Unknown 9 by Layton Green (each kindness read aloud txt) 📕

grown fuller since they had first met. Andie liked it. It gave him a rougher edge and made him seem less like a former jock.

He returned with the drinks. “So how do you think you’ll die?”

She blinked. “Come again?”

“Not counting being tortured by the Ascendants, that is. I mean before all this started: How did you think you would croak?”

“What a bizarre question. I don’t know. Definitely not from old age. Maybe a plane crash, lost in fog over the Himalayas. No—adrift in space with oxygen and proper gear. Yeah, that’d be nice.”

“Curious,” Cal said. “Okay, I’m with that.”

“Why are you asking?”

“I don’t know. Maybe because death has seemed rather imminent lately.”

The comment caused her to look down and hold her glass between her palms. “What about you? I assume you’ve thought about this.”

“Yeah, but it changes all the time. These days, I’ve been feeling a heart attack after a two-week bender in a Mexican brothel.”

“Please tell me you don’t frequent brothels.”

“It’s more about the sentiment. Dead-ass broke, one last hair-raiser south of the border, going out in a blaze of glory.”

“Been there, done that,” she muttered.

“Really?”

“Except for the dying. It was a long time ago, and I turned my life around after that.”

“And? Thumbs-up as a way to go out?”

She chuckled. “Can’t say I recommend it.”

Two drinks turned into three, and then four. They kept up the banter, chatting about happier times. Andie started to feel gooey inside from the alcohol, and Cal’s jaw seemed firmer than when the night had started.

“When you mentioned your mom in Hanoi,” she said, “I gathered you loved her very much. It’s okay if you don’t want to talk about it. We can keep it shallow tonight.”

“It’s fine.” Cal rubbed his beard and sighed. “My dad was a world-class jerk, but my mom and I were real close. When dad lost his job—and our house—we left him and moved to LA so my mom could pursue her dream of being an actress. She was still young then, a real beauty. She acted in a few plays, but always put her dreams aside for her family.”

“How did you have the money to move to LA?” she asked. “I’m sorry—that was a crass question.”

“Nah, it’s fine. We didn’t until my grandfather died and left my mom a small inheritance. We used all of it to fund the move. I mean, why not? My dad was drinking himself to death on the sofa. Anyway, long story short, we made the move, and my mom got a few auditions. It was going well until a director raped her on the casting couch.”

Andie set her drink down. “Oh my God.”

“At least I think that’s what happened. I never knew for sure, but I heard her crying and talking to her sister, and I read between the lines. Some no-name pissant director. Harvey Weinstein is all over the news, and the famous actresses receive all the attention, but for every one of those, there were plenty like my mom who got no press and had their lives ruined. I never got over it, and I never forgot the lesson. Fuck people with power who think they can do whatever they want to other people.”

Andie raised her glass. “Fuck ’em.”

Cal waved a hand. “Enough of all that. Let’s get one more round, talk about the weather, and call it a night.”

“Deal.” Andie realized she was drunk and didn’t care. She had needed the release. She also needed the restroom. “Be right back.”

There was a short line in the hallway outside the toilet. As she waited, Andie glanced at the photos on the wall of bar patrons engaged in various stages of revelry—and had one of the most profound shocks of her life.

Unable to believe what she was seeing, she stepped across the corridor and peered directly at a photograph hanging at eye level. There was no date on the photo, but she could see the neon happy dragon lounge sign behind the bar, and the tourist canoes on the river.

And the tall and beautiful woman in the photo, dancing atop the bar with her blond hair unbound and a drink in her hand, as happy and carefree as Andie had ever seen her, was without a doubt her mother.

Andie couldn’t stop gawking. Dressed in a black tank top and a grass skirt with a tropical motif, wearing her jade ring, her mother was about the same age as Andie was now. The photo must have been taken during her mother’s “sabbatical” in her late twenties.

Andie stumbled back to the table. Cal rose to meet her and put his hands on her shoulders. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

“I think I did,” she said in a daze.

She led him to the photo and told him who it was. After he stared at it for a long moment, stunned, they made their way around the room, searching for more evidence of her mother’s visit.

“Andie,” Cal said when they were standing in front of the bar, his voice strangely subdued. He pointed. “Up there.”

She followed his finger to one of the dozens of license plates on the wall, and then gasped. The artwork on the North Carolina plate was an ode to the legacy of the Wright brothers: the image of an old propeller plane flying above a field of sea oats. She had seen similar plates all over Durham. However, the nine letters on the plate were custom-made, as well as the source of the gooseflesh coursing down her arms.

ANDROMEDA

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Unable to speak, feeling wobbly from the alcohol and the shock of discovery, Andie took out the Star Phone and tried to steady her hand as she aimed the device at the andromeda license plate. She had done the same thing to no effect with the photo of her mother and the happy dragon lounge sign.

But as she peered through the Star Phone at the license plate, the nine letters enlarged to fill