80. Chapter 80
Now Serving Breakfast.
Lindsey parked under the handwritten sign in a spotted windowpane of the bar where she used to work. Driving there was more habit than anything. Her apartment across the street was nearly empty and would probably smell like Jase from him helping her pack.
She would not go there and risk letting his scent cloud their issues.
She didn’t want to go to Smitty’s either, and wouldn’t have if the neon lights weren’t slightly more appealing than the greasy spoon options nearby.
The warped wooden door creaked and slammed with a crack behind her.
The dive’s signature stale alcohol and natural gas scent was distracting in a different way.
Mixed with bacon and eggs, Lindsey was transported back to New Orleans, where a whiff of late night French Quarter air had almost made her puke on a group of women ogling Jase below her balcony.
She had actually vomited the next morning at the hotel’s continental breakfast bar, but whatever.
Lindsey would’ve turned around and headed for one of the greasy spoons if a blonde with a prominent mole above her lip hadn’t looked up from her cell phone.
“Oh my gosh, ohmygosh. Get over here, girl!”
Charity, in the low-cut black tank top and ultrashort cutoffs she wore for tips, was a lost constant from Lindsey’s past she’d almost forgotten about.
And she forgot, until right now, that Charity had texted her weeks ago and Lindsey hadn’t texted back.
“I can’t believe you’re here!” Charity exclaimed, rushing over with open arms.
“Me either.”
What was she doing there, Lindsey wondered from behind the curtain of Charity’s platinum hair. Not just at Smitty’s before nine in the morning, but in Dayton at all anymore?
After a hug that left gold sparkles from Charity’s lotion on Lindsey’s neck, her old friend pulled her to a seat at the far end of the bar from the grungy, tired men on stools near the breakfast buffet.
The floorboards, floating on fifty years of spilled drinks, squished under her feet, and the dim overhead lights flickered as the first notes of a Lynyrd Skynyrd song—thankfully not the one she danced to with Jase last night—started on the jukebox.
“Larry never fixed the electrical?” Lindsey asked.
Charity chuffed. “Has Larry ever fixed anything?”
“Since when do you serve breakfast?”
“Since Lare Bear decided to tap the third-shift market.” Charity drummed her orange acrylic nails on the bar. “Some old bag who used to run the kitchen at a hotel brings in the stuff. I’m pretty sure the eggs aren’t even real. I hope you aren’t hungry.”
“Actually, I could use a drink.”
“Fabulous! What’ll it be?”
“Surprise me,” Lindsey said. “As long as it’s not bourbon. Or whiskey. Or anything top-shelf.”
Charity filled a pint with Mexican beer and dropped a shot of tequila inside it.
“A Submarino?” Lindsey watched the bubbles rise to the top of the glass. “Really?”
“You said to surprise you. This is definitely not top-shelf.” Charity grinned. “Cheers, babe.”
“Cheers, I think.”
Lindsey gulped it down in a few disgusting slugs that burned her throat.
“Dang, girl, you haven’t missed a beat,” Charity said. “Another?”
“No,” Lindsey wheezed. The shot glass clanged inside the pint when she pushed it far, far away from her. “Just a beer. And a water. And a bucket.”
“Go get a plate of bacon too. The bacon’s pretty safe.”
One of Larry’s coveted third shifters smiled at Lindsey while he scooped a fresh plate of food from the steaming trays along Smitty’s far wall.
He couldn’t be much older than her. The grooves in his face were deep from what she suspected were long nights of hard work and short days with little sleep.
Lindsey wondered if he had a wife and kids at home and if this was how Jase would look if Helen didn’t come back and he had to suck it up and get a real job to support Chloe’s baby.
She tossed the greasy tongs she was using into the metal hotel pan, startling the man.
“Get burned?” He gestured to the tongs with swollen, grease-caked knuckles. “Those get really hot under the heat lamps.”
Get burned? Which time? And by which Young?
“You have no idea,” she said.
A full pint waited for her on the bar. Lindsey sat with her plate and pulled the red journal Jason gave her from her purse. She had hardly opened it since the trip. What kind of writer did that make her?
Maybe she’d take some notes today. Clear some of the mental clutter before the Submarino kicked in. She started with a title: Possible Outcomes. Underneath she wrote, Millions and No Millions.
Then there was: Baby and No Baby.
Jase leaves to take care of his baby.
Jase leaves to become a rock star.
Jase just leaves.
The columns became a tree, and at the end of every branch was the man she had fallen in love with driving away.
“You looking to make some cash?”
Lindsey lifted her head. “What?”
Charity was dragging a wet rag through spilled drinks and toast crumbs on the bar.
“Money? Do you need some?”
“Hm.” Technically there weren’t millions in her future, no matter what happened with Helen. She’d been living off her savings and the cash she pulled in from selling her furniture for the past few weeks. “Why?”
“The chick who replaced you is awful. Larry’s going to can her, so I was thinking…”
“You think I should ask for my old job back?”
Charity shrugged. “Why not?”
“Lare Bear canned me a month ago.”
Her pink, shiny lips pouted. “I heard you quit.”
“Forced retirement.”
“Wasn’t that because you were leaving? You’re obviously back.” She paused. “You are back, like, for good, right? You went on some trip with your boyfriend?”
“Ex-boyfriend. But yes. I’m back, but…”
But there was one option she didn’t have the courage to write, one impossible limb, a tiny, brittle offshoot of her possibility tree that kept her from wanting to solidify any other plans.
Jase leaves and I go with him.
Reading back over the tree and its limbs, she realized none of it was about her.
It was supposed to be possible outcomes for her future, and not a single one was anything she could control.
She was just waiting for the other players and pieces to fall to find her own place.
What’s worse, some silly, hopelessly romantic part of her hoped that if Jase left, he’d make room on the seat behind him.
Until now, staring at a tree where one hundred percent of her future was left to fate and the whim of a very inconsistent man—and his devious father—she would’ve gladly climbed on the back of Jase’s bike.
No questions, no suggestions, smiling like Sarge, her family’s old golden retriever, just happy to be along for the ride.
“But what?” Charity pressed. “It’s easy money. I miss our Friday nights.”
“Me too,” Lindsey said.
But did she? Did she miss shaking for shots, stumbling across the street to her apartment, waking up with cotton mouth and Graham’s boner a heat-seeking missile on Saturday morning?
Definitely not that last part.
After she quit Ohio State and started bartending at a busy campus dive, Larry had offered her a small moving stipend to transfer to another one of his bars near the University of Dayton.
This dive originally belonged to Larry’s grandfather before it changed hands and names a half dozen times in the past forty years, and was being restored to its original Smitty’s glory.
With her dad’s words to her mother in her ears—“We never made her finish anything, and see? This is what happens”—Lindsey had jumped at the chance to get even farther from her family in Youngstown (Youngstown. Unbelievable) and moved within the week.
To Dayton. The city meant absolutely nothing to her without the Youngs or the job that brought her there.
Despite being on her second drink at nine in the morning, she didn’t belong at Smitty’s anymore. Jason and his trip and the big stone house he left her changed all that.
“Will you at least think about it?” Charity asked.
“I will. I’ll think about it,” Lindsey said.
A lie she couldn’t even write down on the new page below the heading: What do I want to do with my life?
She underlined the “I” aggressively enough to rip the page.
Lindsey wasn’t coming back to Smitty’s. And she decided it didn’t matter if Helen made it in time, or if Lindsey went with Jase or on her own.
In capital letters she affirmed: LEAVE DAYTON, FOR GOOD.