Chapter 5
But, of course, she didn’t. Marisa followed me down the stairs, complaining about the low railing, past the broken door and into the pub. As we entered, Alex looked up from the tap.
I had known Alex most of my life, all things considered, but I had never seen the expression that passed over his face when he saw Marisa. Anger? He had weathered a lot of bad behavior in his life—drunk people, me—but I had never seen him truly angry. Or was it something other than anger?
Fear?
Everyone at the bar, including all three Jims, turned to see what he was looking at.
“Who had twenty years in the pool for when the circus was back in town?” I said, loud firecracker tones, the wink built in.
Alex was frozen in place. The glass of beer he’d pulled was still in his hand, and he couldn’t seem to decide where to put it.
“The back door is wrecked, Alex,” I said, putting my guitar on the bar. “It’s hanging open. I swear I didn’t do it and this one says she didn’t—can you take care of it?”
“I’ll take care of it,” he said, unlocking from his paralysis. The beer went to its rightful owner, and he would be grateful to have something to do. To fix a problem, as he always had.
“I’ve got the bar,” I said.
Alex lifted the hatch in the counter to go get his tools and I slid behind the bar to take over. Marisa lingered near the corner of the bar near Silent Jim.
“So I see Alex is still weird,” she mumbled.
I let the hatch fall back in place with a gunshot bang. All heads turned my way. Pascal, loading clean glasses at the back bar behind me, paused. Ned appeared at the pass-through to the kitchen.
“If you want to get yourself kicked out of his pub,” I said evenly, “or pick up a boot heel–shaped bruise on your B-side, I invite you to keep talking.”
Alex had been strange lately—twitchy, like he was building up to say something to me. About getting my act together, probably.
But Marisa couldn’t know that, and that’s not what she meant.
“You okay, Doll?” Ned asked.
But Ned might be reporting back to Joey. “All good, Ned, thanks,” I said tightly.
Marisa angled herself against avid Jim attention. “I just wanted to talk with you,” she pleaded.
“I have to work.” I tucked my guitar under the bar for safekeeping and grabbed an apron from the back wall. “But you can talk to me from one of the stools, same as anyone, if you buy a drink.”
Marisa finally climbed up on the corner stool. “What do you have? Coke?”
She had pulled out her wallet, showing lots of bills lined up pretty. When I could look away, my eyes were hot in my head. “Coke? Isn’t that what you always liked?”
She looked up, a fifty half out of the wallet. “Coca-Cola.”
“Put your Monopoly money away,” I said. “We don’t want it.”
“You said buy a drink.”
Pascal watched as I angled the soda gun, probably making sure I didn’t use a dirty glass. Or spit in a clean one.
Pascal was pie-faced but thin, with a little gel curl that dipped over his forehead no matter how hard he tried to contain it. Ned gave him a hard time for being small, but Pascal worked like a mule and still covered for Ned when he was late, which was pretty often lately.
“Get you something, buddy?” I asked.
“You going to be ready for the show, Doll?” Pascal said, glancing uneasily toward Marisa.
“I’m always ready for a show.”
Except last week, but Pascal didn’t say so. He finished with the glasses and took the rack back to the kitchen.
I plunked the Coke glass on the bar in front of Marisa.
“I don’t drink alcohol anymore,” she said, her eyes sliding around to avoid meeting anyone else’s. “Or … the other stuff.”
“Congratulations,” I said.
“I know it doesn’t make up for anything,” she said. “I just thought … you might like to know.”
I couldn’t think of a thing I’d like to know about Marisa, or hear from her mouth.
Anything she might say or do, even begging, the way I’d always imagined, would make me angrier.
I was already so mad at Joey, and Cam for nabbing my vinyl collection, and the guy in the alley negging me, and whoever had broken the door, I hardly had the mercury left to rise any higher.
“Actually, it’s important to me that you know,” Marisa said.
“Well, if it’s important to you,” I said.
Someone was hailing me at the other end of the bar. One of the customers from the fireside, pink-cheeked from the heat. I went gratefully and let myself get caught up in a series of orders.
As I served, Marisa kept trying to catch my eye, but I avoided direct contact. By the time I had a spare second, I was cooled off, calm as a surgeon, and ready to cut her out of my sight.
I grabbed a rag and wiped the counter down to Marisa’s corner. “Another Coke?” I asked.
Her glass was still full.
“Dahlia,” she said.
“You’re sober,” I said. “Is that what you needed to tell me?”
“Well, no,” she said. She was fidgeting with the glass in front of her, moving it around in the condensation on the bar. She reminded me of the gangster tourists, nursing a drink while they ginned up the courage to ask were Al Capone used to sit.
“Look,” I said curtly. “Alex doesn’t want you here. And neither do I. You should get lost, before he comes back.”
“But I came to ask you something.”
I’d seen it coming all along, I realized. Why had she come back after all these years? Only to need something. “Oh, my God,” I said, laughing. “You’re honestly going to ask me for something? I don’t have anything.”
“It can’t be entirely my fault,” Marisa said with a sniff. “If you don’t have more than this.”
Had the room gone quiet, or could I not hear anything over my renewed rage?
“More than … what?”
Marisa looked up. “I didn’t mean—I only meant—”
“More than a place where I am always welcome? And safe? More than a chance to do what I love, every week?” I nodded to the stage behind her.
“More than a job here at the bar, if I’d only say I wanted it?
More than everything I need, more than enough?
I have plenty, Marisa. Just not anything I’m willing to give you, including any more of my time. ”
“This isn’t how I wanted this to go,” she said.
“I’m so sorry your visit to McPhee’s hasn’t been everything you hoped,” I said. “You can tell Yelp. But this is my life, no matter what you think of it.”
Marisa glanced sideways at her audience of Jims. “I have two, you know. Two lives I’ve kept separate all this time,” she said, her voice high and shaking. “Holding them apart, with all my will … it’s so tiring. It’s an addict thing, trying to control everything.”
Silent Jim’s attention eased away from her, as though she’d disappointed him personally.
“And then they collide, anyway, no matter how hard—”
“Are we doing the twelfth step?” I snapped. “Is that what this is?”
Ned slid an order through the pass-through and stayed to watch. I turned and grabbed the plates. They were scorching hot, and I wouldn’t have fingerprints tomorrow, but I could barely feel anything right now.
I turned back to Marisa.
“I am not just something that happened to you. Not just a step to check off your list.”
I ducked under the bar hatch with the plates and carried them across the room. But even with my back turned, I could track Marisa, as though I had an internal compass for her, for only her, as she pushed off from the bar and carried her Coke to the big corner booth at the front windows.
Where Capone might have sat, by the way. A six-top.
When I got back behind the bar, that fifty-dollar bill of Marisa’s was stuck to the condensation from her glass.
Primary Jim leaned forward over folded arms at the other end of the bar. “Who was that?” he said.
This guy and his earnest questions. Primary Jim was so hale and hearty and sincere in his chunky knit sweaters, as if he’d just stuck his skis in the snow outside. But what was a guy in his early thirties doing hanging out here, on the downward slope? He didn’t have anywhere else to be?
He did, actually. Every afternoon, he wandered off to stretch his legs, smoke an illicit cig. Maybe he was making a call, reassuring a girlfriend—or his mom—that he wasn’t drinking at some bar all day.
“That was nobody,” I said, putting Marisa’s fifty in the tip jar for the kitchen.
There was a thump at the front door. I looked up to find the band arriving, banging through the doors in heavy winter gear, beanies pulled down over Lourey’s pigtail braids and Shanny’s unruly blond curls.
Suzy wore a set of black kitten ears, a thing she was trying.
Rooster’s upright bass had become wedged in the vestibule, right on schedule.
They filed past, Suzy off-balance from the outsized backpack she’d used to carry home a snare to re-skin, then Rooster, a little winded under her coffin-sized case. Lourey tucked her guitar case under one arm and tapped her wrist at me ominously.
I didn’t usually drink before a show, but Marisa’s presence required a little liquid courage. I poured a shot of tequila and threw it back.
“Seems like she’s somebody,” Primary Jim insisted.
“Could you see her, too?” I said through the burn in my throat. “Honest to Barbara Mandrell, that was the ghost of McPhee’s.”