The Year of Disappearances Read Online Free Page A

Flo’s Place wasn’t happy that night.
    The regulars sat at the bar and in the booths, glasses of red wine and Picardo in their hands. But not everyone drank the red stuff. Here and there you could spot a glass of beer or white wine, mostly in the hands of mortals.
    No one at our table was talking. Mãe and Dashay looked like beautiful statues.
    So it came as a relief when the door to Flo’s was flung open and Mysty and Autumn strutted inside. They walked in short steps, leading with their bellies, prominent thanks to low-slung jeans and abbreviated, tight tops. I adjusted a strap of my cotton sundress and thought I must look about ten.
    Autumn and Mysty had done something to enlarge their hair. Their sunglasses were pushed back on their heads, and their eyes were lined and lashed and shadowed. Autumn glanced at me, gave me a nod and a wave. But they didn’t come over. They headed straight for the bar.
    Mãe and Dashay didn’t notice them at first, but I watched as the girls tried to order beer.
    After some exchanges with the bartender, Autumn said, “Ain’t our money good here?” in a high-pitched voice that cut through Johnny Cash singing “Ring of Fire.” Everyone in the place stopped talking.
    “This ID is fake. I can’t serve you.” The bartender, whose name was Logan, was tall and good looking, with dark red hair. He was one of us. “We’d lose our license,” he said.
    Autumn turned and looked directly at me. “Well, you served her. ”
    A half-full glass of Picardo sat innocently before me on the table.
    “Who are they?” Dashay said.
    Mãe said to me, “Those are the girls you met the other day?”
    I nodded. Autumn kept staring at me, waiting for me to say something, to come to their defense. But what could I say?
    Logan laughed, and some of the tension went out of the room. “She’s drinking Picardo. There’s no alcohol in that. You want to try some?”
    He poured an inch of Picardo into a shot glass and handed the glass to Mysty. She looked at it dubiously, then raised the glass and shot the bright red liquid down her throat. Almost immediately she made a gagging sound and spat it onto the floor. “Gross!” she said.
    “It’s an acquired taste,” I said. A few of the regulars smiled at me.
    “You girls don’t want to be hanging around a dump like this,” Logan said. “You’d be more at home over at Murray’s.”
    Without another word they left the bar, Autumn throwing me a look of contempt as they went.
    Logan said something under his breath, and everyone close to the bar laughed.
    “I always thought there was alcohol in Picardo,” I said. “There is.” Dashay took a long sip from her glass. “Plenty.”

    My mother took Logan to task for lying to Mysty and Autumn. “You could lose your license for giving them Picardo,” she said, leaning her elbows on the bar.
    Logan poured us another round. He grinned at Mãe. “I know. But the girl wanted a taste. Now she knows what bitter is.”
    I wondered why we could drink so much Picardo and never get drunk. Mãe and Logan both began to speak at once: “Because we’re not—” They laughed. Mãe finished the sentence: “—susceptible to alcohol.”
    I helped her carry the glasses back to our booth.
    “Watch out for those girls,” Dashay said as we sat down. “They gave me a bad feeling.” Abruptly she stretched her hands toward me. “Let me look at your eyes.”
    She pushed my forehead back and leaned in close to cup my chin. I stared into her eyes: caramel brown from a distance, but flecked with orange and green and black and yellow, I saw now. It felt odd to look into them so closely.
    After several seconds, she pulled away. “No, you’re all right.”
    “What was that about?” I asked her.
    She didn’t answer. She stared off into the distance.
    “Her mind is elsewhere,” Mãe said, her voice gentle. “Let her be.”
    And so we spent the rest of Unhappy Hour in silence, listening to the jukebox play a strange mix