God-Shaped Hole: A Novel by Tiffanie DeBartolo

Author:Tiffanie DeBartolo [DeBartolo, Tiffanie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sourcebooks
Published: 2017-05-15T18:00:00+00:00

27

“We can’t spend our last night in San Francisco all cooped up like a couple of chickens,” Jacob said. He got claustrophobic when he was stressed out. If we’d been at home, he would have wanted to go to the beach. Luckily, the bay was too cold for a midnight swim.

“Let’s go grab a beer,” he said. He already had his coat on.

• • •

We went back to the bar on Valencia. There was no Ryan Chuck outside, and no live band inside, just a crummy DJ who spun a load of half-assed pop songs from the early eighties. Jacob neither cared nor noticed. He hadn’t gone for the tunes. We were barely through the door before he had a seat at the bar and a bottle in his hand. He ordered us both beers, even though I said I didn’t want one, and we sat there like a couple of lonely sots. I tried to get him to dance but he was unequivocally glued to his chair. He finished his beer in five big gulps, had two quick shots of tequila, then started drinking from my bottle.

“Thirsty?” I said. He ignored me. “Jacob, why don’t we just go back to the hotel?”

“I don’t want to go back to the hotel,” he snapped. “If I go back there, all I’m going to do is sit around and think about it.”

I assumed it meant his father, as well as the brother he never knew he had. He sucked on my beer and gazed at his reflection in the frosted mirror behind the bar. He stared straight into his own eyes, and I can’t say for sure what he saw, but I would have bet my inheritance he wasn’t looking at himself. I found it funny that he thought going back to the hotel was going to make him think of it, because there he was, sitting on a barstool, thinking so hard on it that he couldn’t even recognize his own goddamn face.

I spun my chair around and watched the small crowd dance. When the DJ took a break, everyone swarmed the bar for refills.

A guy in crisp blue jeans and a bomber jacket stepped between me and Jacob and ordered a rum and coke.

“Omar?” I said.

The guy did a double take. Jacob looked over to see who I was talking to.

“Beatrice?” Omar said. “Are you kidding me? What are you doing here?”

I stood up and he threw his arms around me.

Omar’s girlfriend, Valerie, and I were roommates our last year of college. We stayed friends for a while after graduation, until he and Valerie moved up to the Bay Area and I lost touch with them. Omar was a dark, lanky theater actor with a dusty presence. I always had a crush on him.

“You look great,” he said. “How are you?” He kept his arm around me.

“Good,” I said. I introduced him to Jacob and the arm came down.

Omar gave Jacob a quick overview of our past, explaining how long it had been since we’d seen each other.

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