Chapter 2
From the bundle in the alley, I thought I could see the gleam of an eye, guarded, waiting to see what I would do.
I’d meant to use the back door to the apartment to haul in my bag of shame, but now I glanced toward the pub, where the wind buffeted at the canvas vestibule capped over the front door for winter.
Maybe there was a to-go order Ned could make again? Or an extra blanket in the apartment Oona wouldn’t miss?
I picked my way carefully across the alley’s ice-rink opening, promising myself I would come back with some kind of offering.
I could do that much. I hurried past the blank of the empty corner storefront next to McPhee’s into the shelter of the vestibule and stomped my numbed feet against the doormat.
Through the circular porthole window in the pub’s outer door, I could see what kind of day we were having.
Oh, I always said we when it came to McPhee’s. Like I owned the place. In a way, I did.
You’ll see.
At the moment, the pub was sleepy. The only movement in the room came from the TV screens at the corners of the room and a good fire dancing behind the fireplace grate. A few people I didn’t recognize had set up camp in front of the fire with a board game and glasses of something syrupy dark.
Tourists, probably. Even in winter, McPhee’s did a brisk business with out-of-towners on the strength of a mythology that billed us as a former Prohibition-era speakeasy—with of course a ghost and, get this, secret tunnels leading to Al Capone’s unrecovered loot.
Of course there’s no dough.
You don’t think I looked?
When I’d stayed with Alex the first time, just a kid, I’d crawled all around the place, both halves of the building, upstairs and down, breaking open the cheap locks on the two apartment doors.
Dead easy, by the way: Just pull and jiggle the handle, lift and push, and you’re in. I’d been back in residence a week this time, staying over the pub with Alex’s tenant, Oona, and I’d already had to use that trick twice.
So I knew the place as well as anyone, and there was no ghost, no Capone plunder. But Alex was forever having to pluck ghost hunters and treasure-seekers out of the back hallway and send them on their way.
I mean, yeah, sure, there was a secret passageway, sort of.
The two halves of the old building were like two chambers of a heart, sort of fitting into and around each other.
They had one artery between them, a little low-ceilinged chamber between the bedroom closets in each apartment that Alex called the “scuttle space.” But I can tell you it one hundred doesn’t lead to any gangster gold or anything good at all.
Alex didn’t even use it, really. No one had used the scuttle since I had, when I was six, to menace the cranky old guy who’d lived in the other apartment. For a short time, I was McPhee’s ghost.
Besides the tourists sitting near the fireplace, there were people at the tables down near the stage, people I recognized who were there for the show.
Ned would be working tonight, too. He was Joey’s friend and bandmate.
And of course, bellied up to the bar were the current group of regulars, three guys named Jim who had collected at McPhee’s over time like litter caught in a chain-link fence.
Basically, a minefield.
I wouldn’t be able to get through the room without having thirteen conversations about how cold it was, what’s in the trash bag, or when would the band hit it big and they’d have to say they knew us when? And that was only if no one thought to ask about Joey.
As I watched the flames in the fireplace hungrily, Alex came out from the kitchen and surveyed the room.
He’d be doing his complicated calculations: who might need something, who might be trouble, how little human interaction he could get away with.
He had his plaid flannel shirt buttoned up to his throat, armor against a busy night.
But he’d already turned on the string lights overhead, the old-fashioned Thomas Edison style.
Alex, in a festive mood.
He spotted me through the glass, his bottom lip pulling up a micro-tick, like, you coming in or what? All right. Time to giddy up and get my expression right, I guess, because Doll Devine never let down an audience.
“Doll!” one of the Jims crowed. “Did you have to bring the freezing cold in with you?”
“Don’t they have a celebrity entrance for you, dollface?” another said.
“Those Swiss cake rolls in your hair sure took the brunt of that wind, didn’t they?” the first added.
The third only glanced to check the damage to my hair.
The Jims, collective noun. A three-headed Cerberus of Chicago masculinity, pint-glass emptiers straddling the line somewhere between cornball jokes and flirtation. They never seemed to have anywhere else to be, these guys.
Retirees, first-shifters already off the clock, dudes with no one to make merry with at home—that’s our bread and butter, this lonely time of day and year.
We got all kinds, though, not just the unemployed and aimless.
By five the office types would be celebrating happy hour.
By six, the families would be in to drop tater tots between the booth cushions.
By seven, the evening crowd would trickle in, order a few rounds, get restless for the show. For me.
I heaved my garbage bag to the far corner of the bar, offering a general greeting for whoever wanted it. I dropped my bag and hopped up on the stool. Without asking, Alex poured me a cup of coffee.
“So, where you been in this wind, Dahlia?” one of the Jims asked, turning on his stool to welcome me.
This was the guy I thought of as Primary Jim, even though he was the newest face among the Jims and the youngest, by far.
He was in his mid-thirties, kinda hot, if you could ignore some of the details, like the gleaming white tennis shoes.
I couldn’t. Primary Jim was the chattiest Jim I’d ever seen at McPhee’s, the first at his station every day since he’d started coming in, the first to ask questions.
He was one hundred percent here to make friends.
“You’ll wear out the leather on your fancy boots,” he said. “Then what’ll you dance in?”
“You gotta be out in the world shopping for opportunity for it to find you,” I said, curling both hands around the warmth of my coffee mug. “The Rolling Stones gather no moss, or something like that.”
“You’re not booking gigs somewhere else?” he said. “Breaking our hearts?”
“I kinda thought getting gigs somewhere else was the point,” I said. “You didn’t think playing for tips here was the end goal, did you?”
Alex grabbed a rag from the sink and put his shoulders into wiping the already clean bar.
“Not that it’s not a great place to play,” I added quickly. “But, you know … I just need another hustle.”
“Thought you were looking a little on the skinny side,” the second guy said, the gross uncle type I thought of as Lumpy Jim.
He was a thick, red-faced guy stuffed into a fleece with a company logo over the pocket, landscaping or new windows or sump pumps, whatever he had done for forty years and now didn’t do anymore.
He’d apparently chosen drinking at McPhee’s as his retirement plan, and had been coming in steady for years.
He bobbed his head toward Alex now and, with a leer in his voice, said, “Why doesn’t the proprietor here make you some kind of offer? ”
I leaned forward. “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you, Jim, the offers he’s made.”
Alex scrubbed harder at the shine on the bar.
Listen, don’t get the wrong idea. Alex and me, we weren’t that kind of thing. But it wasn’t the business of Jims where things stood.
But it was true. They wouldn’t believe it.
I played up the misunderstanding they had about me and Alex because it kept either of us from having to explain, well, a lot.
I mean, I’d played the stage Alex had built, just for me, for five years, filling his storeroom with my band’s gear.
And since last week I was squatting in a room in the apartment upstairs, a room Alex owned but now also covered the rent for.
I was currently wearing a sweater of his I didn’t plan on giving back.
And that wasn’t the half of it, when it came to Alex. But it was brittle territory, for me to admit how much I already owed to one person.
“He’s practically adopted me, for crying out loud,” I said, slipping naturally into my stage persona, a gal, a broad. Doll Devine had a bit of a twang. She smoothed things over, lightened a mood. “I mean, he’s already buying me this drink.”
They all laughed. Alex’s shoulders dropped from around his ears.
The thing was, Alex would have paid me to bartend and sling food, just to get the break from the customers, from their questions and curiosity.
But now that the music shop had no further need of my talents, I would need to work for someone I could extort for a higher pay grade than I deserved.
To be perfectly honest, to get back on my boots I might need to work for a place I could easily, quietly rob.
Freaking Joey.
“So you really still haven’t heard from that fella of yours?” Primary Jim asked, as though he could read my mind.
The third barfly, the one I thought of as Silent Jim, quickly flicked a glance toward the garbage bag below my feet.
This guy had become a steady, glowering presence over the last month or so.
He could make a single drink last all day and barely ever said a word, but—annoyingly at the moment—never seemed to miss a thing.
I could see Ned’s shoulder through the pass-through. “I have not seen or heard from Joseph Hartnett,” I said loudly enough Ned might hear. “And I don’t expect to.”
Alex frowned and reached for a clean glass, to clean it some more. He hadn’t really liked Joey all that much. Not that he liked anyone all that much or, if he did, showed it.
Lumpy Jim said, “Plenty of fish, dollface. I’m single.”
“I eat only red meat, Jimbo,” I said.
Primary Jim looked up from considering his beer. “How long’s it been, though? Any reason to worry about the guy?”
I was getting annoyed. “You can worry about his face if he ever shows it around here again,” I said. “He’s just at his sister’s, licking his wounds.”
“If you’re sure—”
“I am.” But I turned my mug around on the bar, thinking. Should I be worried? I’d tried calling Joey’s last week, after I’d realized the rent hadn’t been paid. He hadn’t picked up. I’d almost dialed Heather’s house a few times, too—but to say what, exactly?
No. He’s the one who had wanted to turn everything upside down, three good years in. Three okay years.
And I’d spotted him, anyway, skulking down the block. He was fine. “If Joey wants me to know he’s alive,” I said, “he knows where I’ll be, singing songs about broken hearts and empty pockets.”
I caught myself too late. I hadn’t meant myself. My heart, my pockets.
Just then Pascal came banging through the swinging door from the kitchen, a bin of clean, rattling glassware hanging heavy in his scarred arms. He stopped and stared at the quiet that had fallen upon the scene.
The Jims studied their beers, the TVs. They liked me onstage, saucy and winking, triumphant.
Not down here with them, on the deep bench for the losing team.
Alex cleared his throat. “Ned’ll make you a cheeseburger,” he said. “If you’re hungry.”
I dug a thumbnail into a groove in the wooden surface of the bar so I wouldn’t have to see who was pitying me. I was hungry, actually. It was just … Alex actually made so many offers.
I just hated that I had needed every single one of them.
“And now he’s buying me dinner, too,” I bawled, the persona back in place. I threw out my arms, pantomiming a barrier between Alex and our audience. “Stand aside, boys. He’s all mine.”
Everybody relaxed. Doll was on the case. The broad, the tireless flirt. Bless her heart, she could be counted on to be a real good time.