Page 18 of On His Mind

And I finally hear myself. I’m apologizing to a stranger in French like a lunatic. My ears go so hot I can feel my pulse in them. I turn and grab the whole stack of napkins off the counter beside the cups and hold them out for her.

I can’t get anything else out. Notsorry. Notare you okay. NotI’ll get you a new drink, which is the sentence roaring around behind my sternum with nowhere to go. I just have the napkins. I hold them out in two hands, like an idiot.

She looks at them. Then she takes one. Not the stack. One.

“Thank you,” she says.

Her voice is calm, and it’s pitched low enough that only I get it. I don’t know why that undoes me, but it does. She isn’t mad. She has a soaked dress, and she’s handling it at conversational volume like it’s a thing only for the two of us.

She presses the napkin to the fabric once. It does nothing. The stain is already gone into the fabric, and both of us can see it. Her chin comes up a fraction. Her shoulders square. And she puts herself back together in front of me in about a second and a half— so completely that if I hadn’t had my hands on her ten seconds ago I’d think I made it up.

I’ve seen that. I know that. I’ve done that in the hallway outside a caseworker’s office and in the front seat of a car with my whole life in a bag at my feet. You don’t get that good at it for no reason.

“It’s okay,” she says.

She’s letting me off.

I want to tell herno, it isn’t. It’s a nice dress and I destroyed it. What I do instead? I nod.

Her eyes come up to mine once more.

“Penelope.” A blonde girl arrives out of nowhere at full volume, hands already on her. “Oh my God — okay, okay, come here, bathroom, now, before it sets—”

“Ivory—”

“Come on!”

And she’s gone, towed off through the crowd by the wrist with her free hand still holding one napkin, and the crowd closes up behind her like water.

There’s a puddle on the floor about the size of a dinner plate and a slick of it spreading toward the doorway where somebody’s going to go down. I crouch and start mopping it up with the rest of the napkins.

I know how this looks. I’m aware, the entire time, that I am a six-foot-two person on one knee on a kitchen floor during a party, cleaning up liquid with cocktail napkins while people step over me. Somebody’s shoe comes down four inches from my hand. Somebody says something to somebody else about the goalie and I don’t turn around.

The napkins go transparent and useless. I get the second stack.

From down here I’ve got a good view of the whiteboard on the wall by the fridge.

1. No falling in love before the draft.

Somebody has drawn something anatomical next to it in a different marker since this morning.

Great. Fantastic. Excellent house.

“Okay, so this is a look.” Stanley’s legs appear beside me. Then the rest of him, crouching down, elbows on his knees, beer dangling.

“You good?”

“Somebody’s going to fall.”

He looks at the floor. Then at me. Then at the floor again.

“Percy. Buddy. Statistically, four people are going to slip in this house tonight and two of them are going to enjoy it.”

I keep going.

He watches me for a second longer than is comfortable. Then he stands up, sticks a hand in my armpit, and hauls me upright with about forty percent more strength than I thought he had.

“Come on. You cleaned it all up. It’s good.”