Kara Was Here. William Conescu

Kara imagining what took place inside. We’re right next to the empty building that’s clearly a safe house for giant rodents, Kara would tell the car service operator. I’m one building down from the gang headquarters near the corner, she’d tell the Chinese food deliveryman. Okay, if I don’t get killed by the arms dealers living in the bombed-out building next door, I’ll meet you right outside.

      Margot rang the bell for 4C, was buzzed in without any conversation, and walked up the stairs to what was for four years Kara’s home. When Margot knocked on the door, a twenty-something-year-old Asian girl with long hair and a nose ring opened the door but didn’t particularly acknowledge Margot’s presence. Margot walked inside and hovered around a table, which held bowls of pretzels and chips. Mullet and Collin were nowhere to be seen. An earnest, whiny rock ballad played from a pair of speakers attached to an iPhone.

      There were about ten people in the small living room and at least as many bottles of wine and liquor gathered on the kitchen counter. Everyone was young and waifish, except for a thickly built man on the sofa who had a white goatee and was saying, “Girl, don’t make me slap you back to Kansas,” to a man wearing eyeliner. Margot had more hip and thigh and breast than the six girls here put together. Not that anyone seemed to notice her. One girl registered her presence briefly; another said “Hi” and “Excuse me” and grabbed a handful of Pringles. This didn’t look like a funeral. It looked like a party.

      It was strange being back in this space without Kara. The dusty floral sofa was the same, the found-on-the-curb coffee table with one leg duct-taped in place. Against one wall was a bookshelf that had once held a framed snapshot of the two of them at a wine-tasting. The poster from Grey Gardens was Kara’s. The lamp in the corner they’d bought together.

      “Are you Margot?” someone asked after what was probably a good five minutes.

      “Mm-hmm.”

      “So great to finally meet you,” the girl said. “I didn’t see you come in. I’m Pepper.”

      The girl’s tone of voice seemed to imply that Margot should know who she was, so Margot nodded. “You too,” she said, and they shook hands.

      “I worked at the restaurant with Kara,” Pepper said. “And we went to auditions together sometimes.” Pepper had spiraling red hair pulled back in a bandana. She looked like she was about twenty-five, and there was no question she’d played Annie in a high school production, talent or none. “Let me get Collin,” she added, and she turned around and shouted his name.

      That seemed to do the trick. He emerged from a bedroom, opened his arms, and hugged Margot as if they’d met more than once in their lives. He was wearing a spicy cologne, and his hair dipped below his eyes so he had to toss it back when he stepped away from her.

      “I’m so glad you could come,” he said. “I really am. I just felt like I had to do something. Did you go to North Carolina for the funeral? You did? I couldn’t, and I just felt awful about the way Kara and I left things, so Pepper said do something, don’t keep moping for God’s sake, and I thought, with Kara’s birthday coming up and most of us not being able to go to the funeral, that this is what Kara would’ve wanted, you know? A party. So anyway, thank you for coming. Make yourself at home—did you get a drink?”

      Margot let Collin make her a madras, but he put barely any orange juice or cranberry in it. It tasted like colorful vodka, so she had to sip it down and add more juice herself a minute later. Cougar Cominsky would have been mortified.

      She had heard about the falling out; she just hadn’t heard the details. Somehow, quite suddenly, Collin was an asshole, Collin was full of himself, Collin was intolerable, and Kara was moving out. That was the end of Collin.

      Before he’d disappeared from Kara’s life, Collin was often the character in Kara’s stories who dragged her to the next bar at three in the morning, or had a friend who could get them more Valium, or was going through a phase of bringing home Puerto Rican men, or got them into an after-party at some stranger’s apartment somewhere in Brooklyn Heights. So when Margot heard that Kara was moving out, although she was predisposed to feel some sympathy for the people who lived with Kara, Margot didn’t mind knowing that Collin was out of Kara’s life.

      “Come sit down,” he said, leading Margot and Pepper to the sofa. “Everyone, this is Margot, one of Kara’s friends from back in college.”

      A chorus of Hi, Margots followed, reminding Margot of those AA meetings, or at least their sitcom facsimiles. “Hi, everyone,” she said. She sipped her madras.

      “I’m jealous that you knew Kara in college,” Pepper said. “What was she like?”

      “Oh, a lot like the Kara she is today—or was. Full of energy and jokes. Everybody loved her.”

      “Even the people she hated,” said the man with the white goatee, and most of them chuckled. There was something to that, Margot thought. In college, Kara made everyone laugh; the whole drama department loved her. But in private, she wasn’t always a fan of her fellow actors, and she was quite unforgiving of stage managers.

      “Kara used to say the nicest things about you,” Collin said. “She had pictures of you two looking young and precious. Oh, and there was some story about you doing a photo shoot at a shopping mall. Am I right?”

      “Oh, yeah,” Margot said. “We didn’t actually do the shoot, but we did schedule it. We went to one of those photography studios for toddlers and babies, and she told the salesman that ‘Mummy and Daddy’ didn’t have any pictures of us from our childhood, so we wanted to put together a childhood photo album now. She was very convincing—”

      “Of course,” Collin said.

      “She told the guy we wanted to do a dozen shots dressed as children—riding hobby horses, posing as angels . . .”

      We don’t actually have adult-sized angel wings, the salesman had told them.

      No problem. We have our own, Kara had replied. Now can we do the bath time shot in the back? Obviously, we don’t mind being naked in front of a photographer, but it could be awkward doing it in the store window.

      Margot snorted a laugh. “It got a little outrageous.”

      “Oh my gosh,” said the man with the white goatee, clapping his hands. “Did Kara tell you about that time at Riccardo’s?”

      “No one but Kara could have gotten away with that,” Pepper said.

      “What?” Margot asked.

      “She and I were walking past Riccardo’s—Do you know it? Big, posh place in Soho—and I’m ogling the window, and I say I always wanted to go there but it’s too expensive. So, girl hands me her purse and says, ‘Wait here.’ Next thing I know she’s in the restaurant, standing beside this table where they just got their meals. And she says to this stuffy-looking couple she’s terribly sorry but there was a problem in the kitchen and they need to remake their dinners, but they’ll have replacements out in no time and it’ll be on the house. One minute later, girlfriend is out the door walking beside me with two plated dinners in her hands. I mean, it couldn’t have happened faster. I almost peed on myself. We ate on a stoop around the corner. She’d even grabbed two napkin rolls from the host stand—I still have the silverware. It was the best dinner I ever had.”

      Collin told them about an afternoon he and Kara had spent loudly shopping for matching Rolexes for everyone in the extended family. “Everyone,” Kara would clarify, “except Cousin Gertrude . . . that bitch.” Pepper recalled Kara’s three lively days of employment at Victoria’s Secret. Then Collin remembered the Great Grandma Kara routine and how Kara had used it to get free drinks at the bars and as an excuse for forgetting someone’s order at the restaurant. “She was using that story in college,” Margot said, “to get out of exams.”

      Margot was nursing her drink and keeping an eye on her watch, and at about the one-hour mark, she figured it would be reasonable to say her good-byes. But Mullet still