You’ll see.
At the moment, the pub was sleepy. The only movement in the room came from the TV screens at the corners of the room and a goodfire dancing behind the fireplace grate. A few people I didn’t recognize had set up camp in front of the fire with a board game and glasses of something syrupy dark.
Tourists, probably. Even in winter, McPhee’s did a brisk business with out-of-towners on the strength of a mythology that billed us as a former Prohibition-era speakeasy—withof coursea ghost and, get this, secret tunnels leading to Al Capone’s unrecovered loot.
Of course there’s no dough.
You don’t think I looked?
When I’d stayed with Alex the first time, just a kid, I’d crawled all around the place, both halves of the building, upstairs and down, breaking open the cheap locks on the two apartment doors.
Dead easy, by the way: Just pull and jiggle the handle, lift and push, and you’re in. I’d been back in residence a week this time, staying over the pub with Alex’s tenant, Oona, and I’d already had to use that trick twice.
So I knew the place as well as anyone, and there was no ghost, no Capone plunder. But Alex was forever having to pluck ghost hunters and treasure-seekers out of the back hallway and send them on their way.
I mean, yeah, sure, there was a secret passageway, sort of. The two halves of the old building were like two chambers of a heart, sort of fitting into and around each other. They had one artery between them, a little low-ceilinged chamber between the bedroom closets in each apartment that Alex called the “scuttle space.” But I can tell you it onehundreddoesn’t lead to any gangster gold or anything good at all.
Alex didn’t even use it, really. No one had used the scuttle since I had, when I was six, to menace the cranky old guy who’d lived in the other apartment. For a short time,Iwas McPhee’s ghost.
Besides the tourists sitting near the fireplace, there were people at the tables down near the stage, people I recognized who were there for the show. Ned would be working tonight, too. He was Joey’s friend and bandmate. And of course, bellied up to the bar were the current groupof regulars, three guys named Jim who had collected at McPhee’s over time like litter caught in a chain-link fence.
Basically, a minefield.
I wouldn’t be able to get through the room without having thirteen conversations about how cold it was, what’s in the trash bag, or when would the band hit it big and they’d have to say they knew us when? And that was only if no one thought to ask about Joey.
As I watched the flames in the fireplace hungrily, Alex came out from the kitchen and surveyed the room. He’d be doing his complicated calculations: who might need something, who might be trouble, how little human interaction he could get away with. He had his plaid flannel shirt buttoned up to his throat, armor against a busy night. But he’d already turned on the string lights overhead, the old-fashioned Thomas Edison style.
Alex, in a festive mood.
He spotted me through the glass, his bottom lip pulling up a micro-tick, like, you coming in or what? All right. Time to giddy up and get my expression right, I guess, because Doll Devine never let down an audience.
“Doll!” one of the Jims crowed. “Did you have to bring the freezing cold in with you?”
“Don’t they have a celebrity entrance for you, dollface?” another said.
“Those Swiss cake rolls in your hair sure took the brunt of that wind, didn’t they?” the first added.
The third only glanced to check the damage to my hair.
The Jims, collective noun. A three-headed Cerberus of Chicago masculinity, pint-glass emptiers straddling the line somewhere between cornball jokes and flirtation. They never seemed to have anywhere else to be, these guys.
Retirees, first-shifters already off the clock, dudes with no one to make merry with at home—that’s our bread and butter, this lonely time of day and year. We got all kinds, though, not just the unemployed andaimless. By five the office types would be celebrating happy hour. By six, the families would be in to drop tater tots between the booth cushions. By seven, the evening crowd would trickle in, order a few rounds, get restless for the show. For me.
I heaved my garbage bag to the far corner of the bar, offering a general greeting for whoever wanted it. I dropped my bag and hopped up on the stool. Without asking, Alex poured me a cup of coffee.
“So, where you been in this wind, Dahlia?” one of the Jims asked, turning on his stool to welcome me. This was the guy I thought of as Primary Jim, even though he was the newest face among the Jims and the youngest, by far. He was in his mid-thirties, kinda hot, if you could ignore some of the details, like thegleamingwhite tennis shoes. I couldn’t. Primary Jim was the chattiest Jim I’d ever seen at McPhee’s, the first at his station every day since he’d started coming in, the first to ask questions. He was one hundred percent here to make friends. “You’ll wear out the leather on your fancy boots,” he said. “Then what’ll you dance in?”
“You gotta be out in the world shopping for opportunity for it to find you,” I said, curling both hands around the warmth of my coffee mug. “The Rolling Stones gather no moss, or something like that.”
“You’re not booking gigs somewhere else?” he said. “Breaking our hearts?”
“I kinda thought getting gigs somewhere else was the point,” I said. “You didn’t think playing for tips here was the end goal, did you?”
Alex grabbed a rag from the sink and put his shoulders into wiping the already clean bar.
“Not that it’s not a great place to play,” I added quickly. “But, you know… I just need another hustle.”
“Thought you were looking a little on the skinny side,” the second guy said, the gross uncle type I thought of as Lumpy Jim. He was a thick, red-faced guy stuffed into a fleece with a company logo over the pocket, landscaping or new windows or sump pumps, whatever he had done for forty years and now didn’t do anymore. He’d apparentlychosen drinking at McPhee’s as his retirement plan, and had been coming in steady for years. He bobbed his head toward Alex now and, with a leer in his voice, said, “Why doesn’t the proprietor here make you some kind ofoffer?”
