Chapter Twenty-Four Bram #2
If she hopes this will shut down the discussion, she’s sorely mistaken, because the entire room erupts.
“Chalk, like for sidewalks and children?”
“Is Student Health too poor for dry erase markers?”
“Did you travel back to the 1890s? Do you need a slate rag?”
“It’s from a chalkboard,” Sloane says through gritted teeth. “And I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Did the chalkboard give you the cocaine? Is that why?” asks Leo.
I’m just baffled. “Where on earth did you find a chalkboard on this campus?”
“I bet it was one of those folding ones you put out in front of cafés and shops,” Maddie says, clearly trying to be supportive of Sloane. “Was it for a student health fair or something?”
“No, I was just cleaning it, and it was obviously the first time it’s been cleaned in forty years.”
Now Leo sounds truly offended. “Cleaning? You were cleaning?”
“Apparently with her tits,” observes Alessandro.
“I don’t understand,” I cut in. “Did you buy this chalkboard? And it’s vintage? And you didn’t tell me about it first?”
Joey, this entire time, has been staring through everyone’s legs to Sloane’s open purse by the door, and then with a lunge that reminds us all of his college-ball glory days, he flings himself at her bag and then surges to his feet, a jangle of keys dangling from his hand.
Seized between his fingers is the grubby leg of a baby doll—not from the realistic kind of doll that Student Health has, but from the kind of doll you find prehaunted at a thrift store.
We all go still, except for Maddie, who is scrunching her face.
“Why would you put a baby leg on a key chain?”
“So it doesn’t get stolen,” Joey says. And then with courtroom melodrama, he adds, “But this has been stolen.”
“What?” Maddie laughs. “Sloane wouldn’t . . .”
Sloane has gone from flushed to ashen, and we’re all staring at her in various states of confused worry.
“She must have,” Alessandro says slowly. “Because those are the keys to The Dry Bean’s bathroom. In her purse. Sloane, why do you have the keys to The Dry Bean’s bathroom in your purse?”
And that’s when I notice that Leo is the only one not staring in confused worry. He’s now leaning against the wall with his arms crossed, looking greatly amused.
Sloane clears her throat. Dusts daintily at her blazer. “I, ah, did not steal the keys to The Dry Bean’s bathroom.”
Joey is shaking his head. “Robbie never lets the baby leg leave the hook without his say-so. He would never allow a patron to just walk out of the bar with the baby leg!”
“Oh, but he would.” This (smugly) from Leo.
Sloane clears her throat again. “So, here’s the thing. About Robbie. And The Dry Bean. The bar has been . . . entered . . . into my possession . . . in a manner of speaking.”
A beat. Then, “What?” from all of us, except for Leo.
Sloane laces her fingers together in front of her and, looking very prim for someone standing barefoot on a love seat, says, “I bought The Dry Bean. During the last Best Night Ever.”
Joey’s mouth falls open. Alessandro asks if she bought the business, the property, or both. And I look at Leo.
“You knew?”
“Yes, of course I knew,” he says. “She needed the family lawyer to try to get out of it. But even though the agreement was written on a bar napkin and Sloane was impaired enough to sing in public, we couldn’t actually fight the sale.”
“Because Robbie vanished the next day,” Sloane comes in.
“I went back the next morning to tell him I was going to stop the funds transfer I’d made the night before .
. . I found the bar empty and the keys on the counter with a note telling me when to expect the next shipment of olives.
None of the employees had anything but a phone number for him—which turned out to be disconnected anyway—and none of his business neighbors knew where he lived.
We tried hunting him down at the Lake of the Ozarks since we knew he had a boat there, but it turns out Robbie might not even be his real name.
His deed was inked almost forty years ago, when it was possible to get by with shoddy identification, maybe, I don’t know?
But the upshot is that the transfer had already gone through, he closed his account the next day, I can’t find him anywhere, and now I have the bar. ”
She takes a deep breath. “And I’ve been keeping it a secret because I was hoping I’d be able to get out of it, and also because it’s all just so embarrassing.
Like I didn’t even have the good sense to take up with a younger man, postdivorce.
I bought a sticky dive bar instead. Which is why I occasionally have spare pallets of Perrier and I’m covered in chalk dust.” She glares at Leo. “Which you should have known!”
“Known that you would be cleaning a chalkboard related to your little property mistake?” Leo asks doubtfully. “I don’t think so.”
“You bought The Dry Bean,” Joey says, a note of dawning awe in his voice. “Sloane, you bought The Dry Bean! Just like we always dreamed of when we were younger!”
Sloane dismounts the love seat and, with a huff and a hop, attempts to put on her high heels without sitting down.
“You know, it’s a lot harder than you think, suddenly being responsible for a bar, and it’s bad enough to”—hop—“be dealing with ancient chalkboards”—hop—“and the glass recycling company”—hop hop—“and knowing that I’m throwing my energy into a giant dirty hole that no one will care about after I’m dead— Alessandro, stop. ”
Alessandro, who was making a delighted face, throws up his long-fingered hands in innocence. “You were the one who said dirty hole, Sloane, I’m only a man.”
Finally in her shoes, Sloane lifts her chin imperially and extends her hand, like a queen, to receive the dirty, key-jingling baby leg that Joey solemnly places there. Then she bends down and scoops up the baby from Student Health, grabs her purse, and opens the office door.
“None of you are getting discounts at the bar,” she pronounces, and then leaves.
We stare at the open door as Joey’s alarm goes off.
“Shit,” he mumbles. “The players will be getting here soon. Can I leave the weasel in your office?”
“No.”
“Thanks, man, you’re the best,” he says, and turns off his phone alarm. He leaves without taking the diapered stunt baby still on the floor.
Alessandro and Leo look down at the ermine and the pile of diapers next to it, and then Leo nudges the taxidermied rodent with a tip of his shiny shoe.
“Well, Bram, I’d love to stay, but Alessandro and I are going back to Kansas City to eat in a restaurant that doesn’t deliver pita wraps to dorm rooms.”
“Why were you in Mount Astra anyway?” I ask a little plaintively.
“Work, business, numbers, I’m a very important man,” Leo says. Then offers his elbow to Alessandro. “Mi’lord?”
Alessandro beams and tucks his hand inside. “Mi’lord.”
They start to leave and Maddie does too.
“Ms. Kowalczk, wait,” I say quickly. “I thought we could talk for a moment?”
“Okay,” she says, smiling at me.
Alessandro discreetly takes his phone out of his pocket and sends a text while he and Leo leave the office. I hear Leo’s phone chime, and from down the hall, Joey’s phone chimes too. My phone doesn’t.
Fake friends!
But the sting of their treachery fades the minute Maddie closes the door and I have her all to myself.
I frequently have her all to myself, but it’s never enough, it’s never enough.
I drink in the carmine lips, the dark, shining hair, all of her like she’s water and I’ve just woken up at three in the morning completely parched.
“Sara needs to stay at the research site for another four weeks, and so I wanted to make sure it was okay with you before I brought it up with the agency.”
Maddie bends down and scoops up the ermine, realizes there’s no good way to hold a stuffed ermine, and then cradles it like a baby in her arms while she replies.
“Meaning I would stay on to help with the twins for another four weeks? That’s absolutely okay.
I love working with them, and I’m still stockpiling the first few months of rent. ”
My stomach twists a little, as it does every time I remember that Maddie will leave, that she’ll get her own place.
That even if we carry on, it will be harder to see each other, and gradually we’ll see each other less and less and less, until it’s over and she’s moved on and I’m in exactly the same place.
“Okay,” I say, my voice a little weaker than I’d like. “And you know you’re welcome to stay as long as you like, even if you’re not helping with childcare. I have the spare room either way.”
“I know, Bram,” she says, green eyes soft. “But it’ll have to happen eventually. And I think I’ll have enough in my account for proof of funds by Thanksgiving, for sure.”
My stomach twists again. I struggle against the feeling silently, determinedly. It does neither of us any good.
“So Sloane bought the bar,” Maddie says, and I think it’s partially to move us on from the semi-awkward silence we’d found ourselves in and partially because, holy shit, Sloane bought the bar.
I scrub a hand through my hair and lean back, still a little bewildered. “I can’t think of a less likely person to own The Dry Bean.”
Maddie’s eyebrow lifts up behind her new bangs. “Why?”
“Why? Because Sloane is elegance embodied and The Dry Bean has a mural of a snake giving birth to a jar of pickled eggs in the bathroom.”
“Maybe it’s exactly the kind of new beginning she needs after her divorce?”
I think about my own divorce, about my greenhouse. But then I think about the box of wooden skewers next to The Dry Bean’s toilet and make a face.* “I don’t know. Would you want a grimy bar as your new beginning?”
Maddie nods, immediately, emphatically.
“Really?”
She gives the diapered ermine an idle pat, like it really is a baby. “Do you know who my brother is?” she asks.
I shake my head.
“Really?”
“Should I?”
“He’s kind of famous,” she explains, “but he uses a stage name, so maybe you wouldn’t have guessed.
It doesn’t matter right now. What does matter is that when I was growing up, he made a lot of money.
A stupid amount of money. The kind that should have made everything okay forever, except his skeevy manager ran away with most of it, and by then Nolan had already blown his share.
And my dad died and my mom had bipolar disorder and needed to be home, and money was so tight, Bram, like Nolan paying for groceries one meal at a time tight, and usually with scrounged-up change.
And then Nolan made it big again. He’s married and on TV and has a financial adviser, and he could afford to move Mom out to California and pay for the expenses at Pepperdine that weren’t covered by my scholarships.
And I met Gentry, and it felt like here was my Cinderella story, at last, thank God.
But you know how that fairy tale ended.”
She looks down at the ermine, her bob swinging forward to curtain her face.
“All of it was outside my control. It was like life happened to me—money, lack of money, housing, lack of housing. I had no agency. No idea when things were changing. No way to change things myself.” She blows out a breath, ruffling the precisely cut ends of her hair.
“So yes. If you’re saying that a new beginning would be a building with my name on the lease and a business that I owned, that I made the choices for .
. .” She looks up at me through her lashes, a small, knowing smile on her red lips.
“My answer would be hell yes, please and thank you. And not only would I have control of where things went, but I could actually make things good if I had my own place. I could make them the way they should be. So much of our lives is spent living in a world that’s been made by other people, by their greed or apathy or well-meant intentions—doesn’t the idea of making the world match what you know could be better make you excited?
And if you had your own little world, like a bar, then you could start right then, without delay, no waiting time required. ”
Her words dose me like caffeine, waking me up, jolting my pulse.
I had felt like this too, once upon a time, like shaping the world for the better was not just a dream but a demand, and I’d answered the demand, me and Sara with some borrowed babysitting so we could go off to fight greed and plunder.
I think about that younger Bram sometimes, about what he was willing to risk to change the world.
How I’d gotten so disillusioned with both the right way of doing things (research and protests and policies) and the wrong way (Sara and I clambering up construction equipment in the dark) that I’d ended up choosing the way most adults take by default .
. . the slow way. The way of mostly meaning well and hoping that being a decent person in the same spot for twenty years would be enough.
My phone buzzes in my pocket and I pull it out as Maddie finds a place for the weasel on my windowsill.
Leo: I didn’t want to say anything while she was there, but my guy is writing his report on a certain Mr. Gentry Cooper Wade III now.
Leo: God, who names their kid Gentry. It’s so on the nose. It would be like naming me Distressingly Handsome.
Leo: Looks like he’s decided to run on the tried-and-failed “I can be just as narrow-minded as my opposition about things normal people haven’t cared about for thirty years” platform.
Leo: There’s a video of him saying that America’s literacy issues are tied to porn. LOL. As if typing out MILF isn’t important spelling practice???
Leo: Anyway, my guy is going to send the report sometime in the next couple of weeks or so.
Leo: You can thank me by admitting that Cole McKenney isn’t real.
I put my phone away and tap my fingers on my desk, feeling restless and energized and a little bit like that younger Bram again.
Maybe it wouldn’t hurt to do the right thing the wrong way just one more time.