He was a dead man, Joey Hartnett. As soon as I laid eyes on him again.
I would, too. The country music scene in Chicago was very tight. He’d been gone almost two weeks now—a long time, really, without any apology texts. But then my cell had died, and I couldn’t find the charger. Had he taken it? Playing dirty? I’d swung between raw anger and beginning to worry he’d never reached Heather’s house. But then I’d spotted him down the street from the pub last week. Sneaking around. Slithering back? If he’d meant to come throw himself at my feet, I guess he’d chickened the heck out. He didn’t show.
Maybe he’d still try. I imagined him with grocery store daisies in his hand, arriving while I was onstage, triumphant in my spangles, shooting off sparks. I’d show him: See? You were no big loss.
My turntable, though? My vinyl? Among the things I hadn’t been able to reclaim from the apartment was a Dolly Parton album that couldn’t be had for love or money.
Well, for money, I guess. A lot of it.
At least the night Cam had put the new lock on the door had been a Wednesday, a show night. I’d had my guitar, my sweet Peggy Lee, with me. All the cords and mics I kept for the band, all the sound equipment, was safe at McPhee’s. Everything else was just stuff.
Mystuff, though. I had a good eye for the best bargains at your mom’s garage sale and for hidden gems in secondhand stores. For the treasures that other people could afford to cast off.
But in the end, those thrift-store curtains we’d never hemmed had been ripped down from the bedroom windows, left in two puddleson the floor, exposing all our ratty belongings for what they were, in sharp, forensic detail. Our room had looked like a crime scene from one of those TV shows.
You know the ones I mean. Twisted bedsheets of an unmade bed, looking sordid.
We’d been together three years, and this was how it ended? Well, Cam could have those sheets. And those curtains, too. He could have it all. I had a lot of practice slipping the hold of one life and stepping forward into the next. That life with Joey was behind me now.
Ahead of me, the warm glow of McPhee’s. I was still backtracking through the featureless wind tunnel this stretch of Milwaukee Avenue had become, condos, more condos, and high-end storefronts, dollars signs in everyone’s eyes. All the corner stores, taquerias, or Polish bakeries had sold up, all the stuff that made Chicago great, that made neighborhoods like ours livable. Gone. There was this one real estate broker who’d made a career of strip-mining the city, a block at a time. She’d been after McPhee’s—the prime corner lot the building sat on—for a good long time.
I was curled against the wind, attention on the slippery sidewalks, just trying not to keep sliding down the slipperyslopeof what had become my life. One dumb fight, a single missed appointment, one missing rent payment. What really stung, if I was honest, what really made my bacon sizzle, was knowing that I was twenty-six and still the sort of person who could be kneecapped by something so small. That I could have the rug pulled out and stumble bad—not just a hiccup, right? A real clatter downward, bruised elbows and ego—
At the mouth of the alley next to McPhee’s, my boot swept a patch of smooth ice and I went down, hard.
I got carefully to my feet and, crooning curses, raked my things back into the bag,again, this time with fingers beginning to burn with cold. My voice bounced like a tennis ball off the bricks of the alley, echoing off the dead end until I realized—
I was not alone.
I fell silent. In the shadow of the dumpster at the pub’s back entrance, an old Dominick’s grocery cart was piled high with found objects, flattened cardboard, plastic shopping bags tied together. Behind this meager windbreak was a bundle of rags, someone barely hanging on.
All the fire from before, from the scene with Cam, from the bus, fell away.
I stood at the opening of the alley, my own bag at my feet.
Would I even know her if she ended up here? I remembered her as a redhead, but I wasn’t sure. It had been a long time.
I peered closer. The rags in the alley shifted, and I caught sight of a dirty gray beard.
Wisps of my white breath whipped into the wind. Something inside me loosened. A fist of dread, unclenched, to make way for a wave of relief. Sweet relief, whether I deserved it or not, that today was not the day.
And Joey thought he could damage me? By running off?
Mydealwas that I was already good and ruined, long before he’d come along.
If you wanted to destroy this cowgirl, you couldn’t just go. You had to gobig, baby. You had to go sky-high.
2
From the bundle in the alley, I thought I could see the gleam of an eye, guarded, waiting to see what I would do. I’d meant to use the back door to the apartment to haul in my bag of shame, but now I glanced toward the pub, where the wind buffeted at the canvas vestibule capped over the front door for winter.
Maybe there was a to-go order Ned could make again? Or an extra blanket in the apartment Oona wouldn’t miss?
I picked my way carefully across the alley’s ice-rink opening, promising myself I would come back with some kind of offering. I could do that much. I hurried past the blank of the empty corner storefront next to McPhee’s into the shelter of the vestibule and stomped my numbed feet against the doormat.
Through the circular porthole window in the pub’s outer door, I could see what kind of day we were having.
Oh, I always saidwewhen it came to McPhee’s. Like I owned the place. In a way, I did.
