From The Look Thief

Such a Nice Girl
1983

Five hundred miles to the north, a line of spring tornadoes exploded a regional supermarket, killing everybody in it, while Carinna Carrell, still new to the modest, hospitable city, glided around tables in a bar, exclaiming over people. It was like a party where everybody knew, or could think they knew, who everybody was, or anyhow the kind of person they were: the cowboy hippies in silver-and-turquoise hatbands who came in from the country, where they had moved to plant grapes or make organic goat cheese; the old and young politicos who had joined experience to passion on the picket lines; the man who sold architectural antiques from torn- down houses, who came in carrying a grooved newel post over his shoulder like a mace; the masseuse with the enormous blue crystal around her neck; the artists and artisans and musicians and people who lived off the music business; and the actors from the homegrown comedy club who made jokes about all of them. Remnants of a scene dead and embalmed on the Coasts but lasting longer in Austin, where, losing the afflatus of the zeitgeist, it caught the updraft of the sunbelt, went into business, saw high tech coming, kept playing, and made, or did not make, fortunes.

And there in the middle of it was Carinna, with her hard, reddened fingers, cutting hair for a living, though that was plainly not the half of her. She was trying to get her own salon started, the more reason to have five hundred best friends, so that, when Willie Ritter, a boomtown stranger at a table in the back corner, eyed her, and tapped the bright, fauxrustic oilcloth in front of him as if she might’ve been a waitress, Carinna veered over to speak to him. He had an aura like old nickel and looked faintly like some star she couldn’t remember, with silvery hair that stuck out in a boyish triangle over his forehead; or, maybe like he was trying to look like some star and overdoing it a little, with a long, jeaned leg slung out sideways from behind the table. He gave an impression of minor lack.

At her approach, his aura flashed like a mirror. “You give a good imitation of owning the place,” he said. “Or maybe you do?” Willie had calculated this line, as able to discover the most he could imagine her or, more likely, let her know she was not.

The effect was entirely wasted on her; she laughed and said—in a phrase that gave her away, it seemed to him—she just came here to visit with friends. “What brings you here?”

“Thirst?” Willie offered, though he had been wetting his tongue on a light beer for half an hour. He had heard in real estate circles that this was the happening place.

She told him her name without his asking, but she wouldn’t sit down. “I’m afraid Ms. Carrell regrets,” she said, like she’d never regretted anything in her life. “I’m already promised to another table, I just came back here to get my drink.”

With another woman, Willie might’ve flirted, Well, you can break your promise, can’t you? but this one, he could see, had to know everybody. “Then just while you wait for it. Meanwhile, tell me this. What’s the most interesting thing you’ve accomplished in your life?”

It seemed to Carinna like a question he had gotten from a book about how to make conversation. The most interesting thing Carinna had accomplished was leaving the town where she had lived all her life and moving here, but she had a feeling he would make her explain how that could be an accomplishment. “Raise my son,” she said. “What’s the most interesting thing you’ve accomplished?”

“Gotta think about that. Go get your drink.”

She suspected he had set her up, but it was all right, he was just another person. At the bar, Carinna ordered a non-alcoholic cocktail and waited for it without going back to talk...