9. Chapter 6 | Dom
Dom had a system. Deliveries Tuesday and Friday, cellar stocked before opening, kegs rotated oldest-first. CJ ate at seven, before the crowd got loud. Papa Louie got cut off at three whiskeys, four on a bad night.
Elle Brown didn't fit the system. She moved like a bartender who'd learned the motions fast but was still deciding how to wear them — two women sharing one face, Dom had started calling it.
The easy one: competent, a smile on cue, built over a story that didn't hold up to a second look.
And the other one, the one that surfaced when Elle thought no one was watching — wiping the bar alone, listening to CJ from the doorway.
An older self than Elle Brown. Not gone yet.
Around nine, with the crowd thickening, Papa Louie started eyeing the piano. A half-drunk man on the little stage was murdering "Misty," and Louie — three whiskeys in himself, getting looser by the minute — noticed.
"Papa," Dom said.
"I'm fine."
He wasn't. He was up before she could say it twice, crossing the room to a ripple of quiet — the regulars knew what was coming.
He raised his glass to the room like he was announcing a headliner.
"Ladies and gentlemen — before I was a barkeep, I was Louie the Buoy!
Keeps the beat afloat when everything else goes under.
" Laughter, warm, familiar with the bit.
"Got some stuff for you tonight from before the wa—" He caught himself, grinned wider.
"Before both wars, if you can believe it. "
He sat with the dignity of a man who'd once owned every room he walked into, and put his hands on the keys.
The first notes were the man from the stories — full, unhurried, entirely his own. The room hushed.
Then his left hand missed the reach. Found it. Missed it again. The song came apart in slow pieces, the kind you can see coming and can't stop. He quit halfway through and sat there.
Dom didn't go to him — not with people watching, not yet. She waited until he'd crossed back to the bar and set his glass down twice before she poured him a fourth.
"You know, Dominique," he said finally, to his glass, "I used to play in Storyville. Way back before you were born."
"I know, Papa."
"Best music in the whole damn country."
Dom's hand covered his. He let her.
He sighed. "They're all dead now."
Elle came up beside them with a full glass of water — not whiskey — close enough that Dom felt her warmth.
Their gazes met, then Elle turned her focus back to Papa Louie, setting the glass in front of him without a word, leaning in, smiling, muttering too quietly to carry.
A minute later he was laughing, the real laugh, the one that usually stayed hidden.
Dom carried her crate to the back, still hearing it.
CJ arrived around ten, newspaper already unfolded, a brightness in his face she hadn't seen in weeks. "Dom! Miss Elle! We made it into the paper!"
"The pro-test-ors—" His finger pressed into the page like the word might yield if he pushed hard enough.
He could debate CORE strategy with Oretha for an hour straight, recite the whole history of the Canal Street sit-ins from memory, draw a likeness that took your breath away.
Reading fought him every time. Dom caught Elle's face mirroring her own — still, watching him with the same close attention Dom gave him. Elle had clocked it too.
"De-mon—" He stopped. Pressed harder.
"Demonstrated," Dom said. Soft. Just the word.
He took it and kept going, until his finger slowed again and stopped for good, his shoulders dropping a little.
Elle winced—just barely, a flicker she caught and smoothed over. She cut a look sideways at Dom before speaking. "Want me to finish it for you?"
Relief broke across CJ's face. "Yeah. Yeah, okay."
Elle took the paper and read the rest aloud, easy, unhurried, making it sound like a story instead of a recitation. The bar didn't stop. Dom did. Just slightly.
"You're so good at that," CJ said after. "How'd you learn to read like that?"
Elle paused, a beat Dom had started calling the Thelma Blake pause, where the bartender's face remained composed but something shifted beneath it. "School. And then—" the corner of her mouth moved — "I read a lot of scripts in LA. Guess I read myself all the way to California."
Light, almost a joke. It landed heavier than that.
"I gotta help Papa with the bottles," CJ said, already backing off. He was gone before Elle finished offering him a book.
Dom watched the empty doorway. "Does he ever — does he go to school?"
"He learns at home."
"Right." Elle wiped the bar slow. "It's just — he struggles some with reading."
Dom's jaw tightened. The woman who'd just eased Papa out of his grief without making a show of it — that had been real, Dom knew real when she saw it, which made this worse. "He reads enough."
"He could be so much more." Elle set her glass down, hands flat on the bar. "When he's twenty-five and needs to read a lease, a contract — is 'enough' going to cover that?"
The question went in like a thumb finding a bruise.
"You don't know what it costs," Dom said. "Keeping him safe. Keeping him himself. I'd love to send him to school — how does that work? I've got no legal claim to him. And then what, they put him in a skirt, and you think he learns anything after that?"
Elle looked slapped. A flinch, quick and real, crossed her face, as if picturing it happening to him. "I didn't think it through," she said. "I'm sorry."
"Yeah, well. CJ's mine to worry about. You worry about the bar. You worry about yourself. Leave him to me."
Dom turned before she said something worse, and did the physical work of the bar harder than it needed, ribs pulling with the effort.
She let herself remember her own school days anyway, just long enough to move a keg — the swish of her own skirt against her knees, a sound she'd hated before she had words for why.
She'd stolen a pair of her grandfather's old trousers once and cut them down herself, pinned to fit, in the back room where no one could see her doing it.
The teachers who ridiculed her for it, sent her home over it.
Eighth grade, and she never went back. CJ would get all of that, and worse stacked on top.
She was still turning it over — Elle's voice, the stinging memory of schoolgirl skirts — when she smelled Claudette before she saw her — that perfume, too strong, husky and a little astringent, the kind that got into the back of your throat before you even turned around.
"There's my girl."
The hand landed warm and proprietary on her bicep — a demonstration for the room. "I'm not your girl anymore," Dom said.
She turned to Claudette, caught off guard by how different her familiar face looked — the lipstick a red gone almost orange at the edges, the powder settling into lines it used to just soften.
When they'd first gotten involved, Dom had been young enough that Claudette's age had looked like sophistication, like knowing something Dom didn't yet. Now it just looked like age.
"Well." Claudette smiled like she already knew how this would go. "You're gonna be my girl again soon enough. Wait till you see what I got for you." She reached into her purse and set a flyer on the bar without letting go of the arm. "Fight tomorrow night. Fifty-dollar purse."
Dom looked at the flyer, silent.
"You need the money, don't you." Not really a question.
Dom hesitated.
"That's right." Claudette's smile widened. "My girl."
Fifty dollars was two weeks of what she made here. The shoes CJ needed and hadn't mentioned, the leak in the roof, maybe a few books so he'd be a little more ready when those contracts came.
"Saturn Bar," Claudette said. "St. Claude. Mean crowd, but the money's good." A beat. "Buy me a drink?"
Dom shook her head. "Not today."
Buying Claudette a drink had never just been buying her a drink. Not back when it mattered — when one glass across the bar was enough to make Dom feel like what she was might be wanted instead of just tolerated. Claudette had been the first one to look at her like that and mean it.
That was a long time ago.
Claudette laughed, let go of her arm at last, and drifted back into the crowd.
Dom stood, one hand flat against her ribs, breathing. Fifty dollars.
Elle was at the far end of the bar, pouring a drink with more precision than required. Dom was still raw from earlier — the argument, the skirt line she hadn't meant to say — and expected that to still be sitting between them. It wasn't, not really. She just wanted to be near her.
"Got a fight," Dom said. "Tomorrow. Nine o'clock."
Papa Louie looked straight at her ribs. "They're fine," she said, before he could start. "Fifty dollars. Maybe sixty."
He made a sound low in his throat. Dom kept her gaze ahead, aware of Elle down the bar, tending a glass with more attention than it needed.
She waited until she felt the shift. Elle looked up. Their gazes met across the bar — Elle's face doing the thing it did, giving away exactly as much as she'd decided to give and not one thing more.
"About earlier," Dom said.
"It's fine." Too fast to be true — the same speed Elle poured a drink when she didn't want more questions about it.
"I'm sorry I came at you like that." The rest stayed in her throat: that she'd meant every word about the skirt, still did.
"I know." Elle's voice had gone careful too. Whatever this was between them hadn't actually closed. It had just gone quiet.
"You could come," Dom said. "To the fight. See how I handle myself."
Not casual enough to pass for casual, and she knew it.
"To watch you get beat up?"
"To watch me win."
The corner of Elle's mouth moved — considered, not quite a smile. "Okay. I'll be there."
A lightness entered Dom's chest, and a tension remained.
Elle's face had already settled back into its usual shape behind the bar — easy, warm, halfway turned toward the next customer — and Dom genuinely couldn't have said which one of them had just agreed to come watch her fight.
Elle Brown, who wanted to come. Or Thelma Blake, who knew exactly how to make it look like she did.