Birthday Hostage

Birthdays stopped being fun for me somewhere around thirty-six. They started feeling like deadlines instead. Every year I'd do the math on where I thought I'd be by now, and every year the math came back ugly. So on the evening I turned forty-four, I was sitting through a date I did not want to be on, at a pasta place two blocks from the beach, listening to a woman named Andie explain her condo association drama in detail.

Andie was fine. She was thirty-eight, she had a nice laugh, she worked in insurance. But by the time the bread arrived I already knew there wasn't going to be a second date, and I think she knew it too, because she'd started checking her phone under the table like it owed her money.

"So anyway, they're raising the dues again," she said, twirling her fork. "Third time in two years."

"That's rough," I said.

"You're not really here, are you."

I looked at her. She was smiling, sort of, the way you smile when you're letting somebody off the hook. "Honestly? I'm not. I'm sorry. It's my birthday and I'm being a bad date about it."

"Happy birthday," she said. "Go home. Drink something. You look like someone who needs to not be talked at."

I paid the check, left her a genuine thank-you, and walked out into the cool evening air feeling like I'd dodged something, though I couldn't say what. My car was at the bungalow, so I'd walked to dinner, which meant the walk home was mine too. Down the boardwalk, past the dive bar called The Spotted Dog, where somebody was already getting loud about darts at seven forty-five. Past Wail & Ale, where the karaoke sign in the window said TUESDAYS AND FRIDAYS, TONIGHT'S THEME: ONE-HIT WONDERS.

"Nope," I said out loud to nobody. Forty-four was not a one-hit-wonder kind of night. Or maybe it was exactly that kind of night, and that was the problem.

Mrs. Baker, my landlady, had gone to visit her sister in Sacramento for the week. The deal was simple, settled in plain words two weeks before she left: I'd stay in the bungalow, water the tomatoes, keep the porch light on, and she'd knock forty dollars off the month's rent. Money done, no favors hanging. I'd been renting from her for five years now, ever since I moved to town for the auction circuit. She was sharp as a tack and she scared half the estate-sale crowd in three counties.

The house was three blocks off the beach, a cluttered little bungalow with wind chimes and a garden gnome she'd named Rodrigo. When I came up the walk, every light in the place was on.

That was wrong. I'd left it dark.

I stood on the porch for a second, working through my options, which were basically call the cops or go in. Then I heard a television. And laughter. Some sitcom laugh track, canned and cheerful, coming from the living room.

I opened the door.

There was a woman on my sofa. Feet up on the coffee table, sandals off, a glass of something amber in one hand, the remote in the other. She had dark hair pinned up with a pencil and she was wearing a blazer over jeans, which is what you wear when you've been working and then stopped caring. I knew her. Of course I knew her.

"Angelique," I said.

"Sergio." She didn't move a muscle except to take a sip. "Happy birthday, by the way. Your landlady told me. She's going to call her sister tonight around eight, and her sister told me to wait here for the call, and I don't have her sister's number, so here I am."

"Here you are," I said. "On my couch. With my whiskey."

"It's Grandma's whiskey. And it's Grandma's couch." She gestured with the remote at the room like she was presenting evidence. "I grew up in this house, Sergio. I dusted that gnome when I was a teenager. You've been here five years. Who do you think has seniority?"

"That's not how renting works."

"Nothing about tonight is going to be how renting works, so settle in." She finally swung her feet down and sat up, tucking one leg under her. She was twenty-nine, fifteen years younger than me, and she had beaten me out of the Whitmore estate commission eight months ago, which still stung, which I suspect is why she was smiling the way she was smiling. "Sit down. You're looming."

"I'm not looming. I'm standing in the doorway of my own house deciding whether to call the police."

"Call them. Tell them a woman is sitting on a couch drinking whiskey in a house where her grandmother lived for forty-one years. See how that goes for you."

I set my keys on the hall table, which was as close to surrender as I was willing to admit out loud, and went to the kitchen. The takeout bag from the noodle place was sitting on the counter. Pad thai, extra peanuts, my usual. My stomach, which had been running on bread and spite since lunch, made an executive decision.

"There's takeout," I called.

"Grandma ordered it. She said you always get the same thing and I should eat the other half. It's in the fridge."

I opened the fridge. There it was, a container with a sticky note in Mrs. Baker's spidery handwriting: Happy birthday, Sergio. Don't let Angie antagonize you. Don't let her win either.

I laughed, which surprised me. I carried the container and a fork into the living room and dropped onto the far end of the sofa. Angelique looked at my dinner with open judgment.

"You eat that on your birthday? Every year?"

"Every year," I said. "It's tradition."

"It's sad. That's what it is. Where were you tonight, anyway? Grandma said you had a date."

"Andie. Insurance. Condo association problems." I forked up some noodles. "It went great. I gave her my regards at the bread course."

Angelique snorted, actually snorted, and covered her mouth like she was embarrassed by it. "The bread course. Okay. That's fair. I had a date Tuesday that ended when the guy explained Bitcoin to me for an hour."

"How'd that end?"

"I tipped the bartender extra and left through the kitchen."

We both laughed at that, and something in the room shifted, some of the edge coming off the air between us. It had been there for three years, that edge. Every auction, every estate sale, every time one of us outbid the other on a Victorian dresser neither of us needed. Three years of polite frost. And here we were, sharing a couch and her grandmother's whiskey, because an old woman in Sacramento had decided we should.

The phone rang.

Angelique grabbed it before the second ring. "Grandma? Yes, I'm here. No, I'm not bothering him." A pause. Her eyes came to me. "Yes, I know it's his birthday. Yes, I said happy birthday." Another pause, longer, and her face did something complicated. "He said that? Okay. Okay, fine." She held the phone out toward me without looking at me. "She wants to talk to you."

I took it. "Hello?"

"Sergio," Mrs. Baker said, in the voice she used when she'd already decided something. "Angelique stays for dinner. She has as much right to that house as you do, and she's lonely this week. Be kind to her."

"Grandma, I'm always kind."

"You're competitive and you keep score. It's your birthday, so you're eating noodles alone in my living room. Kindness, Sergio. Do you understand me?"

I looked over at Angelique, who was very interested in the television. "Yes, ma'am," I said.

I handed the phone back to Angelique, who took it and hung it up with a certain ceremony, like she was closing a courtroom.

"So," she said. "You heard the woman."

"I heard the woman."

"And she said be kind."

"She said don't let you win, either. That part I plan on honoring."

She pulled the whiskey bottle onto her knee and poured two fingers into my empty glass, sliding it across the coffee table without looking at me. Some truce, maybe. Some hostage tax. I drank it, because it was my birthday and because the pasta place had only served bread.

"Okay," she said, settling back. "Shop talk or insults. Pick one."

"Insults are just shop talk with less paperwork."

"Fine. Whitmore estate. Eight months ago. You want to talk about it, or do you want to pretend you don't?"

I put my fork down. "You want to talk about it."

"I closed it. Of course I want to talk about it."

"You outbid me on the listing, not the lot, Angie. There's a difference and you