Someone was hailing me at the other end of the bar. One of the customers from the fireside, pink-cheeked from the heat. I went gratefully and let myself get caught up in a series of orders.
As I served, Marisa kept trying to catch my eye, but I avoided direct contact. By the time I had a spare second, I was cooled off, calm as a surgeon, and ready to cut her out of my sight.
I grabbed a rag and wiped the counter down to Marisa’s corner. “AnotherCoke?” I asked.
Her glass was still full.
“Dahlia,” she said.
“You’re sober,” I said. “Is that what you needed to tell me?”
“Well, no,” she said. She was fidgeting with the glass in front of her, moving it around in the condensation on the bar. She reminded me of the gangster tourists, nursing a drink while they ginned up the courage to ask were Al Capone used to sit.
“Look,” I said curtly. “Alex doesn’t want you here. And neither do I. You should get lost, before he comes back.”
“But I came to ask you something.”
I’d seen it coming all along, I realized. Why had she come back after all these years? Only toneedsomething. “Oh, my God,” I said, laughing. “You’re honestly going to askmefor something? I don’thaveanything.”
“It can’t be entirely my fault,” Marisa said with a sniff. “If you don’t have more than this.”
Had the room gone quiet, or could I not hear anything over my renewed rage?
“More than…what?”
Marisa looked up. “I didn’t mean—I only meant—”
“More than a place where I am always welcome? And safe? More than a chance to do what I love, every week?” I nodded to the stage behind her. “More than a job here at the bar, if I’d only say I wanted it? More than everything I need,morethan enough? I have plenty, Marisa. Just not anything I’m willing to give you, including any more of my time.”
“This isn’t how I wanted this to go,” she said.
“I’m so sorry your visit to McPhee’s hasn’t been everything you hoped,” I said. “You can tell Yelp. But this is mylife, no matter what you think of it.”
Marisa glanced sideways at her audience of Jims. “I have two, you know. Two lives I’ve kept separate all this time,” she said, her voice high and shaking. “Holding them apart, with all my will… it’s so tiring. It’s an addict thing, trying to control everything.”
Silent Jim’s attention eased away from her, as though she’d disappointed him personally.
“And then they collide, anyway, no matter how hard—”
“Are we doing the twelfth step?” I snapped. “Is that what this is?”
Ned slid an order through the pass-through and stayed to watch. I turned and grabbed the plates. They were scorching hot, and I wouldn’t have fingerprints tomorrow, but I could barely feel anything right now.
I turned back to Marisa.
“I am not just something that happened to you. Not just a step to check off your list.”
I ducked under the bar hatch with the plates and carried them across the room. But even with my back turned, I could track Marisa, as though I had an internal compass for her, for only her, as she pushed off from the bar and carried her Coke to the big corner booth at the front windows.
Where Capone might have sat, by the way. A six-top.
When I got back behind the bar, that fifty-dollar bill of Marisa’s was stuck to the condensation from her glass.
Primary Jim leaned forward over folded arms at the other end of the bar. “Who wasthat?” he said.
This guy and his earnest questions. Primary Jim was so hale and hearty and sincere in his chunky knit sweaters, as if he’d just stuck his skis in the snow outside. But what was a guy in his early thirties doing hanging out here, on the downward slope? He didn’t have anywhere else to be?
He did, actually. Every afternoon, he wandered off to stretch his legs, smoke an illicit cig. Maybe he was making a call, reassuring a girlfriend—or his mom—that he wasn’t drinking at some bar all day.
