Dark Places

just to show up. Please contact me and I will happily give you more information
.
    Warmly,
Lyle Wirth
    PS This is a legitimate business offer
.
    Stripping? Porn? Back when the book came out, with its section of Baby Day Grows Up photos, the most notable was me at seventeen, my wobbly, woman-breasts barely held in by a white-trash halter top. I’d received several propositions from fringe nudie mags as a result, none of them offering enough money to make me think hard. Even now five hundred wouldn’t quite do it, if these guys did want me to get naked. But maybe—
think positive, Baby Day!
—maybe it really was a legit offer, another of those mourners’ groups, needing me to show up so they had a reason to talk about themselves. Five hundred for a few hours of sympathy was a doable exchange.
    The letter was typed, except for a phone number that had been inked at the bottom in assertive script. I dialed the number, hoping for voicemail. Instead, a cavernous pause came on the line, a phone picked up, but not spoken into. I felt awkward, as if I’d called someone in the middle of a party I wasn’t supposed to know about.
    Three seconds, then a male voice: “Hello?”
    “Hi. Is this Lyle Wirth?” Buck was nosing around my legs, anxious for more food.
    “Who’s this?” Still in the background: a big loud nothing. Like he was at the bottom of a pit.
    “This is Libby Day. You wrote me.”
    “Ohhhhh holy cow. Really? Libby Day. Uh, where are you? Are you in town?”
    “Which town?”
    The man—or boy, he sounded young—yelled something at someone back behind him that included the phrase, “I already did them,” and then groaned into my ear.
    “You in Kansas City? You live in Kansas City, right? Libby?”
    I was about to hang up, but the guy started yelling
hel-ooo-o? hel-ooo-o?
into the line, like I was some dazed kid not paying attention in class, so I told him I did live in Kansas City and what did he want. He gave one of those
heheheh
laughs, those
you-won’t-believe-this-but
laughs.
    “Well, like I said, I wanted to talk to you about an appearance. Maybe.”
    “Doing what?”
    “Well, I’m in a special club … there’s a special club meeting here next week, and …”
    “What kind of club?”
    “Well, it’s kind of different. It’s sort of an underground thing …”
    I said nothing, let him twist. After the initial bravura, I could feel him get uneasy. Good.
    “Oh crap, it’s impossible to explain over the phone. Can I, uh, buy you a coffee?”
    “It’s too late for coffee,” I said, and then realized he probably didn’t even mean tonight, probably meant sometime this week, and then I wondered again how I’d kill the next four or five hours.
    “A beer? Wine?” he asked.
    “When?”
    Pause. “Tonight?”
    Pause. “Fine.”
    LYLE WIRTH LOOKED like a serial killer. Which meant he probably wasn’t one. If you were chopping up hookers or eating runaways,you’d try to look normal. He was sitting at a grimy card table in the middle of Tim-Clark’s Grille, a humid dive attached to a flea market. Tim-Clark’s had become famed for its barbeque and was now being gentrified, an uneasy mix of grizzled old-timers and flop-haired dudes in skinny jeans. Lyle was neither: He was somewhere in his very early twenties, with wavy, mousy hair he’d tried to tame with too much gel in all the wrong places, so that it was half fuzzy, half shiny points. He wore wireless glasses, a tight Members Only windbreaker, and jeans that were skinny, but not in a cool way, just in a tight way. He had features that were too delicate to be attractive on a man. Men shouldn’t have rosebud lips.
    He caught my eye as I walked toward him. He wasn’t recognizing me at first, just assessing me, this lady-stranger. When I’d almost reached the table, it clicked for him: the freckles, the baby-bird skeleton, the pug nose that got pugger the longer someone held eye contact.
    “Libby!” he started, realized it was too familiar, and added, “Day!” He stood up, pulled out one of the folding chairs, looked like he regretted the chivalry, and sat back down. “Your hair’s blond.”
    “Yup,” I said. I hate people who start conversations with facts— what are you supposed to do with that?
Sure is hot today. Yes, it is
. I peered around to signal for a drink. A miniskirted waitress with voluptuous black hair had her pretty backside to us. I table-tapped my fingers til she turned around, gave me a face that had to