From: Bellini O’Donnell
Subject: Jingle Bell Vodka
Don’t drink vodka, Maisie. You know even one shot makes you feel ill.
I will get a book to you by the end of December. LATEST, early January.
VERY LATEST, end of January.
I do not fear Portia.
With Santa’s love,
Bellini
I closed the lid of my computer. I would write another Roxy book. I had to.
This is how I make money. It is how I pay for my home in Oregon and feed my cats.
I put my head on the lid of the computer. I knocked my head against it, hoping an idea for my book would miraculously pop into my brain.
But even if it did, when would I have time to write it?
7
Bellini
I knew that returning to Lady Whiskey’s Bar and Grill would be like going home. A home filled with Scotch and straight shots, pool tables and darts, a long bar and loud music, engineers and rebels, millionaires and nearly homeless people, artists and writers, extroverts and hermits, free spirits, and eccentric cowboys and cowgirls, but still home.
Lady Whiskey’s is downtown, but it’s in its own building. My mother bought it when she was twenty-five years old, after spending five years as a fisherwoman in Alaska to save money. At the time, it was run-down, vacant, and had been used as the offices of a farm equipment company with an attached stable. The farm equipment company was long gone, as were the horses. The spiders and dust and the occasional animal were the only ones left. The “before” photos of the dilapidated building are on a wall in the bar next to the “after” photos.
She got the building for a song. She and The Sisters, her mother, and father cleaned it out. My mother hired electricians and plumbers, drywallers, floor installers, etc., most of them members of our extended family.
She and her dad built a long, wide bar out of fallen trees and added a slick top. She had long mirrors installed behind the bar, found sturdy wood tables at a restaurant in Great Falls that was goingoutof business, and voilà, she wasinbusiness. She bought rivers of alcohol, including Deschutes Family Tequila, which is the only tequila she’ll allow to be served, hired a chef to make “good ol’ American food that will put meat on your bones,” and opened the newly installed red doors that look like what you’dsee in a Wild West saloon. She told me she then “flew by the seat of my pants and hoped I wouldn’t go bust. I had nothing to lose except my pants, so I didn’t have to worry much.”
She put a cash register on the counter and a gun underneath it, turned up her personality about two hundred notches, and crossed her fingers.
Lady Whiskey wears sparkles and fringe, colorful cowgirl boots and hats with feathers, sequins, and turquoise. She is draped in shiny or flowered wraparound, cleavage-out dresses and silver bangles, knee-high black boots and leather vests, and denim with bandannas. She has her schtick, and she wears it well.
She’s known as a woman who wants people to have a raucous good time in her bar, but if you get outta line, you’ll pay. As in, she won’t allow you through the saloon doors again, and if you argue, she will show you the gun below the cash register.
From the start, Lady Whiskey’s was wildly popular because of her magnetic personality. “I wanted to create a place where human beings would feel welcome and wanted in this messed-up world that can chew people up and spit them out. Although”—she put her finger up— “there will be no chewing or spitting in Lady Whiskey’s.”
When I was a baby, one of my mother’s sisters would often babysit me, but sometimes I’d go to work with Mom. She’d strap me to her chest facing outward so I could see everything while she worked. This was, clearly, not legal, but it was a small town in Montana, decades ago, and it wasn’t like the inspectors were beating down the door. The police officers and politicians and doctors who ambled through the red Wild West doors never said a word.
So, yes, I grew up watching my mother and other bartenders making drinks. I started memorizing drink ingredients when I was five years old.
My mother’s favorite cook, Javier, would make me a snack and a milkshake after kindergarten, and then I’d get to work making drinks or helping to put together the salads or spraying whipped cream on banana splits, which we are famous for.
I loved being there. Everyone knew my name, and I knew theirs. When I won the spelling bee in second grade, my mom taped the certificate on the front door. I was so proud when people came up and congratulated me.
She is welcoming and friendly, and she knows everyone’s names and the names of their families. Everyone knows her, greets her, asks for her thoughts and her opinions. People come to the bar to have fun, to celebrate, to dance, to cry in their beer, to complain and be heard, and to argue, she told me, but they also come because the bar is their community.
“They have friends here, even the edgy, downtrodden, and half-cocked. People know them. I know them. You know them, baby. They feel like someone knows they’re alive and not buried six feet under in a pink coffin. Plus, the conversations here are off the hook.”
“What do you mean ‘off the hook,’ Mom?”
“They talk about everything from sports to women to men to politics and social issues and the problems of the day. I had two men in here having a huge brawl the other day as they debated whether Jesus’ last name was truly Christ. I have no idea why they had to punch each other in the face over it, but when I dumped two pitchers of ice water over both of them and yelled, ‘Help me, Jesus Christ!’ for effect, that seemed to get their attention. Then I kicked them out and told them to go outside until Jesus calmed their sorry butts down. They apologized.”
