Jess
My paycheck may have come in Ashton, but my heart was in Springsville still.
Not that my romantic ideal for a location was Springsville—quite literally, my heart and the rest of my body were on the east side of Springsville right now.
It was rather unfortunate, considering this was prime Fallen Saints territory, and I could hear them driving around frequently at night. Sometimes, even when I had hit all of my required hours at Brewskis, I liked to go in and serve anyway. I’d figured back then that if I needed to stay awake and listen to bikers grouse and talk about slamming drinks and pussies, I might as well get paid for it in the process.
But now that I worked in Ashton, it was a little bit different. I couldn’t just roll out of bed and be at work within five minutes. I didn’t have a favorable spot in the eyes of the Fallen Saints—no one who didn’t fuck them, serve them, or work for them did. And in any case, now that there was a Black Reaper that I saw coming around here rather frequently—it was the black guy, Axle, I think—this apartment complex was not the safest place to be seen at in the nighttime hours.
In other words, I had reverted to being the hermit that I usually liked to be. Well, for the next half hour, at least, before an actual shift began at Tom’s Billiards.
And how are you going to react if Phoenix walks in?
It was a question that I’d been thinking about a lot more than I wanted to admit the previous few days. At Brewskis, I had made it a personal rule to never fall for any of the customers. I’d made that mistake at my very first bartending job when I was in college, when I more or less used the gig as a vessel to sleep with a guy I’d had my eyes on for some time, but as soon as I realized how complicated that made serving him and his friends later, I stopped.
But Tom’s Billiards was different. It wasn’t a bar where the bartender stood in the back, slinging drinks, making casual conversation, and staying out of the way otherwise. It was a more intimate space, the kind where, even when a private event with a known guest list was had, it rarely filled up beyond a half-dozen people. It was a true local watering hole, but when the locals were barely in the hundreds, maybe the thousands at most, it wasn’t hard to be more relaxed and engaged.
And that was just in general. Phoenix...
Well, yes, he was hot.
But we’d bonded over something I had never really thought I’d get into a conversation with someone about.Fathers.
His was gone, never to return. I had said mine wasn’t around, and that was kind of true. He was alive, still. In fact, I’d spoken to him somewhat recently, when Brewskis burned down.
But he was more of my father by blood than by actual parenting. I...
I tried not to think about it. It usually led to me being bitterly angry at him or tearfully sad at the fact that I would never have a father like others did. I did, however, pull up our last messages, figuring that that would provide me a chance to close the loop on thinking about him.
I only had to scroll back to the morning after when Brewskis had burned down. I had written, “Dad, I just had something very scary happen. The bar I was working at burned down while I was there. But I’m safe and alive. I hope you are well.”
I was hoping the message would be a chance for him to connect with me, to express concern, and for us to build a bridge between each other. We’d never be close; if I ever got married, he might walk me down the aisle, but his speech would be cliché and boring. I just wanted there to besomething.
Instead, I got a joke.
“I knew the bartending business was hot!”
And that, right there, was Mr. Walters’ problem. Every conversation was either a chance to crack a joke or make a dismissive remark; when called out, he would simply say that he didn’t understand why things had to be so serious. Things could never be deep; they always had to be superficial.
At least he’d somehow gotten better. In my childhood, he never went deep because he was always dark and mean. After I ran away, he got sober, but his refusal to engage in any way meant I always kept my distance. He still had never apologized for the way he had treated or continued to treat me.
So, yeah. When Phoenix asked about my father, I wasn’t lying when I said he wasn’t around. I just may not have told the full truth—but for all intents and purposes, he wasn’t.
My thoughts were broken when I heard the sound of a motorcycle coming toward the complex. It was almost certainly Axle coming to visit his lady, but whenever this sound came, I always double-checked to make sure. I never knew who the Fallen Saints considered enemies, and it wouldn’t be beyond the Saints to burn an entire apartment building down because the landlord had pissed them off.
Funny enough, though, whenever I saw that it was, indeed, Axle coming to visit, it was the safest stretch of the day for me to exit the apartment. If the Fallen Saints decided to stir up trouble, Axle would step in. And even if he didn’t, he’d have the rest of the Black Reapers on call to come by at a moment’s notice.
Sure enough, when Axle took his helmet off, I quickly gathered my bag, made sure that my hair was well-enough combed, and headed out. I didn’t lock the door to my apartment, mostly because the damn thing didn’t work. Some places had perfectly functioning locks; mine did not, and attempts to get management to solve it were like trying to call the customer service of a phone carrier. The fix wasn’t worth the hassle, and even if someone did break in, they wouldn’t find anything of value. I was the rare person who found it safer to keep valuables in my car.
I hurried downstairs and got to my car without incident, although I noticed one guy leaning against the entrance to a pool that got cleaned maybe once a month at most, smoking a cigarette, eying me up and down. He was no threat, just a divorced man in his mid-fifties with no prospects. A leering eye was something that you just accepted as part of being a bartender and, to a wider extent, a single woman.
Just two more months here, Jess.
Just two more months working in Ashton and you’ll have enough money to go wherever you want.
Oregon. Washington. Fuck, maybe Canada or Mexico.
Just away from this place. Away from whatever I have left. Away from the madness and insanity.
