Chapter 3 #2
She came out of the bathroom in her uniform, her hair brushed and her ponytail straighter.
Pickles followed her. She fixed her ponytail in the mirror in the hall because she was going to make a point about something today, and she was getting ready for it.
I knew the routine. The door clicked open, and Mrs. Park came in.
“Morning, Mama, morning, baby girl—oh my goodness, look at this hair today.”
Mrs. Park was great, actually. I didn’t say that about people often. She was sixty-one and had lost her husband two years before I met her.
She had a key to my apartment for emergencies and the closest person Bonnie had to a grandmother. Also, the closest person I had to a friend who wasn’t behind a bar with me. I trusted her more than I trusted most of my own thoughts.
Bonnie hugged her around the waist. Then Bonnie came over and hugged me. I leaned down and pressed my mouth to the part in her hair and breathed her in for a second longer than usual.
“Bye, baby.”
“Bye, Mom.”
“I love you, baby.”
“I love you too, mommy.”
“Be good. Be smart. Don't argue with anyone over a straw man unless you're sure.”
“Mom.”
The door closed behind her and Mrs. Park, and Pickles wound around my ankle and looked up at me, accusatory.
“I know,” I told him. “I'm leaving too.”
He sat down in the doorway of the kitchen and watched me get ready as a form of protest. I dressed, tied my hair up, and put a pen behind my ear because it was just part of me by now. Then I left the apartment.
Half Past was three blocks from my apartment, which was how I'd picked the apartment—three years ago I'd sat down with a pen and a list and worked out that the only thing I could afford to control about my life was my commute.
I walked it. I clocked in. I tied my apron.
I took the pen out of my hair, gestured with it, put it back.
My hands knew the bar before my brain caught up.
The well. The speed rail. The ice. The mixers.
The rag I hung over the rim of the trash for spills.
The customer at the corner of the bar was on her third glass of red, and she had been waiting for me to come on shift before she truly began.
“He hasn't responded to my texts,” she said.
“Mmm…”
“Three of them. Three texts. Yesterday.”
“Mm-hmm.” I poured a draft for the guy two stools down. I rang it up. I slid the guy his change. I came back.
“Do you think he's seeing someone else?”
I'd been a bartender for seven years. There is a class of questions I no longer answer in good faith because the asker has already decided. I poured her a fourth glass of red, and I didn't pour it generously.
“What do you think?” I threw the question back at her.
“I think—I think I should text him.”
“I don't think you should do that.”
“Why not?” She was already reaching for her phone. “You literally just—”
“Leave him.”
Her hand stopped on the phone. “What?”
“Leave him. He's not worth it. You're worth more. You deserve better.”
She gave me the look people get when somebody else has finally said the truth they have been refusing to say to themselves.
“You're right.” Her eyes welled. “You're so right. I don't deserve this, do I?”
“You don't.”
“I'm going to delete his number.”
“Good.”
“Right now.”
“Yes.”
“I'm doing it.” She picked up the phone. She tapped the screen. The phone, in a stunning act of cosmic comedy, beeped in her hand.
She read it. Her whole face went liquid. “He texted me. He wants to see me.”
“Ma'am—”
She was already on her feet. “I have to go. I have to go—sorry. Keep the change.”
She left forty dollars on the bar and a glass three-quarters full. Her coat was hanging half on her shoulder, and the door swung shut behind her.
I stared at the door. I shrugged.
Kit came up beside me. He watched the door swing closed.
“She'll be back,” he said.
“Mmm…”
“She'll be back tomorrow.”
“Definitely.”
He bumped my shoulder with his. “How was the rich-people thing?”
“Fine.” I ran a credit card. I handed it back. I pulled two bottles down from the back shelf for an older couple who'd just sat down at the rail. “Cabernet, please. Two.”
“Coming up.”
Kit kept watching me. He’s twenty-six. He’s one of three people who can read my face, which is annoying, because the other two share a last name with me.
“Sabrina.”
“What?”
“You went somewhere.”
“I didn't.”
“You did. I just watched it happen. You did the eye thing.”
“There is no eye thing.”
“There is absolutely an eye thing.”
I poured the cabernets, skipped the garnish, and took the ticket. I came back and started cutting limes because someone was going to want a margarita. I refused to be unprepared.
He waited. Kit's whole technique is the wait. He's perfected it. He could wait out a glacier.
“Fine,” I shrugged.
“Yes.”
“There was a guy.”
“I knew it!” he chuckled.
“Don't.”
“I knew it! I knew it the second you walked in. You did the walk.”
“There is also no walk.”
“Tell me more. Come on.”
“He was a guest. He ordered the most insufferable Negroni of my career. He told me he hated the foundation. I told him I'd heard the owner of the foundation was a trust-fund baby.”
Kit stopped. The lime knife stopped with him. He lowered it slowly to the cutting board, because he was a professional and he respected a knife.
“Sabrina.”
“What.”
“The Cross Foundation.”
“Yes.”
“The one that has been jerking you and Bonnie around for fourteen months on the surgery.”
“Yes.”
“The one you are currently waiting to hear from.”
“Yes.”
He started to laugh. It wasn't a kind laugh. It was the laugh of a friend witnessing a slow-motion car accident from a very safe distance.
“And the guy you said it to.”
“Mmm…”
“Was.”
“Mmm…”
“Sabrina.”
“His name is Mr. Cross, Kit.”
He laughed harder. He leaned on the bar. He laughed until I had to take the lime knife out of his hand and put it in the sink. A regular at the end of the bar shouted, “What's funny down there?” and Kit waved at him without looking up.
“Okay,” he said, when he'd recovered. “Okay, okay. To be fair. To be very fair. He absolutely deserves it.”
“Thank you.”
“He has had your kid on a list for over a year.”
“Thank you.”
“You probably should've insulted him harder.”
“I would have, but his dad collapsed in the middle of the room about ten minutes later, so.”
Kit's laugh stopped.
“His dad—”
“Yeah.”
“Like, collapsed collapsed?”
“Stretcher, ambulance, the whole thing.”
“Jesus.”
“Yeah.”
“Is he—”
“I don't know, Kit.”
He looked at me for a beat. “You okay?”
“I'm fine. I didn't know the man. I don't know any of those people.”
“Okay.”
He picked the lime knife out of the sink, rinsed it, started cutting again. He didn't push. That's why Kit is Kit.
I poured a vodka soda for the woman who was waving at me from the second stool. I rang it. I came back to the limes, finished the bowl, and took it down to the rail.
He'd seemed like a decent enough human being, in the end.
I would've had more for him if I hadn't been so shocked, and as it was, I'd been polite.
Nice to meet you, Mr. Cross. It was in the past. He was in the past. His foundation could push my daughter to next March or next May or next never, and I would handle it the way I handled everything, which was loudly, with a pen in my hair, until I couldn't handle it anymore.
Later that night, the door opened.
I didn't look up. The door opens four hundred times a night. The door opening isn't, statistically, an event.
Kit looked up.
He stilled beside me, half a beat, and his head turned.
I looked.
Mr. Cross was standing inside the door.
His eyes went around the room, looking for one thing and refusing to be distracted by anything else, and they landed on me.
He smiled.
It was the auction smile, mostly, but tired around the eyes, and there were shadows underneath them. He hadn't shaved either. His shirt was the same shirt he'd had on the night before, top buttons still open, no tie, jacket slung over one forearm.
He walked to the bar. He sat at the empty stool directly in front of me.
Kit looked at me and asked, "Do you know him?"
"No."
Kit looked at me for one more second. Then he picked up a tray and walked down the rail without another word.
Mr. Cross put both hands flat on the bar.
I didn't speak. Didn't look at him. I wiped a glass that had already been wiped and picked up another one.
Finally I looked.
He looked exhausted. I thought, What happened to you? But I shoved the thought somewhere I wouldn't have to look at it.
"You shouldn't be here." I said, quietly.
"I know." He didn't move his hands off the bar. "But I am."