The Karaoke Aftermath

I woke up with Helene's arm across my chest and no pants on.

That's a sentence I never expected to write at sixty-two, but there it was. The arm belonged to Helene, the bartender from last night, and to my other side somebody was snoring into a pillow that was not mine either. The room smelled like beer and old carpet. Sunlight came through windows that hadn't been washed since sometime last decade, and it lit up a floor scattered with empty bottles and a karaoke machine sitting on the carpet like it had crawled there to die.

I lay still for a minute and did some inventory. Headache, mild. Memory of the night, spotty. Pants, missing. I counted the bodies. There were three of them besides me, which was two more than I had gone to bed with in about nine years.

Across the big round bed, Eileen was sprawled on her stomach with her hair everywhere. She's my neighbor, thirty-eight years old, divorced like me, and until last night I would have told you she was just the woman who argued with me about dandelions. Now I was apparently pantless in a loft with her, the bartender, and a man named Khalid whose face was mashed into a cushion and who was snoring with the sound of a slow tire leak.

The woman beside me had dark hair and a tattoo of a songbird on her shoulder. I knew her name was Helene, but I still felt awkward.

I tried to piece the night together. There was karaoke at a place called The Crooked Note, because the sign was burned into my memory along with the image of Eileen dragging me up on stage by the wrist. There had been shots, I believed, though I couldn't swear to the number. There had been dancing, badly. And there was some conversation at the end of the night that I vaguely remembered involving the words upstairs and why not, and here I was.

The arm across my chest tightened and the woman stirred. She opened one eye, looked at me, and did not scream, which I took as a good sign.

"Morning," she said. Her voice was scratchy. "You're the auctioneer, right?"

"Vernon," I said. "And you are?"

"Helene. I tend bar downstairs." She yawned and stretched, entirely unbothered by any of this. "You sang Sweet Caroline twice last night. Nobody's ever done that. Khalid wanted to charge you a fee."

"Twice?"

"Twice. Second time was your idea. It was a bad idea. It was also great."

Down the bed, Eileen rolled over and squinted at us. "Is he talking about Sweet Caroline? Please tell me he's not already apologizing for it."

"I was considering it," I admitted.

"Don't you dare. It was the highlight of my whole month." She propped herself up on one elbow. She was wearing somebody's T-shirt, maybe mine, maybe not. "Sixty-two years old and you committed to the ba ba ba part like your life depended on it. I nearly cried."

"I don't remember committing to anything."

"That's the spirit of karaoke, Vernon. You don't have to remember. The machine remembers for all of us."

Khalid woke up around then, mostly because we were laughing. He surfaced from the pillow, blinked around the room, and counted heads with a look of mild satisfaction, as if checking his lottery ticket. He's the karaoke host, mid-forties, built like a barrel, and apparently completely comfortable waking up in a pile.

"Good morning, everyone," he said. "Nobody left. Excellent. Attendance at my events is usually terrible but retention is perfect."

"Retention," Eileen repeated. "Like we're subscribers."

"You are. You're all subscribers to The Crooked Note experience."

Helene swung her legs off the bed, went to a cluttered kitchen counter, and started hunting through a cabinet. "There's coffee somewhere in here. There has to be. I keep coffee here for emergencies and I would call this an emergency."

She found a bag of grounds and a drip machine that looked older than I was, which is saying something. While she fussed with it, Eileen scooted over and sat cross-legged beside me, close enough that her knee rested against mine. Neither of us rushed to move. I noticed that and decided not to make a thing of it.

"All right," she said, rubbing her face. "Let's reconstruct. What's the last thing you remember?"

"I remember saying Neil Diamond was a lifestyle."

"Correct. What else?"

"I remember Khalid telling the whole bar it was my birthday, which it was not."

Khalid raised a hand from the bed. "That was for morale. You looked like a man being led to the gallows. I did what had to be done."

"I remember the shots," I said. "Vaguely. The details get fuzzy around shot number whatever."

"Four," Helene called from the kitchen. "Four shots. I brought them over on a tray like it was a state occasion. You toasted the state of Nebraska for some reason."

"I have never had feelings about Nebraska."

"Well, you did last night. Strong ones."

The coffee started to drip and the smell filled the loft. Eileen got up, found four mugs that matched none of the others, and we arranged ourselves on a big sagging couch and two mismatched chairs while Helene poured. Khalid wrapped himself in a blanket like a large pleased burrito.

"So," Eileen said, blowing on her coffee. "Last thing I remember clearly is us all sitting on the floor up here, eating cold pizza, and somebody said something that made everybody laugh, and then I think we all decided the bed was closer than the floor."

"That tracks with the pizza box I'm sitting on," Khalid said. He lifted his hip to confirm. "Half a slice still in it. Breakfast of champions."

"The something that made everybody laugh," Helene said, "was Khalid doing his impression of you, Vernon, doing Sweet Caroline. He had the whole thing. The hand gestures."

"I don't have hand gestures."

"You absolutely do. Both hands up on the ba ba ba. Like you were surrendering to the song." Khalid demonstrated from inside his blanket. It was, annoyingly, accurate.

We sat there and laughed about it, the four of us, in the morning light with our coffee, and I want to note something in my own memory, which is that it had been a very long time since I laughed like that before ten in the morning. Since the divorce, honestly. My ex-wife was a lovely woman who did not find mornings funny, and I had gotten used to drinking my coffee in silence and reading the auction listings like they were the newspaper of a country I used to live in.

"So what actually happened up here?" I asked, careful about it. "After the pizza. My memory goes dark and I'd like to know what I signed up for."

There was a small pause. Helene looked at Eileen, Eileen looked at Khalid, and Khalid looked into his coffee like it might have minutes.

"You know what," Eileen said, "I think the honest answer is a whole lot of talking and some kissing and everybody falling asleep before anything interesting. Which, for a group of grown adults, is honestly kind of charming."

"I think I kissed Helene," Khalid said. "It was very nice. Helene, was it very nice?"

"It was adequate," Helene said, and he clutched his chest, and she grinned, and I understood that these two had a whole routine built up over three years of bar nights.

"And you and me?" Eileen asked me, plainly, the way she asks about fence lines.

"I remember a kiss on the stairs," I said. "I remember asking first. I'm fairly sure I asked first."

"You did ask. It was very polite. It was the politest kiss I've had in years." She said it warmly, no teasing in it, and my face got hot anyway.

Helene refilled the mugs and sat back down, this time on the arm of my chair, which I noticed but did not object to. She looked around at all of us like she was taking attendance again.

"Okay, so," she said. "Last night was fun. This morning is weirdly nice. Somebody should probably say the thing before it gets too awkward to say."

"What thing?" Khalid asked.

"The thing about whether last night was a one-time thing or whether we all liked each other enough to, you know, revisit the concept."

Eileen was looking at me when she said it. Khalid was looking at his coffee. Helene was looking at me too, which was a lot of looking for a man in no pants on a Tuesday, or Wednesday, I genuinely couldn't have told you which.

"Well," I said, and took a sip of coffee to buy myself a second. "I make a very good breakfast. That's not the answer to your question, but I thought we should establish it first."

"There it is," Khalid said. "The breakfast gambit. Classic Vernon move, I bet."

"You've known me twelve hours."

"Eleven. And I already know your hand gestures, so."

"It's true, he's a good cook," Eileen said. "He brought ribs to the block party in July and I watched a man cry over them. A grown man. Grown." She said it the way she said everything, plain and level, but she was looking at me over the rim of her mug and I could tell she wasn't only talking about ribs.

"Then it's settled," Helene said, hopping off the arm of my chair. "Vernon cooks. I supervise. Khalid stays in his burrito until called for."

"I resent that."

"You're still in the blanket, Khalid."

He looked down at himself. "Circumstances change."

The kitchen up there was the kind of kitchen you get when a loft used to be a storage floor. A four-burner stove that worked, a counter with a cutting board someone had burned a decorative fish into, and a window so dirty the morning light came through all gray and forgiving.

I claimed the stove the way I claim a podium. Force of habit. "Eggs," I announced. "Scrambled, because I'm not risking your opinions on over-easy. Bacon. Pancakes, if there's flour, and I saw flour. There's a bottle of syrup that I believe came with the pizza last night, which frightens me, but we'll manage."

"You checked my cabinets," Helene said, delighted.

"I checked everybody's cabinets. It's an auctioneer thing. You learn to inventory a room in about four seconds."

Eileen came and stood next to me at the counter with the flour bag. "All right, you're not doing this alone. Put me to work."

"You don't have to."

"Vernon. I was a short-order cook for two years in my twenties. I will out-pancake you and we both know it."

Well, that settled that. She measured and whisked and I did eggs and bacon and Khalid eventually emerged from his blanket and got assigned toast duty, which he performed with the gravity of a man defusing a bomb. Helene sat on the counter with her feet on a chair and gave commentary nobody asked for.

"You're flipping too early," she told Eileen.

"I've been flipping pancakes since you were in high school."

"That's a horrible thing to say to a woman of thirty-five."

"It's an accurate thing."

The first pancake went sideways. Eileen flipped it and it caught the edge of the pan and folded like a wallet, and Helene reached over and flicked a pinch of flour at her, and that was the end of the peace. I mean that was how the war started. Eileen dusted her palm and threw a proper handful back, and it caught Helene full in the hair, and Helene came off that counter like she'd been launched.

"You did not."

"I absolutely did."

I should have gotten out of the way. I did not get out of the way. Khalid grabbed the syrup bottle and announced, "Friends, there are no bystanders in this kitchen," and put a deliberate stripe of it down my bare forearm, and I learned something about myself in that moment, which is that a sixty-two-year-old man can still move surprisingly fast when properly motivated. I grabbed the flour. I got Eileen once and Khalid twice. Helene got me with syrup on the back of the neck, which is a war crime, and Eileen got Khalid with a ladle of pancake batter down the back of his blanket, and he howled about it in a way the whole block could probably hear.

It ended the way these things end, with all four of us leaning on counters and each other, breathing hard, absolutely covered. Flour in my eyebrows. Syrup on Khalid's beard. A handprint of it on my chest where somebody, and I will never prove who, had planted a full palm.

"Well," Helene said, surveying us. "Breakfast is ruined, isn't it."

"The bacon survived," Eileen said. "The bacon is a survivor."

"The bacon is a hero."

Khalid looked at my chest, at the syrup handprint, and then he did something I did not expect. He reached out with a dish towel and started wiping it off. Slow, careful, one pass and then another, and I stood there and let him, because it felt nice and because I couldn't think of a reason not to. His hand under the towel was big and warm and he took his time about the last of it, near my collarbone, and the kitchen got quiet in a way it hadn't been all morning.

"That's," I said, and stopped.

"Okay?" he asked. Plainly, the way you'd ask it. His hand stayed where it was, light on my shoulder.

"Yes," I said. "Yes, it's okay!"

"Good." He grinned, and the tension went out of the room like air out of a balloon. "Because you had syrup in a place syrup should not be and I couldn't watch it a second longer."

Helene hopped off the counter. "You know what, this is silly. We're all a mess, there's a shower through that door that's apparently enormous, I checked, and there are four of us and one of it. I say we clean up properly and finish breakfast after. Or during. I'm flexible."

"That's a terrible plan," Khalid said.

"It's a great plan."