Wishing in the Wings by Mindy Klasky Page B

second round. At least. Pete, the ever-patient bartender, nodded a greeting from behind his long stretch of polished mahogany. “The usual?” he asked, already reaching for a cocktail glass and a bottle of rye.
    My usual. A Manhattan. Dean had bought me my first Manhattan.
    I shook my head. “Let’s try something new,” I said. I didn’t need Dean. I was infinitely better off without him. I had my fairy godmothers, instead. Kira. And Teel. And Maureen Shultz.
    That reminded me of a drink I’d had at a cast party once, for Steven Sondheim’s Into the Woods, a musical about fairy tales gone nightmarishly bad. There. That was a perfect antidote to Dean-driven memories, a great reminder that there was no such thing as a Prince Charming. Ever. Anywhere.
    I said to Pete, “How about a Godmother?”
    Always the perfect bartender, Pete nodded, without my needing to define the drink. If he realized the importance of my decision to change my poison, he hid it well. He grabbed a highball glass and poured a generous amount of vodka. As he swirled in the requisite Amaretto, I couldn’t help but remember the cascading fog that had billowed out of Teel’s lamp. I glanced down at my fingertips, but it was too dark to make out my subtle flame tattoo. I knew the mark was there, though. I knew that I still had three wishes to harvest.
    Pete handed over my drink with a professional nod. He’d run a tab for me. He always did. I tried not to think about the lonely twenties in my wallet, the three hundred dollars that weren’t going to see any companions until my next pay check. I picked up my drink. Some splurges were worth it. Necessary, in fact, for the preservation of mental health.
    “Becca!” Jenn exclaimed in an over-loud voice as I made my way back to the Mercer crowd. A momentary silence flickered over the gathering, just enough to make me certain that they’d been talking about me. They were actors, though, trained professionals. It only took an instant for them to ad-lib new lines, to exclaim about the bitter wind outside, about some actor’s total embarrassment in an audition the day before. No one even mentioned the blocking change from the afternoon’s rehearsal—it must not have been too traumatic, after all.
    Jenn waved me to her side. She was sitting with a couple of long-time Mercer performers, Kelly Reilly and Rob Cornell.
    “Here, Becca,” Kelly said, rolling to her feet. She was hugely pregnant; she looked like she might deliver triplets right there in the Pharm. “Rob and I are heading home. Steal a chair while you can!”
    I appreciated the cheerful way she addressed me, looking me directly in the eye, as if I weren’t the scum of the theatrical earth. Maybe those were the type of good manners that Kelly had mastered in her native Minnesota. Rumor had it, her father ran a great bar for the theater crowd there—that was where she’d met Kira Franklin, how Kira had ended up at the Mercer, way back when. The theater world truly was as small as a frontier village.
    Not that that boded well for anyone disgraced, the way I was.
    Rob pushed Kelly’s chair toward me. I was grateful, given how crowded the Pharm was. “Thanks,” I said, but I was spared more small talk as Kelly and Rob made their way to the door.
    Jenn watched them leave before she clinked her glass of beer against my Godmother. She said, “I’m glad you came.”
    I looked at the remaining actors wryly, pitching my voice so that only my assistant could hear. “You made it sound like they were desperate for me. Like they were prostrate with grief over the old blocking.”
    She shrugged. “I figured you needed to get out. Spend some time with friends, instead of holed up home alone.” She obviously thought that I’d been at my old home, at the place I’d shared with Dean. Well, no time like the present to share my incredible news.
    “That’s the thing,” I said. “That’s why I rushed out of the office today.”
    “What?”
    I took