Chapter Sixteen
He was exhausted. It wasn’t just that he’d slept poorly last night; it was that running the bar day in and day out, opening and closing, with only one day off per week, was enough to break anyone. And he’d been doing it for fifteen years.
He and Benji had tried hiring managers with whom to share the duties of running the place, but every single one had been a disaster.
Lee skimmed money from the register for months before Russ figured it out.
Johnny was a bigger flirt than Benji—which was saying something—and after he’d been their manager for about two months, he and Benji came to blows one night over the same girl.
Then there’d been Chris, who had a serious drinking problem; Scotty, who kept forgetting to lock the front door when he left for the night; and Annie, who was the most promising manager they’d ever had until she moved to Majorca with her girlfriend and neglected to tell them.
And more often than not, lately, the responsibility fell to Russ.
He still couldn’t believe that the rock star had sat at his bar.
Russ had played it cool, but now, listening to the songs that brought back memories of secondary school dances, he couldn’t help but grin.
What would he have thought if someone had told him, the year “City of Light” had come out, that one day he’d own a bar in Paris and Jackson Quick would come in? Life was strange, wasn’t it?
That’s what he was thinking about—the way that life surprised you in ways you couldn’t see coming—when he was snapped out of it by a sharp knock at the front door of the bar.
He turned the music down, rolling his eyes.
Who needed a drink so badly that he couldn’t wait until the bar opened in forty-five minutes?
Annoyed, he turned, ready to bark at whoever was there to come back at a decent hour.
But to his surprise, it was Shelby, two cups of takeaway coffee in a carrier, her blond hair pulled back into a ponytail that showed off her sharp cheekbones.
Her smile was a question mark as Russ stared at her for a second. He crossed to unlock the front door and let her in. “Shelby,” he said, looking down at her. He was glad to see her but couldn’t help but wonder why she hadn’t come last night.
“Coffee,” she said, holding up the steaming cups. “And an apology.”
“I’ll take the coffee,” he said, holding the door open for her, “but you don’t owe me an apology.”
“Sure I do. I said I’d come see you last night, and I bailed.” She slipped under his outstretched arm and headed for the bar as he locked the door behind her. He joined her a moment later and accepted one of the coffees.
“God, I needed that,” he said after a long sip.
“I’m not even human in the morning until I’ve had caffeine,” Shelby said with a smile, taking a small sip of her own.
“So,” he said, “good time with your friends last night?” He could hear Benji’s voice in his ear telling him he sounded like a needy girl, so he added for good measure, “The bar was so busy, I hardly looked up at all last night.”
“Oh, good.” Shelby smiled at him again. “And yeah, we went to dinner in Montmartre and stopped at pretty much every bar between there and the Place de Clichy metro stop.”
Russ laughed. “Ah. So you must be feeling really good this morning.”
She laughed, too, and took another sip of her coffee. “I really did mean to come and see you.”
“It’s okay,” he said quickly. It was bad enough that his feelings had been wounded; the last thing he needed was for her to know that he was being so pathetic. “Like I said, busy night. But do you have some time to hang out now? I could see if Benji could cover for me.”
“My friends would kill me if I ditched them,” she said with an apologetic shrug. “We’re supposed to go shopping on the Champs-élysées.”
“Ah, retail therapy. Right, of course. But maybe you could come by tonight?” He hoped he sounded nonchalant.
“Yeah, sure.” She looked relieved, but there was something else, too. Uncertainty? Sadness? He couldn’t quite put a finger on whatever had just flickered across her face, and then it was gone, replaced by a bright smile. “I’ll see how the day goes.”
“Sure, right, yeah.” He hesitated and then leaned in to kiss her, just a quick peck on the lips, before he could second-guess himself. “Sorry, I hope that was okay.”
“Yeah, totally,” she said, blinking back what looked like tears, but that couldn’t be right. “Of course.”
The passenger van of Vietnam vets pulled up outside of the Peninsula Hotel just before 11 a.m., disgorging its load of passengers outside of the palatial building near the Arc de Triomphe.
George was the first one off after their tour guide, Pierre, because it was beginning to feel like the walls were closing in on him.
Today’s outing was an early lunch at the famed hotel, where the treaty ending the Vietnam War had been signed in 1973.
Pierre had arranged a private meal for them in Le Bar Kléber, which didn’t open to the general public until noon.
Pierre hustled the group across the lobby and through a pair of double doors.
George felt a bit like royalty as they were ushered into the dark, oak-paneled bar lined with mirrors and silk tapestries.
Quiet classical music played over the speakers, and a tuxedoed bartender told them in perfect English that the three tables in the corner had already been prepared for them.
“It is here that your secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, negotiated the Paris Peace Accords,” Pierre said as George, Lou, and Cliff—who was once again wearing his beret—settled into three enormous chairs around a table, which sat beneath a huge vase and a stunning indigo tapestry with a white peacock in the foreground.
The three couples sat at the table to one side of them, and the two nurses shared a smaller table on their other side.
Cliff, of course, couldn’t seem to stop himself from ogling them.
“Right here in this bar?” Cliff asked, looking around in awe.
“Indeed,” Pierre confirmed. “It is why a visit here is the highlight of each Vietnam veterans’ tour I run. I’ll leave you to it, then.”
He moved to sit at the far end of the bar, and the bartender whisked over to him immediately with a cup of coffee and a folded newspaper. A tuxedoed waiter hurried over with menus, and after a bit of consultation, they ordered a bottle of Sancerre for the table.
After the waiter had poured them each a glass of wine, the three men toasted the past and looked around the room for a moment in silence. Beside them, the three couples were chatting away, and the two nurses had pulled out a guidebook and were reading to each other.
“You can feel the weight of history here,” Lou said reverently, glancing first at Cliff and then at George, whose gaze he held for a long moment. “The end of an era.”
Being in Vietnam had altered George at his very core—he had come back unable to sleep for months, haunted by nightmares of men beside him being shot dead, tormented by the lives he’d taken in combat.
He and Lou had grown especially close in the year after they’d come home, when they’d returned to a country that, to their surprise, reviled the soldiers who’d served.
They’d been spit on numerous times, and Lou had once been kicked so hard in the torso by a protestor that George had had to take him to the hospital to rule out kidney damage.
It had taken both men years to reconcile their guilt over their involvement in a war they hadn’t fully understood and their pride in doing their duty to their country and serving with honor.
George still wrestled with the conflicting feelings all these years later.
“The closing of the most formative period of our lives,” George agreed, his heart heavy.
He looked around at the stately room, which must have looked much the same fifty years earlier.
Hard to imagine that Kissinger himself might have sat in this very spot as he helped put an end to the war that had taken so many lives and changed them all.
Lou put a hand on his arm and nodded gravely, and George felt a thousand unspoken words pass between them.
When you’d shared something like Vietnam, sometimes words weren’t necessary.
Fearing that Cliff would feel left out, George finally looked away from Lou, forced a smile, and said, “Amazing, Cliff, isn’t it?”
Cliff sighed. “It’s just hard for me to appreciate anything here in my current state,” he said in a low voice.
George and Lou exchanged looks. “Is something… the matter?” Lou asked.
Cliff heaved another dramatic sigh. “It’s just that I’m in love with Diane over there, and she won’t give me the time of day.” He stared wistfully at the taller of the two nurses, who was utterly ignoring him.
“I’m sorry; you’re in love with her?” George glanced at Lou again, confused. Lou merely shrugged.
“Well, aren’t you?” Cliff asked with a despondent laugh. “How could anyone not fall instantly for her? She’s only the most extraordinary creature to have ever lived. And look at those legs…”
“But…” George drew the word out. “You just met her. And you’ve hit on literally every woman we’ve come across since we arrived in Paris. Including Diane’s friend. Sheila, is it?”
“That was just to make Diane jealous,” Cliff said, blinking at George like he was a dolt. “Obviously.”
Their waiter arrived then to take their orders—a club sandwich for Cliff, chicken pad thai for Lou, and a wild mushroom omelet with a green salad for George.
“Don’t you think,” Lou said after the waiter had departed, “that it might be easier just to talk to Diane? Instead of playing games?”
Cliff glanced at Diane, a look of horror crossing his face. “Talk to her?”
“Tell her how you feel, in other words,” Lou said. “Instead of flirting with everyone around her in the hopes she’ll notice you.”
“That isn’t how the game is played,” Cliff said blankly.