away. She meets your gaze in the mirror and you crack up and you apologize—it’s so good to start with sorry—and you tell her that you didn’t mean to stare but you couldn’t help it.

“You’re just so gorgeous,” I say. “And I don’t mean that in a creepy douche kind of way and I’m not gonna try and pick you up when I see you’re very clearly here with your friend.”

And then I take all my marbles away and flag the bartender and order a gimlet—I want to know why Forty was so into them—and now the girl puts her hand on my arm. “What’s your name?”

“Brian,” I say. Like Brian from Cabo. “Brian Stanley.”

“Well,” she says. “I’m Dana and this is my girlfriend Jessica. Are you here by yourself?”

“Yeah,” I say. “What about you girls? Are you here by yourselves?”

Jessica rolls her eyes and this is exactly what I want. My gimlet comes. I sip. I ask Dana what she’s doing here and she tells me she’s here to provide moral support for her friend Jessica. Jessica is feeling more invisible by the second—it won’t be long now—and I sip my gimlet slowly. Dana is Jessica’s roommate in New York and Dana is a first-year law student and Dana loves this cute little town and Dana loves this song and she loves this bar and Jessica does not love being a third wheel. She stands. “Do you guys mind if I get out of here?”

I apologize—I am Mr. Manners—and Dana says she should go and Jessica says that’s ridiculous. She says she’s tired. Dana doesn’t know how she’ll get home. “It’s not like New York where you can just call a cab,” she says. “No, I should go.”

Jessica says she’ll be in the car. Jessica Salinger has no use for me. I tell Dana it’s unorthodox and presumptuous but I could give her a lift home if she wanted to stay.

“Thank you,” she says. “But I don’t even know you.”

“Yeah,” I say. “I’m sorry. I wasn’t trying to . . .”

Two hours later, Dana is a teetering drunk girl and she’s in good hands with me. I help her out of the bar. I open the car door for her. “Just like Say Anything!” she says.

I start the car. This is it. I’ll have to keep up the gentleman act and escort her into the Salinger house. And she’s so drunk, she won’t be able to make it up the stairs alone. “So,” I say. “Where am I taking you?”

“Ugh,” she says. “Hang on. I have to find the address in my phone.”

I almost fuck up and tell her I already know the address. But she unlocks her phone—1267—and she bites her lip and she scrolls through her e-mail. “Got it,” she says. “Thirty-two Starboard Way.”

My head snaps up. That’s not Peach’s address. “Are you sure?”

She raises her phone and shows me the Airbnb page and I am fucked. A whole night wasted. “I usually stay with Jess and her family,” she says. “But they have some crazy shit going on right now. Did you see the news about the girl who they think was killed here? That was her cousin.”

“Really,” I say. And I look both ways and I use my blinker and I curse Tinder. “That’s some scary shit.”

When I escort Dana into her Airbnb, she tries to kiss me. I tell her I’m sorry. “I’m getting over someone,” I say. “I’m really sorry. I just can’t now, you know?”

Dana gets it. She says she’s been there. But she has no fucking idea. I go back to my shitty motel. I should have gotten an Airbnb.

47

I go down to breakfast the next morning and why in the fuck would I ever want to make my own waffles? Do I look Belgian? I itch and I think my room has bedbugs. And the number one thing I did not miss about the East Coast: the humidity. After the brisk chill of yesterday, Little Compton, Rhode Island, is suddenly in the midst of an unplanned natural event they call Indian summah! The girl at the front desk beams, sunburnt, small-minded: “Didja come heeah foah the Indian summah? It’s a wicked pissah!”