It’s around nine something when I’m sitting on a bench on the deck next to Paula who is Joe’s wife Nadine’s friend and is wearing a skirt that stretches across the top of her knees while Mark and his girlfriend Linda are sitting on the bench across from us when Paula passes me the blunt and I inhale once deep then again and hold it a bit as I stretch and pass it off to Mark who’s in the middle of telling his story about the time he got so drunk that he went to his car and sat in it throwing up all night onto the ground with his door wide open while some bum watched him do it and never said a thing and by the time Mark’s driving his car away I start wondering why Nadine’s laughing so loud because she never does since she’s a calm person which is part of the reason I think she’s hot but now that she’s laughing like that I want to tell her to shut up because it just gets louder and louder and why’s she laughing anyway that story wasn’t funny though as I’m about to do it Paula says she’s going to get a beer and I panic thinking why does she need a beer? do I smell? is there something peculiar on my face that put her off? and since we’re the two single people we’re supposed to be getting along and then maybe fuck but she gets up and leaves and I start examining the scene of the crime that is the bench we’re on looking for clues about what the hell is happening but no one seems to mind and Nadine is still laughing which drives me nuts so I finally get up and announce I’m going to get a beer and walk past the sliding glass doors through the bedroom and into the hallway where I think I’m supposed to stumble into Paula and have sex with her in the bathroom or closet or something but I can’t find her anywhere so I start to consider that perhaps she left and left me with laughing Nadine which I can’t do anything about anyway and now I place my hands against the walls where I can feel the craters in the flat paint and brace myself since the investigation is now at an end and any cop can tell you that when there is no resolution it is devastating so I stand there for a minute looking at the little porcelain elephants that Linda keeps on the little table in the hallway where they just stand perfectly still facing the direction that I am facing which is the living room and I think perhaps she is in there but when I walk in there’s no one but I do hear clinking and I follow the clinking into the kitchen where Paula is taking more than one beer out of the refrigerator where Mark has bills posted on there held by a magnet of a elephant with a rainbow across his face being held up by his trunk and Paula asks what’s up? and I tell her I wanted a beer so she hands me one and says she was going to bring out a bucket of them and I help her load them into the bucket and tell her I’ll carry the bucket so we walk back out onto the deck where Nadine is no longer laughing but just sitting with her head on Joe’s shoulder and no one’s talking until we walk up and Paula says beer! and I hand them out one by one into each hand so soft and warm like melted butter on a block of ice.