Paint It Black by Janet Fitch

Andes, an earthquake. I slept about three hours last night.” He sighed heavily. “Look, I just wanted to call, to say goodbye.”
    Goodbye? “Where are you going?”
    “Home, Josie,” Cal said gently. “I’m leaving on the red-eye.”
    Home. He was going home. He was going back to Numbah Foah and her children in New York. He’d be in bed with her by morning.
    Suddenly, she was as jealous of him as if she had been Cal’s lover. How dare he have someone to go home to. How dare he have a life. He was already on his way, his thoughts moving ahead to his new family and what he had to do tomorrow, he was
getting on with it.
When she was lying here fucking herself on this couch like a shipwreck stranded in the middle of a currentless sea.
    “Listen, here’s my number. If you want to talk, call me. Anytime.” But she knew she wouldn’t call because if she did, he’d be taking tango lessons in Buenos Aires or beating the bush in Kuala Lumpur. Nevertheless, she pawed in the debris on the orange footlocker to find a pencil, the tears in her eyes keeping her from seeing right. She finally found one, wrote down his fucking number.
    “We’ll go on, Josie,” he said. “We have no choice. We’ll find a way.”
    Will we? Will we really, Cal?
You
dickhead.
You
find a way. You fucking find a way.
After she hung up, she just sat for a while, staring at the phone beyond her bare knees. Pen came out with a bowl of Cheetos.
    “Get dressed,” Pen said. “People are coming over.”
    “What people?” Josie said. She couldn’t imagine there was still anybody left in the world.
    “Your friends,” Pen said. “Get some fucking clothes on.”
    Shirley Kamaguchi came over, and Genghiz, her boss at the shop, a self-proclaimed Aztec from Pico Rivera, fourth generation, and Ben Sinister, and David Doll. They brought boxes of sushi and ate at the battered table. “This is a nice place,” Ben said, glancing up at the Chinese characters on the lamp.
Tao, ming.
“Did you do those?”
    “Michael,” Josie said.
    “He always seemed nice. I liked him,” said Shirley K., her Kabuki red mouth making a sad pout.
    Pen didn’t say anything. It was the first time Josie had ever seen her hang on to her opinion, leave a thought unvoiced.
    It was surreal to have all these people here. No one ever came to their house, it was their kingdom, their province, lair and clubhouse and center of the universe. Now the spell was gone and people were just walking in. It got dark, and Paul Angstrom came from work at Cashbox with a bag of tamales and Mason and PJ came with Stoli and popcorn. Pen must have put a bulletin up at the Hong Kong Café. They were all so sorry, really kind, but not one of them had known him, no one had known the first thing about him. They talked about other friends who died. Pen told them all how Meredith attacked her at the funeral, and Genghiz talked about a friend of his who had killed himself while he was taking hormones for a sex-change operation. “I just think of the last time he called me, I was in a rush, I said I’d get back to him and then I didn’t. I just forgot. And then he was dead. Like, what if there was something I could have done? I mean, I’d just had coffee with him. We weren’t that close but it was like, I should have been there.”
    These are my friends,
she kept telling herself.
    They drank the Stoli, and PJ had some blow, and Genghiz brought poppers from one of the boys’ clubs on Santa Monica Boulevard. It wasn’t quite the high she wanted, she really could have used some big fat reds, but you took what you got and were goddamn grateful for it. The poppers blasted her head blank for five minutes, it was great not to have one fucking thought. The blow got her blood moving, she even laughed a little. High, she could even imagine Michael was out shopping at the Chinese market, or down at Launderland, any minute he would come back through the door, unshaved and rumpled in his tweed jacket, and