A Grave Beneath the Floorboards novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Wing
At Dutch's bar Carly spits out a wing and says she can't do spicy food, and Macy realizes the woman across the table is not her best friend. She bags the woman's glass and reads a text on her phone: Did she buy it?
My best friend spat a chicken wing into a napkin in the middle of our favorite dive bar, and then she swore at it.
"Macy, what the hell is in these? I can't do spicy food!"
I froze with my own wing halfway to my mouth.
Carly could do spicy food.
She had spent four years learning how, just so she could keep up with me on our Friday food crawls.
First came mild salsa, then jalapenos, then a bottle of habanero sauce she kept in her purse.
By the end she was eating level-four curry without blinking, and she'd raised both fists in the parking lot and cheered.
"Macy," she had told me that night, grinning, "if I ever come back and I can't eat spicy, call the cops. That won't be me."
I had laughed and punched her in the shoulder.
Now the woman across the table dabbed her mouth with a napkin and reached for her water.
She had Carly's hair, cut the same way, and Carly's green jacket with the missing top button.
She had Carly's voice, too, pitched exactly right.
But she had just ordered the Nuclear wings out loud and called them "our usual," and Carly had never once been brave enough to say that.
I put my wing down.
"You okay?" the woman asked. "You look pale."
"Just tired," I said. "Long week."
"Poor baby. Tell me about it."
So I told her about a patient who had bitten my finger that morning.
She laughed.
She threw her head back and laughed with her whole mouth open, and I could see every one of her front teeth.
They were straight, even and white.
I clean teeth for a living, and I know a bonded repair when I see one.
Carly had chipped her left front tooth in a bike crash in seventh grade, and the dentist had patched it twice since.
You could not see it from across a room, but I could see it from across a table, and I had been looking at it for sixteen years.
And Carly never laughed like that.
She laughed behind her hand, always, her palm flat over her mouth, and I had teased her about it a thousand times.
"Your teeth are fine, Carly. Stop hiding them."
"I can't help it," she'd say, giggling. "My hand moves faster than my brain."
The woman across from me didn't lift a hand at all.
I took a long drink of my beer.
My heart was banging so hard I thought she would hear it.
"You're so quiet tonight," she said. "Is it the house? Is the back bedroom still bothering you?"
"The floor still creaks a little," I said, "where the new boards went in."
"Don't poke at it." She waved her hand. "I told you, it's fine. The guy I sent did a great job."
She had said the same thing in March, almost word for word.
I looked at her face and tried to find my friend in it.
I couldn't.
It was a good face, warm and tired and fond, and I would have walked into traffic for it five months ago.
"I forgot to tell you," she said. "I'm having my birthday dinner on the thirteenth again."
Her birthday was the twelfth of September.
She had put her party on the thirteenth every year since we were twelve, and she had never told me why, and I had never pushed.
"Same as always," I said, and my voice came out steady.
It scared me how steady it was.
I knew two things.
The woman in front of me was not Carly.
And she had no idea that I knew.
So I smiled and picked up another wing.
"I'm going to wash my hands," I told her, and I stood up and took my purse.
At the sink I pulled a pair of gloves and a zip bag out of my purse, the kind I carry for patients' retainers.
When I came back, she had gone to the register to settle our check.
I slid her water glass into the bag with the gloves on, and I zipped it shut.
Her phone lay face up beside the empty basket, and the screen lit.
A text sat across the lock screen from a contact named "V."
Did she buy it?
I stood there with a stranger's glass in my fist and read it again.
Then I put the bag in my purse and sat down before she turned around.
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