Chapter 9 Erin
Erin
“Is this a pity job?”
I direct the question at the Pink Floyd concert dates printed on the back of Mallorie’s vintage tee as she rummages through what appears to be a dumpster of decaying Halloween props.
Her face appears briefly, sweaty and red from hanging upside down for the best part of ten minutes. “Of course not!” she says, with a little too much enthusiasm.
“What do you need me to do exactly? Fetch coffee? Pay gardeners? Do laundry? Apparently, I’m good at that.”
She drops a few feet onto the ground, shakes her hair off her face and rolls her eyes. “I’m not going to make you fetch coffee, Erin. It’s just a couple errands, that’s all.”
I fold my arms. “‘Kay. So, what kind of errands?”
She pants like she’s out of breath which, to be fair, I would be too after hanging upside down and rummaging through the remains of Halloweens gone by.
“Well, it turns out, the headless mannequins I need are not in here, so they must be at the docks.”
“The docks?”
“Yeah.” She sighs, wearily. “We have a storage unit at Washington Port. It’s kind of like an overflow for our window dressing props.”
“So, you need me to go fetch them?”
She smiles, abruptly, like she was expecting to have to lay the persuasion on thick. “Well, yes. That would amazing.”
I shrug. “You offered to pay me money and give me a generous reference for helping you out for the day. I’ll do whatever you need me to.”
“You can take my car,” she says, reaching into a deep pocket and jangling a set of keys at me. “You think you’ll be okay driving through the city?”
I arch a brow. “Once you’ve learned how to drive in New York City, you never forget. Besides, people drive everywhere in California.”
“That’s true,” she concedes, hitching a shoulder.
I swipe the keys from her, thankful for a little bit of alone time on the road. “How many of those decapitated things do you need?”
She rolls her lips inward. “Twenty? It might take you a while.”
I open my palms. “You’re paying me a day rate, right?”
She frowns as though she’s questioning her proposal. “I am.”
“Then I’ll do my best to get them in a day.”
“Good, because there’s no power in the storage unit and daylight starts fading at five.”
What?
“Is this going to be like a scene from Silence of the Lambs?”
“What do you mean?”
“I’ll need to have a torch on me at all times so I can navigate the dead bodies, and have to blow the hair out of my face a lot?”
She clicks her tongue with a wink. “Exactly that.”
I’m about to laugh when her smile falls and she hands me a map. “Now seriously, there is no light and no logical lay-out. You will have to rummage hard.”
I gulp and nod.
“When you find the mannequins, stack them by the entrance and I’ll send a truck to collect them tomorrow.”
“Can I take a photo?”
“What?”
“Of the pile of naked, headless plastic people? It’s not a sight one gets to see every day.”
She rears back slightly and peers at me from the side of her eye. “Sure. Whatever you want, Erin.”
“That’d be a good name for a rock band, wouldn’t it? Naked, headless plastic people.” I reach for my bag.
“Are you proposing we start a band?”
I follow her to the coat rack. “Why not? The name alone would get us airtime, and with my tits and your ass, we’d be quite the attraction.”
She turns around and flings her mothball-scented arms around me. “Oh honey, I’d be your support act anytime.”
I laugh into her shoulder. “You’re nobody’s support act, Mal. You’re the headline through and through. I’m just here for the ride.”
She pulls away with a grin. “Speaking of acts, how’s the role of barmaid going?”
I wince before schooling my features into something seemingly professional. But Mallorie knows me well and she sees it.
“Is it really that bad?”
I hesitate before saying anything, because actually, since the night my stranger threw a patron across the room for feeling me up, I’ve been treated with so much reverence and respect I could be mistaken for British royalty.
“It’s fine.”
“Eriiiiin….”
Ugh, I know that tone. It says she’s not going to let this lie until I give her the full truth.
“It’s going okay, to be brutally honest. Better than I expected. Not that I expected much.”
“So, those slimy sea monsters have a soul?”
A part of my heart wilts. I’ve come to realize in the last few days, those slimy sea monsters aren’t bad people—they’re simply humans who’ve lost their way in life. Now that they’re less distracted by my feminine assets, they’re opening up.
Ted, the guy who sits at the end of the bar asking for whisky top-ups and not always paying his tab, his wife passed ten years ago.
He was a cop, but he lost his focus, torn between his duty as a police officer, as a father and as a grieving husband.
He couldn’t satisfy all of those things, so he turned to drink instead.
He has a rule: never drink at home, which is why he’s at the bar so much. It kicks up quite the check so he’s always in arrears. His son has disowned him, his job let him go, he has no wife to confide in. He’s lonely.
Anders sits in the corner, not speaking to anyone because his anxiety paralyses him. A veteran of ‘Nam, he’s perpetually half a month’s paycheck away from homelessness and lives in constant fear of not being able to pay his lease.
For every Ted and Anders, there are ten more, and that’s only what we see in the bar. As much as I resent having to live with my mother, seeing these men most nights makes me eternally grateful to have her.
So, do those ‘slimy sea monsters’ have a soul? “Yeah,” I reply quietly. “They do.”
She presses two hands to my shoulders and lowers her gaze. This is Mallorie in serious mode. “Don’t get attached, Erin,” she warns. “I know what you’re like. You take along every lost soul, even if they bite your hand when you look the other way.”
“That’s not true,” I say, but my protest is weak because she’s right.
“So, what changed? One minute you were completely opposed to working in that bar, and now, what, you’re enjoying it?” She squints like she’s trying to figure me out.
I fold my arms defensively. Not because I don’t trust Mallorie with my life, but because I’m still figuring out how this all changed.
“I was opposed in the beginning, and the patrons were gropey and sexist…”
“So what happened?”
I look up at her, warily. “There’s this guy…”
She arches a brow and now there’s no escape.
“It happened before I started at the bar, actually. I was on my way to my divorce mediation and I ran into a guy in a coffee shop…”
Mallorie’s eyes widen. “Yeah?”
“I mean, literally. I literally ran into him and his coffee went all over my blouse.”
Her lips pin together like she’s sympathetic but also, she would have totally expected that from me.
“I had an actual fit, screaming and yelling at him… I didn’t realize he’d stripped off his shirt and was offering it to me so I’d have something clean to wear for the mediation.”
Mallorie frowns. “He stripped off his shirt for you… In the middle of a coffee shop?”
I fling my arms to the side. “Yes. I was totally thrown for a loop. I mean, I haven’t seen a body like that in… all my life,” I finish quickly.
I search her expression for some kind of sympathy but that’s not what I get. Instead I get something akin to envy.
“Do you know who this guy is?”
“No,” I explain. “I was so pissed, I gave him my address so he could return my dry-cleaned blouse to me.” I stare at her with hard eyes. “He didn’t return my blouse…”
“What an ass,” she says, frowning.
“No, wait for this. He sent me twenty—twenty,” I repeat, for emphasis, “designer shirts from Saks instead, which, according to my fashion-obsessed daughter were worth, at the very least, twenty thousand dollars.”
When Mallorie doesn’t move, I know I’ve finally stunned her. A little victory dance will be due after I’ve got the rest of this story out.
“But, I didn’t accept them…”
Mallorie’s mouth opens but I cut her off.
“I’m not a charity case,” I say, firmly. “If I had more time on my hands I would have been offended.”
“Okay…” she nods, in solidarity.
“So, anyway, I thought that was the end of it, but then he walked into the bar…”
Mallorie is riveted.
“One of the patrons tried to get my number. When I said no, he told me not to play hard to get and grabbed me…”
Mallorie stills, the way she does when she’s watching a really suspenseful movie. If this wasn’t my actual life I’d be buying her popcorn.
“Then this guy… the one who spilled his coffee over me and sent me the shirts, he flies toward me, punches the man in the jaw and, I’m not even joking, sent him soaring across the room. Knocked him out cold.”
When I look up at Mallorie, there’s a curl to her lips like she knows something I don’t.
“What?” I snap.
She wraps her arms around me. “Oh honey.”
“What?” I ask again, trying to pry her arms apart.
“You’ve been out of the game so long you have no idea when someone’s all soft for you.”
I eventually succeed in pushing her off. “That’s ridiculous.”
“Ridiculous, huh?”
She stands with her hands propped on her hips like this is her moment.
I know that when she went through her divorce and became a sworn-in single woman, she’d amassed a ton of wisdom about love, life and the patriarchy.
But because I’d thrown myself into new motherhood and went totally down the white picket fence route, I wasn’t the target audience for her newfound gospel teaching.
So, she’s been waiting a while, with the patience of a saint.
“Did your knight in shining armor say anything to you? Like, why he punched the guy?”
My skin warms at the memory.
“He said he’d done it because the guy touched me.”
“Touched you?” Those eyebrows are going to disappear if they reach any further into her hairline.
“Yes. So? He was just being a gentleman.”
She stares at me, her eyes narrowing. “That’s not the behavior of a gentleman,” she frowns. “It does sound as though he’s a little too interested in your safety. Did you say anything back to him?”
“Yes. I said ‘you’ll get me fired’ and he said ‘you get fired when I say you get fired’ and I said ‘oh right, so you own this place?’ and then he snapped.”
“He snapped?”
I nod, afraid to recount his words out loud.
She tilts her head to one side. “Erin…”
I couldn’t blush any deeper but I don’t think there’s any getting away from telling her now. Plus, she might be able to help me make sense of it, seeing as it was totally inappropriate, untrue and utterly tied to the moment.
“He asked me if I knew what that kind of adrenaline does to a man’s dick…”
Mallorie’s mouth falls open and she grips her stomach like her womb might fall out if she’s not careful.
“He said, word for word, ‘It confuses the body so much that when it sees something it wants, it is primed to get it. So, I suggest you step away from me now, before I order everyone the fuck out of this establishment, bend you over this bar, and make you come so hard you forget your own name.’”
I know those are his exact words because I have played them over and over about one thousand times since.
Now, Mallorie has always been a bit of a drama queen, but when she staggers backward, misses the thing she was aiming to hang onto, and falls flat on her ass, I know she’s genuinely floored. In more ways than one.
I wait patiently as her mouth opens and closes like a fish. I’m just relieved I’m not the only one stunned by the promise that fell from his lips that night.
“He really said that?” she asks, breathless.
“Yup.”
“A-and you? What did you say?”
I shrug, exasperated. “Nothing. He just stormed out and hasn’t been back to the bar since.”
She drops her gaze to the floor. “I didn’t think real men said things like that.”
Her lashes flick up again and her voice takes a devious turn. “Or maybe only real men do.”
Shaking my head, I pocket the keys and head for the door.
“It doesn’t matter. I doubt I’ll see him again. As soon as I get this payment from Gerard I’m quitting the bar. The late nights are killing me. I’ll… I don’t know… I’ll deliver sandwiches or something.”
“Honey—”
The warning in her voice makes me turn.
“Real or not, I don’t think any man drops a comment like that with no intention of taking it any further.”
Something flutters in my stomach at the thought before I shut it down. I’m a forty-four-year-old single mom trying to earn a living so I can get out from under my mother’s roof. I simply don’t have the time, nor the patience, frankly, to entertain the thought of taking anything anywhere.
“I better go before the light disappears.” I throw her one last smile before I close the door. “Twenty beheaded corpses coming up.”