Chapter 5
Hanna
The Watershed is what happens when a man retires from the fire service and decides to open a bar, and then turns out to have been, all along, the exact right kind of person to own a bar.
Big Jim Kowalski got his payout at fifty-five, bought the old corner lot on Main from a family that had been selling hardware on it for a hundred years, and built a bar that looks like a hardware store where they decided to start serving beer and forgot to remodel.
The shelves behind the counter are lined with Mason jars.
The walls are hung with vintage Copper Ridge Fire Department photographs and one framed thing that's definitely a fish.
The tables are solid wood. The stools are upholstered in what appears to be a repurposed saddle.
I've been avoiding it for weeks.
I walk in at seven-twelve. Gemma is at the bar with Beck.
Aiden is in a booth with a woman I haven't met, who must be Riley, because Cal told me Riley has very specific eyebrows and the woman at this booth does.
Derek is already loud. Deluca is drinking something neon.
Rivera is at the jukebox making a face at the jukebox, and the face is translated, by my developing Rivera-to-English dictionary, as somebody has put on Bruno Mars and I've accepted this.
Ty is at the end of the bar. Ty is talking to Big Jim. Ty isn't looking at me.
Ty has been not-looking-at-me with forensic precision for four weeks.
At shift, at calls, in the kitchen, in the briefing room, in the parking lot.
He's a man who's mastered the art of not-looking-at-a-person.
He looks at me, technically, exactly the amount a colleague would look at a colleague, and not a tenth of a percent more, and I hate him for it, because it's humiliating to want a person to look at you and to have no mechanism by which to tell them to stop respecting the distance you yourself asked them to respect.
"Larsen!" Derek bellows, from the middle of the bar. "You made it."
"I made it."
"I had five to one odds you wouldn't make it."
"Who did you have them with."
"Myself."
"That's not how odds work, Derek."
"It's how I do odds."
"That's not how anybody does odds."
Rivera, from the jukebox, doesn't turn around. "She's right. Shut up. She's right."
Derek shuts up. I've been at this station for four weeks, and I've learned that Rivera's voice from across a room is the authority of last resort, and nobody argues with Rivera. I'm going to request a Rivera for my apartment when I get one.
Big Jim comes down the bar to me. He's a big man.
He's also, Cal has told me, a soft man. I've known Big Jim most of my life in the way you know someone who's in the background of your family's community — a man who was at my father's funeral, and stood at the back, didn't give a speech, but made the green bean casserole that showed up at our door every week for four months after, delivered by his teenage son, who's now the Derek currently trying to bet on my feelings.
"Hanna Larsen." Big Jim sets both hands on the bar.
"Mr. Kowalski."
"Jim."
"Jim."
"What'll you drink."
"Whatever's not going to make me regret my life."
"Whiskey."
"That will make me regret my life."
"You like whiskey."
"I like whiskey."
"Whiskey's fine, then." He's already reaching for the bottle.
He pours it. He doesn't ask me if I want it neat or on the rocks or what brand, because he's Big Jim, and Big Jim has decided what I'm going to drink, and I'm drinking it.
He slides it across to me. I take it. He doesn't charge me.
This is his bar and I'm Tom Larsen's daughter and I'm not going to pay for a drink in this establishment for the rest of my life.
"Thank you."
"Welcome home, girl." He goes back to drying a glass.
I look at the room. I sit down at the bar, two stools away from Ty, because two stools is the measured professional distance of two people who work together, and we're two people who work together, and nothing is happening.
"Hi."
"Hi," Ty says.
"Whiskey?"
"Apparently."
"Big Jim's whiskey is a commitment."
"I'm discovering."
"Pace yourself."
"I was going to, yeah."
He has a beer. He's wearing a navy henley and jeans, and he has that after-shift look, the soft-edged look he used to have at twenty-three, and my hand around my whiskey glass does a thing I'm not going to examine.
I sip the whiskey.
I don't regret my life.
Okay, I regret my life slightly.
I put the glass down.
"Larsen!" Derek bellows again, because Derek doesn't so much speak as transmit. "Come here. Come sit with us. We're gonna tell stories."
"About what."
"About everything. It's Ty's fault. He told a story about his probie year and now we're in it."
"I didn't tell a story," Ty says.
"He told a story."
"I answered a question."
"Oh god." I pick up my whiskey. "Do I want to do this."
"Yes," Derek says. "You do. Come sit."
I sit. Ty gets up from his stool and moves too, because Ty is going to follow the center of the crew toward the booth and it would be weirder for him to stay at the bar than to come.
He sits at the far end of the booth. I sit at the near end.
Cal, who's been in the bathroom, comes out and inserts himself in the middle between us, which is Cal's preferred seating arrangement in all situations in life, and we all eat nachos.
"Okay," Derek says. "Ty was telling us about the time he got pulled over for doing six in a school zone."
"It was a school zone at nine p.m. There were no children."
"The law doesn't care about children," Derek says.
"The law cares about children, Derek, that's literally the entire point of a school zone."
"The law doesn't care whether children are physically present — "
"We know, Derek — "
"Point being," Derek says, "we were talking about how Ty is a stickler, and that got me thinking about how Ty has always been a stickler, and that got me thinking about the academy, and — "
"No," Ty says.
"Yes," I say.
"No, Derek."
"Who wants to hear the Brennan academy story," Derek says, swinging toward the booth with the grin of a man who's found a new audience for a bit he's been running for a decade.
"Nobody," Ty says.
"Everybody wants to hear the Brennan academy story. Larsen — " Derek turns to me. " — do you remember the sprinkler incident?"
Oh.
Oh, no.
"Which one," I say.
"Which one," Derek says, looking around the table with delight. "She said which one! Which one!"
"Derek — "
"No, this — this is good, Larsen, you know everybody's got one of these. Ty had the biggest one of anyone in his class. There was a sprinkler malfunction in the locker room, the whole thing went off mid-drill, half the class came out looking like — "
"Derek, I've heard this story."
"You haven't heard this version — "
"Derek, my sister hasn't been in Copper Ridge for ten years, she doesn't want to — "
"Cal, I'm absolutely going to tell her," Derek says.
And he tells it.
I can't look at Ty. I can't not look at Ty. I split the difference by staring at the neon beer sign above his head — face aimed his direction, eyes elsewhere. The kind of thing the old me would've been smoother about.
Derek has absorbed every academy story ever told at this bar and sharpened each one into a bit.
He tells it like he was there, though he wasn't — the sprinklers, the darkened locker room, half the cadets in turnout gear and the other half in their skivvies, instructors furious, twelve people drying boots with hand towels in the corridor.
One of those academy nights that becomes myth.
He doesn't tell it like it was the night I pushed Ty Brennan into a supply closet because we'd both been soaked to the bone and I had a stupid idea about body heat that turned into something else.
Three months of something else. Because I'm the one who kissed him first — Ty Brennan would never have made that move, and we both knew it — and neither of us would ever admit this out loud to another human being as long as we lived.
Derek doesn't tell it like that.
Derek tells it like: "And Brennan, right, Brennan disappears for twenty whole minutes, maybe twenty-five, and we're all looking for him in the chaos, and nobody can find him, and we're thinking, like, is he hurt, is he in the supply cage, did he get knocked out, and then he comes back like a half hour later — where were you, Brennan, where'd you go, what happened — "
"Bathroom." Ty doesn't look up from his beer. "I was in the bathroom, Derek."
"Twenty-five minutes?"
"Long bathroom."
"Yeah, see, that's what we thought — "
Rivera, from four feet away at the jukebox, doesn't turn around. "Leave the man's bathroom alone."
"Rivera — "
"Leave his bathroom alone."
Derek, I'm learning, has two off switches. One of them is Rivera. The other is my mother, Judy Larsen, whom he hasn't met, but who would also work. Derek raises his hands in mock surrender and goes to his pint.
"Fine. Brennan was in the bathroom."
"Thank you."
"For twenty-five minutes."
"Derek — "
"In the middle of a drill."
"Derek."
"Fine."
I pick up my whiskey. I take a long, civilized sip. I set it down. I don't feel my face. My face has gone somewhere. My face is in the witness protection program.
"I don't remember that drill," Cal says, to me, like I'm someone who would find this revelatory. "Was I there?"
"You were there," Ty says.
"Was I in the locker room?"
"You were puking in a bush."
"Right, right. I had the stomach flu that night."
"You had hazed rookies drinking Everclear. You didn't have the stomach flu."
"Stomach flu," Cal says.
"Mmhmm."
"I had the flu, Hanna, I want to be clear about this." Cal turns to me.
"Got it."
"I don't remember Brennan leaving."
"You were busy," I say.
"Mmhmm," Ty says.
Derek leans in. Derek, two beers deep, is on the scent of something without knowing what.
"Hey, Larsen."
"Yeah."
"You were at that academy. You were a class behind us. You were there in the second semester, right?"