I slide my mask off over my head, and Jolene unhooks hers from her ears. We don’t say anything as we slip down into our seats in my car, shut the doors, and drive away fast. I smell my breakfast, lingering in the car, and it weirdly doesn’t make me feel like I’m about to retch. In fact, I’m fucking hungry again, and my head doesn’t even hurt.

Maybe the best, surefire cure for a hangover is almost killing some entitled young twerp.

“You hungry?” asks Jolene, reading my mind.

My phone quivers and rattles in the cupholder beside me. It’s probably my naggy wife checking up on us: How’s Jolene’s state test going? Are you guys getting along. Hope you’re having fun… blah, blah, etc. I don’t think you can hear (via this text) the shrill tone I’m imagining as I guess at what she must be getting at.

“Yeah, I’m really hungry,” I say.

“I’m fucking starving!” Jolene replies, her coy smile as prominent and beaming as ever . . . as if we didn’t just confront some shitty little asshole who broke her heart.

My phone shakes again.

“Want me to check that?” she asks.

“Sure,” I sort of sigh, admitting to myself anew I do indeed have a wife who’s always on my ass, and whose body couldn’t stand a chance against a decent five minutes of the right porn.

Jolene reaches for my phone, her long, smooth arm twisting like a thin branch to skewer the device free from where I always keep it. “Um…” she begins, and her eyes widen, “...it’s from someone called . . . Figgles…?”

Fuck. Why the fuck would Figgles text me now?

Figgles is this high school friend I might have mentioned before. He lives all the way across the world, so I never hear from him. But when I do…

“What’s it say?” I ask sheepishly, expecting the worst.

“He says, ‘Hey bro, just got back from whoring. Fuuuuuuuuuck!’ Yeah, 9 ‘u’s in Fuuuuuuuuuck. Um, who’s Figgles? And by whoring, does he mean…?”

“Shit, I don’t know what he meant,” I gasp, and swerve a little maybe from shock and shame.

My phone rattles again.

“‘You gotta come whoring, bro!’” she reads, pronouncing each word as if it’s from a textbook and the whole damn class needs to hear.

Another vibration.

“‘Whoring is the fucking bees knees!’” she recites in that same scholarly voice.

I let out a few sad, pathetic breaths, each time trying and failing to put together and deliver some kind of explanation that might make any sense.

“Uncle X,” she says, and I feel her lively eyes burning into the side of my head like death, “can I ask you something?”

I see a Wendy’s up ahead, two blocks before the freeway entrance (of course two blocks is, like, half of fucking Blythe). “Can it wait until we’re eating?” I ask, stalling, not really sure what she could be thinking to lay on me after those texts.

“Hmph,” she agrees, and we pull in and park up under the big glowing red and white neon sign complete with mascot Wendy’s pippi-longstocking-fucken-red pigtails and constant unearthly smile.

I see there’s no one inside, then notice a pen-written sign that says it’s drive-through only due to COVID.

We pull around.

I open my window, and Jolene suddenly leans right over me to order. I mean, she’s so close I can literally smell her over the remnants of my croissants and coffee, and even over the usual Wendy’s smell coming in. Her shoulder grazes my chest, and I can’t help but stare at her face as she shouts her order, her eyes and smile taking on whole new dimensions. It’s as if I see through the person she wants the more distant world to see . . . through the cool, calm, unwavering smartass . . . through to a softer, more innocent, more thoughtful, careful person beneath. I wonder if anyone else has ever really seen her this way. I hope so.

It’s my turn, so I order a few baconators, a big fries, and three frosties (in case she wants one).

We drive very casually over to the corner of the parking lot that basically puts in view everyone leaving Blythe.

“Do you think whoring means going out to pay for whores?” she blurts out of nowhere before she even unravels her single thin plain burger.

“Yes,” I say, hoping my face stays straight. “I’m pretty sure that’s what it means.”

“Do you pay for whores?” She takes a tiny bite.

“Do you?!”

“Sorry, we don’t have to talk about that.”

“No, we can,” I sigh. “And, no, I’ve never been to a prostitute. I probably never will.”

“Oh…” I can’t tell if she’s disappointed.

“Can I ask you something else?” she asks.

“Sure.”

“Um . . . well, why did you get so mad at Tyler when you did? I don’t have a problem with it or anything. I was just . . . I’m really wondering . . . why?”

I choose to give the half of the answer I’m most proud of. “Because he hurt you,” I say, tonguing a stray strip of bacon back into my mouth.

“But you already knew he hurt me from the beginning,” she utters as if she’s a seasoned detective easily calling me out on my shifty bullshit. “Why then? Why when he said he didn’t fuck Trixie, or . . . shit, I forget their names . . . the other two. But you get what I’m asking, right?”

“I get it,” I say. Seconds later, I make a decision, which I think is based almost entirely on what I believe I saw when Jolene bent across me to order her food. I hope I’m right. “Sex,” I answer. “You want me to be honest with you, right? I will. It all comes back to sex. Everything.”

“What do you mean, Uncle X?”

But I think she knows.