Chapter Four
Teague
She walks in at nine on a Tuesday, which tells me everything.
Nine on a Tuesday is not a social hour. Nine on a Tuesday is when people come in alone because they don’t want to be at home and they don’t have anywhere else to go.
I’ve been bartending long enough to recognize the type.
They sit down, they order something strong, they stare at the bar top for a while, and then they either talk or they don’t.
Either way, I pour and I listen and I don’t push because it’s not my job to fix people.
It’s my job to make sure they don’t break anything on their way through whatever they’re going through.
This one is young. That’s the first thing I notice.
Not underage young, but young enough that the fake confidence she’s wearing doesn’t fit right, like a jacket she borrowed from someone bigger.
She’s pretty. Brown skin, hair pulled back, clean sneakers.
She sits down at the bar instead of a table, which means she wants company or doesn’t know better, and she puts her hands flat on the bar top and looks at the bottles behind me like she’s never seen most of them before.
She probably hasn’t.
“What can I get you?”
She looks at me. Full eye contact, no hesitation, which is unusual for someone who walked in looking that lost. Her eyes are dark and a little red at the edges, like she’s been fighting with herself about something all day and losing.
“Just get me too drunk to care.”
I lean on the bar. “No.”
“No?”
“I’m not getting you too drunk to care. You’re, what, barely old enough to be in here? You walked in here alone on a Tuesday night looking like someone cancelled your birthday, and you want me to pour shots until you stop feeling things?” I shake my head. “That’s not how this works. Not at my bar.”
“I'm twenty-two. And it’s not your bar.”
She says it without heat, just observation, and I like her a little for it. She must have noticed the name on the liquor license behind me. Carl Novak. Not Teague Moran.
“It’s my bar tonight.” I reach under the counter and set a glass in front of her. Fill it with ginger ale, grenadine, and a cherry. Slide it across. “Shirley Temple. On the house. Drink that while you actually look at the menu and figure out what you want like a grown-up.”
She stares at the Shirley Temple. Then she stares at me. Then she picks it up and drinks it.
“Good,” I say. “See? Tastes better than regret.”
“I wouldn’t know. I’ve never had regret.”
“At twenty-two? Give it time.”
She almost smiles. It’s there and gone, a flicker at the corner of her mouth, and I catch it because catching things is what I do.
Eight hours behind a bar every night teaches you to read faces faster than words.
Hers is easy. She’s sad and she’s tired and she’s trying very hard to be tough about it, and the trying is the part that makes her look young.
I go back to my routine. There’s glassware to polish, a keg to check, the playlist to manage.
Right now it’s the Pretenders, Chrissie Hynde’s voice filling the room with the kind of restless energy that’s too smart to be angry and too angry to be sad.
The bar is mostly empty. A couple of regulars at the pool table, nursing beers.
A guy reading a paperback in the corner booth who comes in every Tuesday and never orders more than two drinks and always leaves a ten.
The girl with the Shirley Temple is watching me. Not in a creepy way. More like she’s trying to figure out where she landed.
“What is this?” she asks.
“A Shirley Temple. We covered this.”
“No, the music. What is this?”
I look at her. Most people who come into Anthem don’t ask about the music. They either know it or they tune it out. She’s doing neither. She’s listening.
“The Pretenders. ‘Back on the Chain Gang.’”
“I don’t know them.”
“You wouldn’t.” It’s not a dig. It’s just math.
She’s twenty-two. She grew up on whatever was streaming when she hit middle school, which means she missed roughly four decades of music that mattered.
“They’re from Akron. Late seventies, early eighties.
Chrissie Hynde is the frontwoman. She’s one of the best to ever do it. ”
“Best what?”
“Vocalist. Songwriter. Just — presence. She walked into rooms full of men who thought they owned punk and she took the whole thing from them without raising her voice.”
The girl leans forward on her elbows. The Shirley Temple is half gone. “Punk? This is punk?”
“This is punk-adjacent. Punk is a big tent.” I pull a glass off the rack and start polishing.
“You want the real origin story? It starts in New York. CBGB, 1974. The Ramones. Talking Heads. Blondie. Television. A bunch of people who couldn’t play their instruments very well and didn’t care because the point wasn’t technique.
The point was that music had gotten too big and too clean and too far from anything real, and they wanted to tear it down and start over. ”
“Why?”
That one word. Why. She asks it like she actually wants to know, not like she’s making conversation. She’s got her chin in her hand now and she’s looking at me, and her eyes aren’t red anymore. They’re focused.
“Because that’s what punk is. It’s the reaction to being told to sit down and shut up and be grateful for what you’ve got.
” I set the glass down. “It crossed the Atlantic. London, 1976. The Sex Pistols, the Clash, the Damned. Different energy over there. More political. More angry. The kids in London were broke and bored and the government was telling them their future was sorted and they looked around and said no it fucking isn’t. ”
“And then what?”
“And then it kept going. D.C. in the eighties. Minor Threat. Fugazi. Ian MacKaye invented straight edge because he was tired of watching his friends drink themselves stupid, and he turned that into a movement. Then it went west. California. Black Flag. Dead Kennedys. Bad Religion. Then it went underground and came back up and went underground again and every time it resurfaced it looked different but it was always the same thing underneath.”
“Which is what?”
I stop polishing. She’s finished the Shirley Temple. The cherry stem is on the napkin, tied in a knot, and I don’t think she did it on purpose.
“Giving a shit,” I say. “About something. Anything. Loud enough that people have to hear you.”
She’s quiet for a second. Then she licks her lips, a quick nervous thing, tongue across the lower lip and gone, and I notice it because I notice everything behind this bar and because her mouth is soft and her face is open and she just sat through a five-minute punk history lecture without checking her phone once.
“Can I order a real drink now?”
“What do you want?”
She looks at the menu for the first time. Reads it slow, like she’s taking it seriously, which she should because I wrote that menu. “Moscow mule?”
“Good choice.” I pull the copper mug from the rack. Vodka, ginger beer, lime, ice. The mug frosts immediately. I set it in front of her and she wraps both hands around it like it’s cold outside, which it isn’t.
“I’m Zoe,” she says.
“Teague.”
“Is that your real name?”
“Is Zoe yours?”
She grins. It’s the first full smile I’ve seen from her, and it’s ridiculous. The whole face changes. She went from sad-eyed girl drinking a Shirley Temple to someone who looks like she just remembered something good, and the shift is so fast it’s almost disorienting.
“Yeah,” she says. “Zoe Kimball. What’s the rest of yours?”
“Moran. Teague Moran.”
“Teague Moran.” She says my name like she’s tasting it. Rolling it around. “That’s a cool name.”
“Thanks. I grew it myself.”
She laughs. It’s loud and surprised and she covers her mouth with her hand like she didn’t mean to let it out, and three of the four other people in the bar glance over. The paperback guy doesn’t look up. He never does.
The playlist shifts. Buzzcocks. “Ever Fallen in Love.” I turn it up a notch because you have to turn up the Buzzcocks, that’s just respect, and Zoe tilts her head.
“This is good.”
“This is 1978.”
“It sounds like now.”
“That’s the whole point.” I lean on the bar.
“Good punk doesn’t age because the things it’s angry about don’t change.
The details shift but the feeling stays.
Kids in 1978 were pissed about the same stuff kids are pissed about now.
Being lied to. Being told to fall in line.
Being handed a future they didn’t ask for and being told to say thank you. ”
Her face shifts. A small collapse, just for a second, like I hit a nerve I didn’t know was there. She takes a long drink of the Moscow mule and sets it down and wraps both hands around the copper mug, gripping it like an anchor, and I watch her put herself back together in real time.
“I got assigned to the wrong fire station,” she says.
I blink. Of all the things I expected her to be upset about, fire station assignments was not on the list. “You’re a firefighter?”
“I just graduated.” She says it with pride underneath the frustration. “I wanted Station 11. I got Station 24. They’re not the same.”
“I’ll take your word for it.”
“Station 11 is in my neighborhood. I grew up there. I’ve been listening to their sirens my whole life.” She wraps her hands tighter around the mug. “And today I went there and asked the captain to give me a chance and she said no. She was nice about it. But she said no.”
I don’t know anything about fire stations.
I don’t know what makes one different from another or why it would matter enough to send a twenty-two-year-old into a bar alone on a Tuesday.
But I know what it looks like when someone wants something so bad it’s wrecking them, and I know what it sounds like when the story is real, and this girl isn’t performing.
She’s just sitting at my bar telling me the truest thing she’s got.
“So what are you going to do?” I ask.
“Go back. Try again.” She says it without hesitating. “I have three weeks before I have to report. I’m going to go back every day if I have to.”
“Every day?”
“Every day. With cookies.”
I look at her. Zoe Kimball. Twenty-two years old. Wants to be a firefighter at a specific fire station badly enough to beg. Drinks Shirley Temples and Moscow mules and ties cherry stems in knots without knowing she’s doing it. Listens to punk for the first time and asks why instead of what.
Licks her lips when she’s nervous and doesn’t know I’m watching.
“You want another one?” I nod at the mug.
“No, I think one’s enough.” She pulls out her wallet. “How much?”
“The Shirley Temple was on me. The mule is twelve.”
She puts a twenty on the bar. “Keep the change.”
“Big tipper for a girl who lives at home.”
“How do you know I live at home?”
“Lucky guess.”
She smiles again. Smaller this time, but real. She slides off the stool and stands there for a second, like she’s deciding whether to say something else. Then she looks at the speaker above the bar, where the playlist has moved on to the Clash, and she nods at it.
“What’s this one?”
“‘Lost in the Supermarket.’ The Clash. London Calling, 1979.”
“It’s kind of beautiful.”
“Don’t let any punk hear you say that.”
“Why not?”
“Because it’s a compliment and punks don’t know what to do with those.” I pick up her glass. “Get home safe, Zoe.”
She walks out. The door swings shut behind her and the bar goes back to what it was before she showed up, which is quiet and mine and exactly how I like it. I wash her mug. Wipe down her spot. Throw away the cherry stem she left on the napkin.
Tied in a knot. She definitely didn’t do that on purpose. I toss it in the trash and go back to closing prep, and I don’t think about her mouth or her laugh or the way her face broke open when I talked about being handed a future you didn’t ask for.
I don’t think about it. I just finish closing and walk home and go to bed.