I unlocked the vestibule and then the bar, and let the dogs off theirleash to wander around. The bar was cold, off hours, but it felt like a sauna compared to the street temp. The dogs’ nails clicked on the hardwood of the pub floor. A lonely sound.
The girl peeled off her long scarf and her hat. “There’s no one here.”
“I told you, we’re not open yet,” I said. “I’m not sure how I can help. Was your friend here for the show last night?”
“Show?” the girl said, looking around with a tuck in her bottom lip that I read as disgust. “I doubt it. To be honest, I have no idea why she would come here.”
“Most people come for a drink,” I said. I could use one, to be honest. I walked to the bar and ducked under the hatch. “You want one?”
“It’s nine thirty in the morning,” the girl said. But she followed me to the bar. “Also, she’s a recoveredalcoholic. She’s not going to come all this way to have a drink.”
“Someone in recovery might go quite a stretch to end a dry spell,” I said.
“She takes her sobriety, um, really seriously,” the girl said.
“You’re the one who said she was here.” I poured a shot and sank it. Irish coffee, without the coffee. Almost a legitimate breakfast drink. “So she didn’t like live music,” I said. “She didn’t drink… I think this might not be the best place to look for her, what do you think?”
“She called home from this place,” the girl said. “My mother washere.”
The first hum of bad news might have already started up quietly in the back of my brain, but now I had a literal bad feeling. Bad-bad, deep in the gut. I lifted the hatch and came out from behind the bar to slump onto the corner stool. “What time was that? The call?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “Why? Will that help? I can look it up.”
“How do you know she called fromhere?”
“The line dropped, so I used the app? To see where she was? When I called this place, the guy who answered couldn’t hear me. It was too noisy here.” She glared around the room, searching for a place for herblame. Her eyes landed on the stage. “Then the app stopped being able to find her device.”
I wasn’t even sure which app she was talking about. “Your mother, you said?”
Something in my voice made the girl’s head snap in my direction. “You remember her.” She scrabbled onto the stool across the corner of the bar. “You do. I can tell you do. Please?”
Could it be? The kid was in every way the opposite of me, bright eyes and silken hair, straight off a Disney film, the girl who would be a princess before this was all through. She had peaches-and-cream skin—it was a real thing. The result, I assumed, of being breast-fed for the proper amount of time by someone who had heard of prenatal vitamins, who didn’t smoke, who didn’t score blow over the top of the kid’s head.
She was eighteen, maybe. Nineteen at best. Life hadn’t disappointed her yet. She still lived within an atmosphere of love, like an infant, breathing in pure adoration and exhaling only trust and hope and cotton-candy breath.
She was staring back at me, her glossy lips parted but not in a social-media-selfie kind of way. She was desperate. She had beenloved, and loved her mother in return.
Like I said, the complete opposite of me.
“Your mother’s name wouldn’t be Marisa, would it?”
Her face contorted—relief and joy like she had tasted something sweet, but her expression kept moving past that. Pain, concern. “Yes,” she sobbed, then recovered herself. “Yes, that’s her. Marisa Young. Please.”
Marisa Young, was it? An updated last name, then. Just one more piece of her old life Marisa had been able to leave behind, even though she’d given me grief for doing the same. “And you don’t know why she came here,” I said.
“Whatever you know, even if it’s—maybe she was drinking?” she said. “We’ll get her help.”
“She wasn’t drinking…”
“Or if she… if she wenthomewith someone,” the girl said, her eyes sliding away for the insinuation to land. “But you know what? Parents can work things out, right? We just need to know where she is.”
I couldn’t begin to unpack how little I believed parents could work anything out. “Well,” I said. “I don’t know where she is.”
“Whatever it is,” she whispered.
I could have left it there, with the barest truth. The woman this girl was looking for had been here, and now I didn’t know where she was. That was the truth. Goodbye and good luck to you.
Come on. That’s not what Idid.
