Rating: ★★★★☆ Tags: Mystery Detective, General, Fiction

NICK DUNNE
THE DAY OF
I
swung wide the door of my bar, slipped into the darkness,
and took my first real deep breath of the day, took in the
smell of cigarettes and beer, the spice of a dribbled
bourbon, the tang of old popcorn. There was only one
customer in the bar, sitting by herself at the far, far end: an
older woman named Sue who had come in every Thursday
with her husband until he died three months back. Now she
came alone every Thursday, never much for conversation,
just sitting with a beer and a crossword, preserving a ritual.
My sister was at work behind the bar, her hair pulled
back in nerdy-girl barrettes, her arms pink as she dipped
the beer glasses in and out of hot suds. Go is slender and
strange-faced, which is not to say unattractive. Her features
just take a moment to make sense: the broad jaw; the
pinched, pretty nose; the dark globe eyes. If this were a
period movie, a man would tilt back his fedora, whistle at
the sight of her, and say, ‘Now, there’s a helluva 
broad
!’
The face of a ’30s screwball-movie queen doesn’t always
translate in our pixie-princess times, but I know from our
years together that men like my sister, a lot, which puts me
in that strange brotherly realm of being both proud and
wary.
‘Do they still make pimento loaf?’ she said by way of

---

greeting, not looking up, just knowing it was me, and I felt
the relief I usually felt when I saw her: Things might not be
great, but things would be okay.
My twin, Go. I’ve said this phrase so many times, it has
become a reassuring mantra instead of actual words:
Mytwingo. We were born in the ’70s, back when twins were
rare, a bit magical: cousins of the unicorn, siblings of the
elves. We even have a dash of twin telepathy. Go is truly the
one person in the entire world I am totally myself with. I don’t
feel the need to explain my actions to her. I don’t clarify, I
don’t doubt, I don’t worry. I don’t tell her everything, not
anymore, but I tell her more than anyone else, by far. I tell
her as much as I can. We spent nine months back to back,
covering each other. It became a lifelong habit. It never
mattered to me that she was a girl, strange for a deeply
self-conscious kid. What can I say? She was always just
cool.
‘Pimento loaf, that’s like lunch meat, right? I think they
do.’
‘We should get some,’ she said. She arched an
eyebrow at me. ‘I’m intrigued.’
Without asking, she poured me a draft of PBR into a
mug of questionable cleanliness. When she caught me
staring at the smudged rim, she brought the glass up to her
mouth and licked the smudge away, leaving a smear of
saliva. She set the mug squarely in front of me. ‘Better, my
prince?’
Go firmly believes that I got the best of everything from
our parents, that I was the boy they planned on, the single
child they could afford, and that she sneaked into this world
by clamping onto my ankle, an unwanted stranger. (For my

---

dad, a particularly unwanted stranger.) She believes she
was left to fend for herself throughout childhood, a pitiful
creature of random hand-me-downs and forgotten
permission slips, tightened budgets and general regret.
This vision could be somewhat true; I can barely stand to
admit it.
‘Yes, my squalid little serf,’ I said, and fluttered my
hands in royal dispensation.
I huddled over my beer. I needed to sit and drink a
beer or three. My nerves were still singing from the
morning.
‘What’s up with you?’ she asked. ‘You look all twitchy.’
She flicked some suds at me, more water than soap. The
air-conditioning kicked on, ruffling the tops of our heads.
We spent more time in The Bar than we needed to. It had
become the childhood clubhouse we never had. We’d
busted open the storage boxes in our mother’s basement
one drunken night last year, back when she was alive but
right near the end, when we were in need of comfort, and
we revisited the toys and games with much oohing and
ahhing between sips of canned beer. Christmas in August.
After Mom died, Go moved into our old house, and we
slowly relocated our toys, piecemeal, to The Bar: a
Strawberry Shortcake doll, now scentless, pops up on a
stool one day (my gift to Go). A tiny Hot Wheels El Camino,
one wheel missing, appears on a shelf in the corner (Go’s
to me).
We were thinking of introducing a board game night,
even though most of our customers were too old to be
nostalgic for our Hungry Hungry Hippos, our Game of Life
with its tiny plastic cars to be filled with tiny plastic pinhead

---

spouses and tiny plastic pinhead babies. I couldn’t
remember how you won. (Deep Hasbro thought for the
day.)
Go refilled my beer, refilled her beer. Her left eyelid
drooped slightly. It was exactly noon, 12–00, and I
wondered how long she’d been drinking. She’s had a
bumpy decade. My speculative sister, she of the rocket-
science brain and the rodeo spirit, dropped out of college
and moved to Manhattan in the late ’90s. She was one of
the original dot-com phenoms – made crazy money for two
years, then took the Internet bubble bath in 2000. Go
remained unflappable. She was closer to twenty than thirty;
she was fine. For act two, she got her degree and joined
the gray-suited world of investment banking. She was
midlevel, nothing flashy, nothing blameful, but she lost her
job – fast – with the 2008 financial meltdown. I didn’t even
know she’d left New York until she phoned me from Mom’s
house: