Page 30 of The Loophole
I knew I had to let go of this need to control my environment. This was his home for the next year, and I wanted him to be happy here. Besides, he really wasn’t going to be able to do much with that amount, no matter what he said. “Okay. What should we bet?”
Embry thought about it before saying, “If I win, you have to cook me dinner.”
“I’m going to do that anyway.”
“But you have to cook whatever I want, even if it’s not up to your fine dining standards, and even if you think it’s weird and gross.”
“Fine. And if I win?—”
He grinned at me. “You won’t. I’m already formulating a plan.”
“But if I do,” I said, “I want brutally honest feedback on some of the dishes I’ve been working on for my new restaurant. I know you’re a vegetarian, so I’ll obviously be mindful of that.”
“Great, it’s a bet,” he said. “Just so you know though, I’ll be happy to give you honest feedback, even after you lose.”
We went into my home office, and I pulled a hundred dollars out of the petty cash envelope in my desk and handed it over. Embry barely noticed. He stuck the money in his pocket without so much as a glance and gravitated to one of my two large, magnetic whiteboards. One was all about food, while the other focused on the look of the new restaurant. They were covered in sketches, notes, and a few inspirational photos printed from the internet or torn from magazines.
It was his first time seeing these, and he murmured, “Your drawings are absolutely beautiful. You’re an artist, Bryson.”
“Not really. They’re just ideas for how to plate some of the dishes I’ve been developing.”
“They’re amazing.” He pointed to a colored pencil sketch of frozen custard pearls and fresh red currants in a delicate meringue box. “Is this a dessert?”
“Yeah. I try not to do too many of those. I’ll obviously hire a pastry chef for my new restaurant, and they’ll want to develop their own recipes. But sometimes ideas for desserts come to me, and I draw them as a way of getting them out of my head. Then I can focus on other things.”
“I do the same thing with my ideas for cakes.” He pulled his phone from the pocket of his hoodie and smiled at me. “Okay, time to get going on the holiday decorating. Step one is to message my secret weapons.” He seemed happy and optimistic, but I was worried he’d end up disappointed when he realized how little that budget would cover.
He sent a text and got a reply a few moments later. “Lark and his boyfriend Dylan are going to help me. Lark is very crafty, and Dylan is studying to be a landscape architect and has access to a lot of great stuff.” I had no idea what kind of “great stuff” he could possibly be referring to, but sure. “I’m meeting Lark at a hardware store in an hour. But before I do that, is there anything around here I can use?”
“There are a couple of boxes of ornaments, a few strands of lights, and a Christmas tree stand in the garage. Help yourself to anything you need.”
He seemed concerned. “I don’t want to use anything that’s going to make you sad.”
“Don’t worry. After the divorce, my dad went out and bought some pretty basic ornaments for our tree, since my mother keptthe ones we had growing up. They’re not sentimental heirlooms or anything.”
“Okay. Just making sure.”
“I appreciate that.”
He surprised me by throwing his arms around me and exclaiming, “This is going to be so fun! I’ve never gotten to decorate a whole house before. I promise to do my best and not make it super tacky or anything.”
The important thing was that he enjoyed himself and felt more at home here. If it ended up a little tacky, I’d just have to deal with it. Besides, how bad could it be?
Pretty bad, it turned out. That afternoon, Embry and Lark returned from their outing wearing matching Santa hats and lugging some enormous shopping bags. I tried to hide my frown as they unpacked a bunch of stuff onto the living room floor, including several boxes of purple lights. I had to ask, though. “Why purple?”
“Because they were left over from Halloween and on sale for ninety percent off,” Embry explained, “and because they match the dragon.”
“The what?”
Lark pulled a smashed box out of one of the bags and held it up to show me. The wordseight-foot inflatable dragonwere emblazoned above a picture of a cartoonish purple creature. It had orange flames shooting from its mouth, and it was sitting up on its haunches, like a dog begging for a treat.
I wanted to be open-minded, but what the actual fuck?
There was an orange clearance sticker on the box. It told me it had been marked down to nineteen dollars, but it also said itwas damaged. When I pointed that out, Embry produced a roll of duct tape. “One of his horns is torn off, but it’s not a problem,” he assured me. “Once we patch him up, he’ll inflate just fine.” Awesome.
Dusty was circling the bags and sniffing everything, and when Lark pulled the dragon out of the box, the dog growled at it. I agreed with that sentiment.
I had serious misgivings about all of this, but I tried not to freak out about it. So, I had to live with a janky, patched up dragon in my yard for a few weeks. My neighbors would think I’d lost it, but so what? My dad had been friends with almost everyone on the block when I was growing up, but those families had moved away one-by-one. Now I was surrounded by strangers. Their opinions shouldn’t matter to me.