15. Chapter 15
“This is where your dad wanted us to go?”
Two steps inside the Haunt, Helen was already unhappy. As Graham figured she would be. As he’d warned when she insisted they take his dad’s super freaky video advice and visit the local dive.
Graham was still reeling from the new rules. The Dalmore helped but not nearly enough. As was becoming a little too common for his liking, he required quantity over quality—a need that borderline worried him when he thought about his future in AA, which wasn’t tonight.
“Is he serious?” Helen asked.
Rooted near the door, she scanned the warehouse-style space with its high ceilings, leaning tables, crooked stools, and the stage sitting dark past the long, mostly empty bar.
In a few hours this place would be crawling with folks from the societal fringe and the speakers quietly playing modern alternative would blast a patchy mix of 80‘s punk, classic rock, and death metal that made about as much sense as the handwritten note that said Vapes OK underneath the No Smoking sign.
“It’s a…” his lovely goddess was rendered speechless by his father’s latest suggestion.
“Dump,” he finished for her. “I warned you.”
Probably, hopefully, devising ways to punish him later for her mistake, Helen took his collar and hauled Graham to a stool a few down from the one he usually occupied in his early college, pre-Helen days.
He’d never brought Helen there to spare her the filth and himself the horror of running into any of the women—however few there were—he’d taken home on the nights when quantity was definitely more important than quality.
After they broke up, he came back and found the Haunt hadn’t changed in three years, but he had, and he couldn’t get a buzz with young townies swaying their hips to Morrissey, giving him the eye over plastic cups of Malibu.
And the older ones who never made it out of Dayton after high school reminding Graham that he hadn’t made it out either.
One such older townie approached from behind the far end of the bar. Graham recognized the redheaded bartender from his brother’s grade, two ahead of his own. Penny, he thought. She was wearing one of his dad’s band T-shirts with the OMP3 logo across the chest.
“Graham? Graham Young?” She squinted behind the thick black rims of her glasses. “I’ll be damned.”
He set his arms on the perpetually sticky bar top and said, “Penny, right?”
“It’s been a minute.” She smiled with bright red lips. “How’s your brother?”
“Taking a break from spreading his seed to all corners of the country,” Graham said.
“Jase? Really?” Penny asked, crinkling her nose. “I remember him being kind of…what’s the word I’m looking for?”
“Dorky?” Graham offered. “Loser?”
Penny laughed. “I was going to say shy.”
“Which is a nice way of saying dorky loser,” Graham said. “Can we get some drinks?”
“You bet,” Penny said. She studied his arms on the bar.
After taking a few weeks off, he’d been going to the gym every day since they got back to Dayton.
The muscles he built up over the last six months remembered and were quickly redefining.
They weren’t as stark as his brother’s—he imagined Jase built up his bulk bench-pressing motorcycles or something—but were a welcome by-product of his brutish need to strain and sweat through his father’s cancer and subsequent death.
If he wasn’t wringing every ounce of strength from his body in the gym, he was doing it in the bedroom. Before Helen, he’d taken all his anxiety out on Lindsey however and as often as she’d let him.
Lindsey had been a distraction while his dad was sick the same way sex with Helen was therapy, a place for his emotions to go to keep them from literally bursting through his rib cage. The center of his chest was bruised from how often he massaged it to loosen the knot that kept tightening there.
Another problem for future Graham.
Present Graham squeezed his hands into fists and Penny glanced up from the taut muscles in his arms. “A lot changed since high school, hasn’t it?”
“Not this dive,” Graham said, taking in the fake cobwebs blowing dusty and aimless in the air from the exposed ducts on the ceiling, the burned-out bulbs in the strings of purple and orange lights zigzagging around the room. “Still milking the Halloween theme?”
“It’s all we’ve got,” Penny said. “What’s your poison?”
“Is it actually poison?” Helen muttered. She appraised the bottles on display behind Penny, then Penny herself, and raised her eyebrows at Graham.
He took the not so subtle hint and said, “This is Helen, my fiancée. She drinks anything expensive.”
“Fiancée? Very nice.” Penny spun slowly, perusing the liquor selection. “Anything expensive? You’ve definitely come to the wrong place.”
“Vodka soda,” Helen said. “Highest shelf you have, please.”
“Coming right up.”
“In an actual glass, if you have it,” Graham specified.
“Plastic cups are reserved for karaoke night,” Penny assured him.
“Good,” Graham said. “Then I’ll take a whiskey sour. Double.”
“Whiskey!” Penny’s face perked up. “I almost forgot! I have something for you.”
“For us?” Graham asked.
“And Jase.” Her gaze landed on something behind them and her jaw slowly dropped. “Speak of the hot-ass devil.”