Karaoke Emergency Contact

Angelina was forty-four years old and had been flying commercial routes for twenty years, and she had never once lied to her first officer. Then her last kid moved out in August, and by October she was drowning in pity.

It happened in the crew lounge after a Denver turn. Marsha, who was forty-seven and had been married since she was twenty-five, set down two coffees and gave her the look.

"So," Marsha said. "Gary in accounting has a brother. Divorced. Nice boat."

"Marsha. No!"

"He's got a timeshare in Cabo."

"I have a boyfriend," Angelina heard herself say. The words just came out. "So you can stop with the brothers and the boats."

Marsha lit up like a runway. "You've been holding out on me! Who is he? What does he do? How long?"

"Um. He's in entertainment. And it's new. A few months."

"Entertainment! Angelina. I want details at the Christmas dinner. Bring him. Everybody's bringing somebody."

Angelina nodded along and finished her coffee and thought about how badly she had just screwed up.

***

The problem was she did not have a boyfriend, never mind one in entertainment. So on Friday night she went to The Crooked Note, a dive bar near the airport with a sticky floor and a neon martini glass that buzzed when it rained. Her neighbor had mentioned the karaoke host was funny. Angelina figured funny meant he could act.

Robbie was forty-one, skinny, with a haircut like he'd done it himself in a van mirror, which he had. He worked the mic between singers and mostly got groans. Angelina waited until his break and bought him a beer.

"So here's the deal," she said. "I need a boyfriend for maybe four events. Dinners, a Christmas party. I can't pay you, so it's a favor, and dinner is on me at every one of them, plus whatever you want from the bar tonight. No strings and nothing else changes hands. You show up, you hold my hand, you tell people you're in entertainment."

Robbie counted on his fingers. "Four events, four free dinners. What kind of entertainment?"

"Say DJ. Nobody checks."

"What's the catch? There's always a catch."

"You have to be believable. Can you be believable?"

"Lady, I've been pretending to be a legal resident for twenty years. Believable is my whole thing." He grinned. "Sorry. That was a joke. Mostly. Deal. Free steak, no touching below the elbow."

"Fine by me," she said, and shook on it, because she liked rules.

His name was Robbie. He'd come to the country at twenty-one and never quite gotten around to leaving. He lived in a van behind the bar. She decided not to think about that part.

***

The first event was a crew dinner at a steakhouse on the second Saturday of November. Robbie showed up in a blazer that almost fit and remembered her drink order and her flight schedule, because she'd written it all on a card for him. He was good. He told a story about a DJ gig in Reno that had Marsha laughing until she wheezed. He put his hand on the small of Angelina's back exactly twice, which felt about right.

Then the restaurant's karaoke machine, some terrible corporate team-building thing, came out, and Robbie's face changed.

"Don't," Angelina said quietly.

"One song," he said. "It's my brand."

"Robbie, no."

"Sweet Caroline" happened. He sang it at full volume, kneeling in front of Marsha on the ba part, and the whole table sang along, and it was actually a huge hit with everyone except Angelina, who sat there wishing the booth had an ejector seat like the flight simulators.

In the car afterward she let him have it.

"You embarrassed me in front of my first officer."

"I got a standing ovation from your first officer."

"I said don't sing and you sang."

"You said don't sing like it was a bad thing. I read the room. The room loved it." He was quiet a second. "Look, I'm sorry. Genuinely. I get loud when I'm nervous. Nervous people sing. It's a whole condition."

"You're paying attention to me from now on. That's condition one of this whole arrangement."

"Deal. No singing. Unless the room really, really needs it."

***

Two weeks later his van died. Not the engine, the whole van, towed with his stuff half inside it, because the lot's owner had sold the land and the tow company cleared everybody out, the same week the bar's books got looked at and Barney, the owner, told Robbie he couldn't keep him on payroll until things got sorted.

Angelina found out at the third event, which was a potluck at Marsha's. Robbie showed up in the same blazer and she noticed he smelled like the inside of a laundromat dryer, which was better than the alternative, and afterward he didn't drive off in anything because there was nothing to drive off in.

He stood in the parking lot with a duffel bag and a milk crate of records.

"Barney's letting me sleep on the office couch till the lot reopens," he said. "It's fine."

"It's not fine. It's December."

"It's fine-ish."

Angelina looked at him for a while. "You can crash on my couch. Temporarily, no charge, and it's not a trade for anything. There are rules."

"Rules are my favorite."

"Rule one, no singing. Rule two, you clean your own dishes. Rule three, this stays fake in public. You're a tenant who happens to be my boyfriend at parties, nothing more."

"Three rules. I can do three rules." He picked up the milk crate. "You're a good person, Angelina."

"I'm a tired person. Get in the car."

***

Her apartment was near the airport, tidy, two bedrooms, one of which had been her son's and was now a guest room full of boxes. Robbie took the couch and within four days had made it look like a rummage sale. Records on the coffee table. Boots by the door. A mug with something growing in it.

"You can't leave a mug of tea to ferment," she said. "That's not a thing humans do."

"It's not fermented, it's steeping."

"It's got a skin on it, Robbie."

He cleaned it up, mostly. But the boots migrated, and the records migrated, and one morning she came out of her room at