A Clean Slate. Laura Caldwell

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      I stopped at Chuck’s, the first bar I found. Inside, it was dark, with at least five different football games blaring from at least ten different TVs. The tables were full of people cheering and screaming, baskets of fries and pitchers of beer in front of them. I slipped onto a stool at the bar.

      “What can I get you?” the bartender asked me. He leaned forward and dried a spot of water on the wood with a quick flick of his towel.

      “Beer.”

      “Okay. Well, we have twenty-three different labels, so what kind do you want?”

      “Doesn’t matter.” I usually drank margaritas, but it seemed too festive a drink.

      The bartender stood there for a long minute, staring at me, before he moved toward a silver tapper and picked up a glass.

      What was happening to me? What had happened to my town house, to my relationship with Ben? I wished desperately that I could rewind the day back to that moment at the dry cleaners when I was being pissy about losing a pair of black pants and the fact that my job wasn’t so great. If I could just go back, I would truly realize how lucky I was right at that moment. I would appreciate it somehow.

      But my mind kept skidding away from the dry cleaners and rushing through the rest of the day. Why hadn’t I known that my place had been sold, that Ben and I had broken up?

      The bartender pushed a glass of amber beer in front of me without a word. I took a sip, and I made myself review what I did know about myself. Name: Kelly McGraw. That was correct, wasn’t it? Beth Maninsky seemed to know that Kelly McGraw used to live in her house, and Ben had called me Kell, so that had to be right.

      What else? Parents: Sylvie and Ken McGraw, who’d had me while they were married for a very brief period and living in Fort Myers, Florida. My father was a complete shit who took off a year after my birth, and my mom reverted to her maiden name, Sylvie Custer, even though she hated it. It was too close to custard, she always said, and made her sound like some sort of pudding.

      Childhood: my mom worked her way from being a secretary at a TV station to a production assistant there, and a few years after that, she married Danny Rosati, a local crime boss who was the subject of an exposé she’d helped put together. Danny wasn’t much of a dad to me. He always treated me more like a pet, patting me on the head and giving me treats when I was good. He did give me my first camera, though, and for that I’d always be grateful. My mom gave birth to my half-sister when I was six. She was named Delores after Danny’s mom, but except for Danny, everyone called her Dee. Dee was always a frail kid, but she had the greatest toothy smile and the loudest laugh you’d ever heard.

      After my mom divorced Danny, we moved to Atlanta so she could work for a better TV station, and we stayed there until after my freshman year in high school, when we moved to Chicago. I joined the yearbook staff at my new school because at least I could take pictures, even if they were of people I didn’t know—and that was where I met Laney. We’d been best friends ever since. We went to different colleges but visited each other constantly and shot up our phone bills. After we graduated, we got an apartment together in Lakeview and shared it until a few years ago.

      Laney is the most energetic person I’ve ever met. Sometimes she’ll call me at eight in the morning, before she leaves for her account exec job at a marketing firm, and she’ll tell me that she’s already done her laundry, given herself a leg wax and taken a kick-boxing class at the gym. Laney was the person, other than Ben, who’d saved me when Dee died last year in a car accident. My mom and I couldn’t comfort each other; we reminded each other too much of Dee. My mom left Chicago—fled really—for L.A. last April to take a job with an entertainment news show, and Laney and Ben became my only family in town.

      What happened after April? I tried to think about stocks I’d researched at work, weekend trips I’d taken, street fairs I’d gone to over the summer. Nothing. I couldn’t remember anything from May up to now, the beginning of October, a span of five or so months.

      I took a gulp of my beer, hoping it would help, maybe induce some kind of alcoholic flashback. Nothing again. I had to talk to someone about this. Ben was out. Laney was my only support now, and she was in Palm Beach. Or was she?

      I sat up straighter on the stool and pushed my beer away, trying to concentrate. Laney had gone to a marketing conference in Palm Beach for a week. But was that this week? I’d been wrong about so many things today.

      I threw five dollars СКАЧАТЬ