Household Gods

Nicole waited for Julia to throw something at him or pick up a stool and brain him with it, supposing he had any brains north of his crotch. But Julia’s laugh was loud and obviously genuine. The men in the tavern laughed, too, but they were men. What else could you expect from them? Only when Nicole heard Fabia Ursa giggling did she realize the joke wasn’t out of line here. Local community standards.

No matter what the local community thought, she didn’t like it.

“Next round is mine,” Ofanius Valens said, fitting himself into the party as if he had every right to do it.

“You’re going to be a couple of cups short, Ofanius,” Titus Calidius Severus said. They straightened out who owed how much wine to whom, with resigned amusement that showed they’d done such things many times before. Drunks, Nicole supposed, had plenty of practice in getting drunk.

She wasn’t as scornful as she had been, not with that drunken night with Julia under her own belt. In its own way, it had been fun – while it lasted. The next morning… The less she thought about the next morning, the better.

Sextus Longinius was not to be left out of the party. He bought the next round. Nicole wished he hadn’t, not with a baby on the way and him as far from rich as she was. But there wasn’t any way to tell him so without bruising his pride. A person had to be able to hold his head up in front of his friends and neighbors – as much here as in Los Angeles, or Indianapolis for that matter.

All the rounds included Nicole – they wouldn’t have been rounds if they hadn’t. She had to empty her cup each time, too, or people would wonder what was the matter with her. Their conversation, which hadn’t been particularly genteel to begin with, turned loud and silly. She turned loud and silly.

She wasn’t drunk. She was sure she wasn’t. She’d been drunk before. Drunk was when she couldn’t stand up without wanting to fall over. Now, although her feet didn’t quite want to do as she told them, she walked well enough. She said clever things, witty things: people laughed, didn’t they?

She couldn’t remember the last time she’d been the life of the party. Had she ever been? Her memory was fogged a bit – time travel did that to a person, even without a few cups of Falernian – but as far as she could recall, mostly at parties she’d either circulated rapidly and got out as fast as possible, or found a corner to hide in while too many other guests got sloshed or stoned.

None of them had been as witty as she was being. She didn’t remember laughing this hard or feeling so much like someone who belonged, either. Now there was irony: she had to go back eighteen hundred years and halfway around the world to find people who accepted her as one of them.

Hardly anybody came in to distract from the celebration. She understood perfectly. She was amazed at how well she understood. Who would want to go wandering around on a wet, sloppy day? You couldn’t stay dry in a car, not here, not now. You couldn’t stay dry anywhere, unless you stayed indoors.

“You look happy, Umma,” Titus Calidius Severus said to her in the warm haze of the wine, “happier than you have in a while. I’m glad. ‘

Of course you are – you want to go to bed with me. But the thought lacked the sour edge it had had before. If she looked at him through the lens of better acquaintance – and several cups of wine – the fuller and dyer didn’t seem so bad. No – he wouldn’t have seemed so bad at all if he hadn’t smelled like a public toilet, and not a well-maintained one, either.

Gaius Calidius Severus pulled his hood up over his head and headed for the door. The rain hissed down outside. He ducked a runnel of water off the roof, sloshed to the edge of the sidewalk, and lifted his tunic. Through the sound of the rain, the sound of piss hitting flooded street was tiny but distinct.

When he came back in, he was grinning. “Running water, as good as the baths,” he said. Everybody laughed.

Or was it everybody? Nicole had missed a couple of voices. “Where’s Julia? ‘ she asked. She couldn’t have mislaid her, now, could she?

Fabia Ursa giggled in between sips of wine. Fetal alcohol syndrome, Nicole thought fuzzily. The thought, for a mercy, blurred and faded before it touched her tongue. “Didn’t you see her go upstairs with Ofanius?” Fabia Ursa asked. She seemed to think it wonderfully funny. “I wonder if that really is for free. The first time, maybe, but not many after that, I’ll bet. Julia will be minding her asses now.”

A pun lurked in there somewhere, but it needed to be in English to work. Nicole’s warm, happy mood went suddenly cold. Lucius and Aurelia were upstairs playing – and shame on Nicole for not thinking about them till just now. Were Julia and Ofanius Valens going at it right next door to them?