Chapter 6
From behind the bar, I watched the band set up around my absence—but not without occasional time checks on their phones and significant looks in my direction. Rooster’s new boyfriend, Trey, was lending a hand on setup and sound, something Joey normally did.
I was stuck, though. The pub was filling up with paying customers, and Alex was still out dealing with the broken door. I took orders, pulled beers, mixed a few cocktails. Shoved a few loose tater tots from the pass-through window into my mouth.
Ned pushed a small plate of them through the window for me but held on as I grabbed it.
“Joey’s a bonehead,” he said, his pronounced Adam’s apple sliding slowly up and down.
It moved in the same liquid way as Ned moved through the world, like he’d get there when he got there—and he usually got there late.
“And I’ll tell him that myself,” he said. “When he shows up tonight.”
“He’s not showing up,” I said.
“He’s showing up. He’ll get it sorted out. With the landlord and all.”
It was too late for sorting any of it out. “He’s not showing up. When you see him, shake him down for my phone charger.”
“He took it? Dark.” Ned pushed two plates through.
I loaded them on my arm and delivered them, humming under my breath.
Warming up, but also trying to tap into all the energy in the room—the chatter, the laughter, the warmth of the fire and the golden glow of the string bulbs overhead—and bring it into myself.
Store it up, to burn bright onstage. All these people had dragged themselves here, crawled here on their knees from what life had handed them this week.
When the lights dimmed, they would turn to me, and I would need to blaze, like a cross over the shoulder of a megachurch preacher.
Get yourself an amen.
Except I wasn’t quite there. There was an alien frequency pulling from the corner booth, and I was distracted. Ned had to ask three times for clarifications on grill orders he couldn’t read, and I forgot which drink I was making, mid White Russian.
“Vodka,” Silent Jim said.
“Thanks,” I said. This guy, I couldn’t quite figure out.
He was a whiskey commercial made flesh, black suit jacket and shiny cuff links like he was any minute off to the C-suite.
Except: a five o’clock shadow every hour of the day.
Each afternoon, he arrived walking stiffly, like a dude just getting off a horse, and took the same stool, where he commenced a program of staring into the middle distance as though waiting for a signal.
Then suddenly Alex was behind the bar again, his hair wind-mussed and his face ruddy from the cold.
“Thank God,” I said, pulling the apron off and flinging it under the bar. I needed to get my head right.
“What did you say happened to the door? The wind?” Alex said.
“I don’t know what happened,” I said impatiently. “Are you okay if I…”
He’d spotted Marisa in the corner, her back to the bar. “She’s still here,” he said. He checked out the crowd uneasily. “Why is she still here? What does she want?”
“I don’t care what she wants,” I said. “Do you?”
Alex knew what he was having for breakfast three weeks from now and, even in the mess of his office, the location of every receipt, every piece of paper, every cent coming in and going out.
When he got nervous or needed to think something through, he’d hide inside the complexity of a project, find something to take apart, clean, and put back together.
But we were too busy right now for a tailspin.
“You need me to stay?” I asked, but not as though I meant it.
“No,” he said. Not as though he meant it. He so obviously would have liked me to stay. He got to work, but his eyes were a little wild and he kept glancing toward Marisa’s corner. He owned the place, yet her presence could tilt the room in her direction.
But tilting a room? That was my specialty.
THE SOUND OF MY STEPS on McPhee’s stage—boot heel on wood, a little hollow—was my favorite sound, a nice layer of percussion to go along with Suzy’s drumbeat. When my footfall hit the stage now, the girls all looked up.
“We were wondering if Alex would make it back in time,” Suzy said from behind her kit. She gave the hi-hat cymbal a playful test jangle, then sat back. “Is everything okay?”
I put my guitar in place on the stage, up against the piano. No one ever played the piano, except the occasional drunk goofing off. Mostly it just helped define the lines of the stage, so no one would trip over the corner.
“Something came up,” I said. “Had to get it sorted.”
“Things always seem to come up,” Lourey said, tugging at one of her braids. Her bright red lips twisted as she thought about it. “Right at curtain, actually.”
Shanny peered at me with concern. “You don’t look so good. Are you able to go on?”
Rooster, tuning her bass, shot Lourey a look. I wasn’t supposed to see it.
“Yeah, it’s— I’ll tell you later. Let me have five minutes and then we’ll kick it off.”
“Sure,” Lourey said, setting her guitar aside. “Sure, we’ll take a break before we even start. Makes sense.”
I hopped off the stage and headed down the service hallway toward the door that led to the apartment, but I really didn’t want to go upstairs and stir up the dogs. Oona would be home by now, too, and what I needed was a few minutes of silence.
The door to the ladies’ john opened at my shoulder.
The band had access to the narrow toilet stall at the back of the storeroom, but that little closet had terrible lighting and stayed fifteen degrees colder than any other part of the pub.
Most of the time, there was a draft wailing through there that was absolutely the source of the McPhee’s ghost story.
If the ladies’ john was unexpectedly free …
It was. The door closed behind me, snapping off the racket of the pub. I went to the sink, wet a paper towel, and pressed it to my face. A pin in my hair was loose. Swiss cake rolls, I remembered Primary Jim calling them, and smiled into the mirror.
Bathrooms were such great places to sing. I was still fixing my hair and humming a warm-up when Marisa walked in. I slid right into the low swing of the chorus to Patsy Cline’s “Crazy.”
“Funny,” Marisa said. “Look, I didn’t come to ask you for anything—”
“Come on,” I said. “You’re just trying to rattle me now.”
We were looking at each other’s reflections, not directly, and it helped. I didn’t feel rattled, actually, not anymore. I felt calm and righteous, like I’d been singing all night bathed in the adoration of a rapturous crowd.
“But I did need to tell you—”
“You get to come and say whatever-it-is to me, as long as it’s on your schedule?
” I said. “You could have come any day of my life since—since ever. But you didn’t.
You managed to keep all your say-somethings to yourself.
But now that you’re ready to talk, I have to drop everything and listen.
Is that right? Do I have that right, Marisa? ”
She looked tired, suddenly. “I hate that you call me that.”
“Your name?”
“You know you could—”
The bathroom door wrenched open. Marisa dove forward and clutched at the sink. In the open doorway, Rooster stood wide-eyed in her va-va-voom sweetheart-necked dress. “Sorry,” she squeaked and retreated.
Marisa was still panting into the mirror.
“You’re a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs, Marisa,” I drawled.
“Why are you talking like that?”
I pulled out the tube of lipstick I’d stowed in my dress. “You’d expect a steelier nerve from a lady who used to live on the streets.”
Marisa’s eyes met mine in the mirror, then swept past to her own reflection.
What she saw seemed to surprise her. She fixed her bangs, brushing them to the side.
Maybe, until she’d seen herself there in the glass, she’d forgotten who she was.
Maybe she’d slipped sideways through time into a moment when she’d been about my age, using bathrooms like this to shoot up.
“Where did you get the name Devine?” she said.
“I chose it,” I said. “That’s the great thing about being abandoned.
You don’t have to cling to any labels your parent slapped on you.
And I talk like that because I do, okay?
” I slid into my stage persona, a voice sweet as blackberry jam on a biscuit.
“This is my rodeo and those folks out there are my clowns.”
“It’s a put-on,” Marisa said, and for the first time all night, she sounded sure of herself. “Have you ever been to the country? Have you been outside of Cook County?”
“I’ll be anyone I want to be,” I said. “You don’t get a say in who that is. And if you would stop trying to make me feel bad about my life and let me get back to living it, you’ll find that it’s not a put-on. It’s a role. I’m the star—the rodeo queen. And you might be treated to a hell of a show.”
Marisa watched as I touched up my lips, rolled them, and puckered—smooch—at the mirror. Blood red and ready to slay.
“All for the low, low price,” I said, “of getting gone.”