Chapter 6 #2
“Here,” I say, extending my hand. “Let me demonstrate the correct technique. You want to make sure your palms meet fully, then apply even pressure. Not too hard, not too soft. Two or three pumps, and then release.”
The biker looks at my extended hand like I am offering him a live snake. Although I get the feeling he probably owns snakes or some other dangerous creature.
“Lady,” he says slowly, “you’re trying to tell me how to shake hands?”
“I am offering instruction, yes. A good handshake is the foundation of—”
“I don’t need some prissy city princess telling me how to shake hands.”
“Well, I am not prissy. I am a professional. Proper etiquette is not about being prissy, it is about showing respect for—”
“You want to talk about respect?” He steps closer, and suddenly he is very large and very angry, and I am realizing I might have made a significant tactical error. “How about you show some respect by minding your own dang business?”
“I was just trying to—”
“Trying to what? Make me look stupid in front of everyone?”
His voice is rising now, drawing more attention.
“You come in here with your fancy clothes and your fancy attitude, acting like you’re better than everyone.”
“That’s not what I—”
“Hey!” The voice is calm, authoritative, and familiar. Wyatt appears beside me, placing himself slightly between me and the biker. “What’s going on here?”
“Your new boss lady’s trying to teach me manners,” the man snarls, “like I’m some kind of child.”
Wyatt’s expression does not change, but I see something in his eyes.
“Oh, is that so?”
“I was just explaining proper handshake technique,” I say.
Even as the words leave my mouth, I hear how ridiculous they sound.
“He was— well, I mean, the way he shook Presley’s hand was—”
“Eleanor.” Wyatt’s voice is quiet but firm. “Why don’t you go wait in the office? I’ll handle this.”
“But—”
“Office. Now.”
It is not a suggestion.
I open my mouth to argue with him, but something in his expression stops me. He’s not angry, or if he is, he is hiding it really well, but he is definitely serious.
I go.
* * *
The office is very quiet, and the silence feels like judgment.
I sink into the chair behind the desk. Mavis’s chair, I suppose, though it does not feel like mine. I rest my head in my hands.
The adrenaline of the night is fading, leaving a hollow feeling of shame.
What in the world was I thinking?
Teaching a biker how to shake hands. Critiquing a stranger’s posture. Getting into a public argument over menu grammar. The grammar still bothers me. I can’t lie.
I was not thinking. That was the problem.
I was reacting, falling back on the only skills I really have, trying to impose order on a world that does not want or need my brand of order.
All I can hear is my mother’s voice echoing in my head.
Presentation matters, Eleanor. First impressions matter. If you can’t control your environment, you can’t control anything.
But this is not my environment.
This is Mavis’s, and Wyatt’s, and Dolly’s, and anyone else who has built a life here. I am the interloper. The outsider. The prissy city princess who does not know how to exist in a world where people do not care about grammar, posture, or the proper way to shake hands.
Tears fall down my face before I can stop them.
And I do not cry prettily. I never have. My face gets all blotchy. My nose runs like a faucet, and I make these embarrassing hiccuping sounds that I cannot seem to control.
I am in the middle of this humiliating display when the office door opens.
“Hey, so the biker situation is—” Wyatt stops mid-sentence.“Oh.”
I try to pull myself together, wiping frantically at my face with the back of my sleeve. Lovely.
“I’m fine. I’m just, it’s been a long night and I—”
“You’re crying.”
“I’m not crying. I’m just—” A hiccup escapes me, undermining my denial. “Okay, so I’m crying. A little. It’s fine. You can go back to the bar.”
But he doesn’t go.
Instead, he closes the door behind him, moves to the filing cabinet in the corner, and pulls out a bottle of bourbon and two glasses.
“Mavis kept this here for emergencies,” he says, pouring a measure into each glass. “I’d say this qualifies.”
He hands me a glass and settles into the worn armchair across from the desk, the same chair he sat in the other night when he told me about Mavis and her cheating at poker.
“The biker is fine,” he says. “His name is Dave. He’s actually a pretty nice guy once you get past his tough exterior. I bought him a beer, told him that you’re new and still adjusting to the place, and he agreed to just let it go.”
“I made a fool of myself.”
“A little bit, yeah.”
I take a sip of bourbon. It burns going down, but it’s a good burn. Warm and grounding.
“I don’t know what I was thinking. I was just, I just saw things were wrong, things I know how to fix, and I couldn’t stop myself for some reason.”
“Things that were wrong by your standards,” he says gently, “not by ours.”
“Wyatt, the grammar on the menus is objectively wrong.”
“Maybe, but nobody here cares. They come here for food and drinks and company, not grammatically correct descriptions of mozzarella sticks.”
I know he’s right, of course. I have known it all along, really. But admitting it feels like everything I’ve built my life on, the rules, the standards, the careful cultivation of proper behavior, is just meaningless.
“I don’t know how to be here,” I say, my voice small. “I don’t know how to exist in a place where all the things that I know don’t even matter.”
He’s quiet for a moment, swirling the bourbon in his glass.
“Can I tell you something?”
“Always.”
“When I came back from overseas, I didn’t know how to exist anywhere.
Everything I’d learned in the army, all the hypervigilance, the constant threat assessments, the need to control every variable, well, it didn’t translate very well into civilian life.
I’d walk into a room and immediately identify all the exits.
I’d hear a car backfire and hit the deck. I couldn’t turn it off.”
“That sounds awful.”
“It was, but here’s the thing. Mavis didn’t try to fix me.
She didn’t tell me I was doing it wrong, that I needed to adjust, or that my skills were useless.
She just made space for me. She let me be who I was while I figured out who I wanted to become.
” He meets my eyes, and there’s no judgment, just understanding.
“The things you know aren’t useless, Eleanor.
They’re just not the right tools for this particular job.
And that doesn’t mean they’re worthless.
It just means you have to learn some new tools. ”
“I don’t know how.”
“Well, nobody does at first.” He takes a sip of his drink. “But Mavis didn’t leave you this bar because she thought you were perfect. She left it because she believed you could grow.”
I think about Mavis’s letter. A chance to figure out who you are when you’re not performing for anyone.
“What if I can’t?” The fear is real, pressing against my chest. “What if I’m just too set in my ways, too rigid, just like my mother?”
“Then you’ll spend six months being miserable and go back to Atlanta,” he says, shrugging. “But I don’t think that’s going to happen.”
“Why not?”
“Well, because you’re sitting here crying over a mistake instead of defending it.
Because you asked me to tell you about Mavis instead of just reading about her.
And because you’re trying, even when you’re failing.
” He sets his glass down and leans forward.
“Rigid people don’t try, Eleanor. They dig in and insist they’re right. You’re not doing that.”
I consider this. It’s not how I would have described myself, but maybe that’s the point. Maybe I don’t know myself as well as I thought I did.
“Dolly’s going to want to talk to you,” Wyatt says, standing. “She’s not mad, but, you know, she’s going to have some, shall we say, suggestions about how to approach things differently.”
“Oh, I’m sure she will.”
“Take them. She’s been doing this for thirty years. She knows what she’s talking about.”
I nod and finish the last of my bourbon.
“Wyatt,” I say as he reaches for the door.
He turns back. “Yeah?”
“Thank you. For this.”
I gesture vaguely at the bourbon, the conversation, and the kindness I didn’t expect.
“Mavis wouldn’t have left you this place without a reason, and I’m starting to think maybe she knew what she was doing.”
He leaves before I can respond, closing the door behind him.
I sit in the quiet office, surrounded by Mavis’s chaotic files and the lingering scent of bourbon, and think about tools, about growing, about the possibility that the woman I’ve been isn’t the one I have to stay just because my mother said so.
It’s terrifying.
It’s also, I realize for the first time in years, that I feel something might actually change.
Later, after the bar is closed and the staff has gone home, I climb the stairs to the apartment and stand in front of Mavis’s photo wall again. I find the picture of me as a child.
“I messed up today,” I tell her. “Badly. I made a fool of myself in front of everybody.”
Of course, the photo doesn’t answer, but I swear I can almost hear Mavis’s voice.
“So what? Get up and try again.”
“I don’t know if I can do this.”
“Only one way to find out.”
I touch the edge of the photo, feeling the curl of the aged paper.
“Okay,” I whisper. “I’ll try.”
Then I go to bed, and for the first time since I arrived in Copper Creek, I sleep without dreaming of my mother’s disappointed face.