Two Men Walk Into a Bar (At Christmastime) (2 page)

As the voice on the loudspeaker faded away, Zach clenched his eyes shut and slammed his glass back down on the counter. “Fuuuuck.”

“I can’t believe this!”

“Me neither, but oh, fuck, this sucks.”

Zach braced his forehead on his hands, then laced them on the back of his head, staring down at the bar. Violet had asked him not to take this gig so close to Christmas. She’d practically begged him not to risk missing the holiday together. Her mother up in Maine had to work, and Zach’s sister, Cora, was spending the holidays with his estranged parents in Upstate New York. Violet had been worried about him not making it home in time, though he’d promised her that he would.  Now it looked like he’d be breaking his promise.

“Let’s go talk to someone at customer service, huh?”

They paid their tabs, grabbed their bags, and headed over to the mile-long line of frustrated travelers. Zach took his phone out of his back pocket to check it. No texts. It was three o’clock in the morning in New York, where Violet was sleeping peacefully, waiting to wake up to her husband coming in the door. Fuck, fuck, fuck. It tore him up to let her down.

He opened a text box and prayed for the words to explain.

***

Violet Aubrey woke up to bright sun streaming into her bedroom and reached for Zach. Finding his side of the bed empty and cool, her brain reminded her that his flight wasn’t getting in until eight. He wasn’t due home for another hour or two. She stretched, opening her eyes and rolling onto her back. Today was a big day, she thought, sliding her hands to her belly and resting them there tenderly.

Tonight she was going to give Zach the biggest Christmas gift of his life.

She still wasn’t sure what he would say. They hadn’t really been trying for a family, though married life and being totally cuckoo for each other had led to a few careless nights, so it wasn’t exactly an impossibility.

Would he be shocked, as she’d been? Would he be delighted, as she’d also been? Or would he feel like they weren’t ready for a baby? Though their lives were mostly centered in New York City where they cowrote and produced Broadway shows, Zach was still a sought-after fill-in musician, and he liked the opportunity to get back up on the stage now and then, just as he had this past weekend out in LA. There was a part of Violet, of course, that felt apprehensive. Would she be a good mother? Was he ready to be a father? Did it matter? Baby Aubrey was already on the way, and they had about seven months to figure it out.

She took a deep breath and sighed, humming as she rubbed the smooth skin of her tummy.

Half him, half me,
A brand-new somebody.
Half him, half me,
His lips, my knee,
His eyes, my toes,
His cheeks, my nose.
Half him, half me.
A family.

“All we need now is for Daddy to write a lullaby,” she said softly, then laughed with quiet joy, sitting up and plucking her phone from the bedside table to check it for messages. He’d been drinking bourbon with a veteran when he last texted her. Now . . .

Her face fell.

All flights canceled until morning. Baby, I love you so much. Don’t give up on me. I’ll find a way home.

But when she turned on the news and saw that over three hundred flights to the Eastern Seaboard had been canceled and delays ranged from one to three days, all she could do was whisper, “I don’t think so, Zach. I don’t see how.”

She swallowed over the lump in her throat, blinking her eyes against the burn of tears. He wasn’t going to make it home. She—and her news—were going to spend Christmas all alone.

Ring, ring. Ring, ring.

She sniffled and wiped her nose, reaching for the landline.

“Hello? Zach?” she said, her voice breaking.

“Hi. Is this Violet Aubrey?” asked a woman with a slight Southern accent.

“Uh, yes. Who’s calling?”

“You don’t know me,” said the woman. “My name is Savannah Lee.”

***

“Any luck finding a hotel room?” Zach asked Asher, whom he found staring dejectedly at a bank of courtesy phones on the lower level.

Asher turned around and sighed. “The Best Western over in Van Nuys thought they had a room, but just as the clerk was about to take my credit card number, someone walked in and took it.”

“What time did United rebook you?”

“Nine o’clock tomorrow night. You?”

“Ten.”

“At least we’ll make it home for
part
of Christmas,” said Asher glumly.

For the first time, with the stark airport lighting over their heads instead of the dimmer, softer light at the bar, Zach realized that the scarring on the right side of Asher’s face was really quite extensive. He guessed that they were about the same age, or Asher could have been a few years older, maybe. He admired Asher, giving up so much for his country. He hated the thought of a veteran spending tonight and most of tomorrow in an airport chair.

“Hey, I know we don’t know each other that well, but my wife and I have an apartment out here. We keep it for when we need to be out here for a few weeks at a time to work on a show or an album. Anyway, you’re welcome to come home with me if you want.”

“You’re sure?” asked Asher, looking relieved. “I wouldn’t be imposin’?”

“Nah. As long as you don’t mind the couch. It’s just a one-bedroom.”

“I’d sure appreciate that,” said Asher.

“Not the Christmas Eve either of us had in mind, huh?”

“Just bad luck,” said Asher, hefting his bag on his shoulder and following Zach out to the long line at the taxi stand.

“Tell that to my wife.”

“She’s pissed?”

“Oh, yeah,” said Zach. “She asked me not to take this gig. Didn’t want to risk spending Christmas alone. And now she’ll wake up on Christmas morning without me there. I fucking hate it.”

“I’m sure she’ll understand.”

“Will yours?” he asked doubtfully.

Asher looked slightly less confident. “I hope so.”

“What were you doing out here? I never asked.”

“In LA?”

Zach nodded.

“I work in the office of media relations at Walter Reed in Maryland.”

“The military hospital?”

“Yep. And occasionally we work in tandem with other hospitals like the UCLA Medical Center. They have a great program called Operation Mend that offers assistance to veterans with catastrophic physical injuries—extensive burns, amputated limbs. I flew in for the holiday gala two nights ago and spent yesterday with a few of the guys in the program.” He held up his prosthetic hand. “I did some i-Limb demonstrations.”

“It looks bionic.”

“Someday, when we have kids, that’s what I’ll tell them: Daddy’s a bionic man,” Asher said, grinning.

“Is your wife . . .”

“Bionic? No, just me.”

“No.” Zach chuckled. “Is she pregnant?”

“Expectin’? Lord, no!” said Asher, shaking his head. “No. We’re still newlyweds. Only been married a few months. You? You have kids?”

“Ha!” said Zach. “We’re musicians.”

Asher raised his eyebrows. “And musicians can’t have kids?”

Zach shrugged as they moved up in the long line. “We haven’t really talked about it.”

“But . . . you want them?”

“Kids?” asked Zach. “To tell you the truth, I don’t really know.”

Zach’s own childhood hadn’t been very happy. Forced to perform, play, and practice, sometimes he didn’t feel like much more than a trained monkey, and his parents had been brutal with their expectations of him. Hell, if it hadn’t been for his twin sister, Cora, Zach wasn’t actually sure he would have survived his childhood. So one thing was for damn certain: if he and Vile ever
did
have kids, he’d love them no matter what. He’d hug them and kiss them, and he’d tell them that he loved them—all the time, every day. And if they had a special gift—for writing poetry or playing instruments—he’d let them learn at their own pace without pressuring them or terrorizing them or . . .

“Our turn,” said Asher, gesturing to the cab that pulled up alongside the curb.

“Yeah,” said Zach, as he picked up his duffel bag and guitar case off the sidewalk and placed them carefully in the open trunk. “Yeah, I want kids. But not now. Someday.”

***

“I still don’t understand how you figured this out,” said Violet Aubrey, shaking her head with wonder at her new friend, Savannah Lee, who sat across from her at 25,000 feet.

At almost seven that morning, Violet had gotten a call from Savannah, who explained that their husbands had met in a bar at LAX, and when their flights were canceled, Zach invited Asher to stay at his apartment until they went back to the airport for their rebooked flights. But Savannah, who didn’t trust that they’d make it home in time for Christmas, had decided to take things into her own hands.

“After the second text from Asher, I couldn’t go back to sleep,” said Savannah. “My mind kept trying to figure out a way to be with him for Christmas. We’ve never had a Christmas together and didn’t want to miss the first. And if they can’t be here . . .”

“. . . we must go there.”

“Exactly!” Savannah laughed. “I opened up a few weather programs on my laptop and tracked the storm, and the reality is that the snow had stopped by one in northern New England, by two in New York, and by three in Philadelphia and Washington. So I started thinking, if I can just get to Boston, I bet the airport will be cleared first and they’ll have flights leaving for the West Coast.”

“So you literally jumped out of bed, packed a bag, and started a journey to Boston!”

“Pretty much. There was an Acela train out of D.C. at three a.m., and I made sure I was on it. Here’s the thing: I had to cover rush hour delays for a year when I worked for a paper in New York, and I learned that snow rarely throws off train schedules too much unless it’s massive amounts, like fifteen or twenty inches. A train can plow through five or six inches.” She grinned at Violet. “I knew there would be delays in Boston, though, so I didn’t know if we’d manage to get on a commercial flight. Thank God for
you
! You saved the day, Violet!”

“Thank God for the Mechanics’ private jet,” said Violet. She leaned forward, resting her arm on the supple, cream-colored leather armrest. “You know, when you first called me from Penn Station, I thought you were crazy.”

“My husband says I’m an alien,” said Savannah.

“Are you? Tell the truth.”

“Not that I know of.” She cocked her head to the side. “But maybe.”

“Zach’s going to owe Severin big big big for this favor,” said Violet, referring to the Mechanics’ lead singer, Severin Slade. “But that’s
his
problem.”

“What do you think Severin will collect?” asked Savannah with wide eyes.

Violet rubbed her stomach thoughtfully. “As long as he doesn’t collect in July, I don’t care.”

“July?” asked Savannah glancing at her new friend’s mostly flat belly.

“July fourth.”

***

Zach had insisted that Asher use the shower first, so now he sat on the couch in Zach's living room, freshly showered and dressed in jeans and a UCLA Operation Mend T-shirt, feeling incredibly glum while Bing Crosby sang “White Christmas” in a black-and-white movie on TV. After losing his parents as a teenager and losing Savannah for a short period of time at the end of last summer, Asher knew what it was to feel bereft of someone you love—to feel their loss on a visceral, actively painful level. And even though Savannah was safe at home, and he was secure in the knowledge that her heart belonged to him, he felt that terrible ache now to be separated from her at Christmastime.

He missed her. He really, really missed her.

Asher and Savannah had met in May when she approached him about doing a patriotic human interest piece for a newspaper in Phoenix and fallen madly in love a few weeks later. But she’d also made some bad decisions about protecting their brand-new, budding love, and by July they’d broken up. In those bleak weeks apart, Savannah did all she could to make things right, and Asher had learned the utter desolation of life without her. By the end of August they’d reconciled, and Asher had proposed. Because they didn’t see any point in waiting to be together, they’d gotten married in late October, their wedding a whirlwind affair. And each precious day since with his wife—his
wife
—had been a gift that he’d embraced with both arms wound tightly around his happiness.

But now here he was on Christmas Eve. And after a decade of Christmases spent alone or with his grandmother’s old friend Miss Potts, how terribly he’d wanted an old-fashioned Christmas, with a tree and presents and his wife’s beautiful smile. He imagined waking up beside her, making love to her as the sun rose, then swapping gifts. Eventually they’d get in the car and drive from Maryland to Danvers, Virginia, for Christmas dinner with Savannah’s family and Miss Potts, whom Savannah’s sister, Scarlet, had adopted as a surrogate grandmother in Asher’s absence. There would be baby clothes for Scarlet’s spring arrival, good southern bourbon, Judy Carmichael’s delectable dinner, carols, and fun.