“That was nobody,” I said, putting Marisa’s fifty in the tip jar for the kitchen.
There was a thump at the front door. I looked up to find the band arriving, banging through the doors in heavy winter gear, beanies pulled down over Lourey’s pigtail braids and Shanny’s unruly blond curls. Suzy wore a set of black kitten ears, a thing she was trying. Rooster’s upright bass had become wedged in the vestibule, right on schedule.
They filed past, Suzy off-balance from the outsized backpack she’d used to carry home a snare to re-skin, then Rooster, a little winded under her coffin-sized case. Lourey tucked her guitar case under one arm and tapped her wrist at me ominously.
I didn’t usually drink before a show, but Marisa’s presence required a little liquid courage. I poured a shot of tequila and threw it back.
“Seems like she’ssomebody,” Primary Jim insisted.
“Could you see her, too?” I said through the burn in my throat. “Honest to Barbara Mandrell, that was the ghost of McPhee’s.”
6
From behind the bar, I watched the band set up around my absence—but not without occasional time checks on their phones and significant looks in my direction. Rooster’s new boyfriend, Trey, was lending a hand on setup and sound, something Joey normally did.
I was stuck, though. The pub was filling up with paying customers, and Alex was still out dealing with the broken door. I took orders, pulled beers, mixed a few cocktails. Shoved a few loose tater tots from the pass-through window into my mouth.
Ned pushed a small plate of them through the window for me but held on as I grabbed it. “Joey’s a bonehead,” he said, his pronounced Adam’s apple sliding slowly up and down. It moved in the same liquid way as Ned moved through the world, like he’d get there when he got there—and he usually got there late. “And I’ll tell him that myself,” he said. “When he shows up tonight.”
“He’s not showing up,” I said.
“He’sshowingup. He’ll get it sorted out. With the landlord and all.”
It was too late for sorting any of it out. “He’s not showing up. When you see him, shake him down for my phone charger.”
“He took it? Dark.” Ned pushed two plates through. I loaded them on my arm and delivered them, humming under my breath. Warmingup, but also trying to tap into all the energy in the room—the chatter, the laughter, the warmth of the fire and the golden glow of the string bulbs overhead—and bring it into myself. Store it up, to burn bright onstage. All these people had dragged themselves here, crawled here on their knees from what life had handed them this week. When the lights dimmed, they would turn to me, and I would need to blaze, like a cross over the shoulder of a megachurch preacher.
Get yourself anamen.
Except I wasn’t quite there. There was an alien frequency pulling from the corner booth, and I was distracted. Ned had to ask three times for clarifications on grill orders he couldn’t read, and I forgot which drink I was making, mid White Russian.
“Vodka,” Silent Jim said.
“Thanks,” I said. This guy, I couldn’t quite figure out. He was a whiskey commercial made flesh, black suit jacket and shiny cuff links like he was any minute off to the C-suite. Except: a five o’clock shadow every hour of the day. Each afternoon, he arrived walking stiffly, like a dude just getting off a horse, and took the same stool, where he commenced a program of staring into the middle distance as though waiting for a signal.
Then suddenly Alex was behind the bar again, his hair wind-mussed and his face ruddy from the cold.
“ThankGod,” I said, pulling the apron off and flinging it under the bar. I needed to get my head right.
“What did you say happened to the door? The wind?” Alex said.
“I don’t know what happened,” I said impatiently. “Are you okay if I…”
He’d spotted Marisa in the corner, her back to the bar. “She’s still here,” he said. He checked out the crowd uneasily. “Why is she still here? What does she want?”
“I don’t care what she wants,” I said. “Do you?”
Alex knew what he was having for breakfast three weeks from now and, even in the mess of his office, the location of every receipt,every piece of paper, every cent coming in and going out. When he got nervous or needed to think something through, he’d hide inside the complexity of a project, find something to take apart, clean, and put back together. But we were too busy right now for a tailspin.
“You need me to stay?” I asked, but not as though I meant it.
“No,” he said. Not as though he meant it. He so obviously would have liked me to stay. He got to work, but his eyes were a little wild and he kept glancing toward Marisa’s corner. He owned the place, yet her presence could tilt the room in her direction.
But tilting a room? That wasmyspecialty.
THE SOUND OF MY STEPSon McPhee’s stage—boot heel on wood, a little hollow—was my favorite sound, a nice layer of percussion to go along with Suzy’s drumbeat. When my footfall hit the stage now, the girls all looked up.
“We were wondering if Alex would make it back in time,” Suzy said from behind her kit. She gave the hi-hat cymbal a playful test jangle, then sat back. “Is everything okay?”
