Eddie shook his head and buttoned up his jacket. “Okay if you…?”
“I’ll do the register,” said Liza. They both knew she did the register. On the odd occasion Liza had to stay at home because her boy was sick the whole thing ended up such a mess it left her with twice as much work to sort out when she came back the next day. So the routine was that Eddie always asked before he left.
She switched the usual playlist with its permanent hit parade for the Delines’ “Calling In.” She always played it after she closed up. Once somebody asked if that was her singing, some guy who obviously thought she and Amy Boone sounded the same. Liza swayed about behind the counter as she balanced the cash drawer. Bernie’s—which wasn’t Bernie’s, there was no Bernie, just three sisters who’d inherited the bar—wasn’t doing all that well, that was pretty obvious. While the other bars in the neighborhood decorated and worked hard to attract the students, Bernie’s banked everything on minimalist maintenance, low outlay and lower prices. But the combination of shabby location and shabby clientele had given the place a rock-bottom image, which deterred everyone except those with the least money. That didn’t make it a customer profile impossible to make money from, and Liza had her own ideas on how to make Bernie’s a bar that was both cheapandcool and could attract the alternative section of the student population. These would in turn attract the straight, monied crowd who liked to hang out with the cool artist types in the belief that this made them that bit cooler themselves. It was the same pattern as in uptown: first came the bohemians, attracted by the cheap real estate, and the squares followed them. The sisters had listened when Liza voiced her thoughts, but when it came to funding the small investments such a change would have necessitated, they backed off. It was frustrating, and every once in a while it occurred to Liza to make them an outrageously low offer and take over the bar herself. Put her ideas into action. Make some money for once. Buy Bernie’s cheap and sell it at a profit. Because once the straights started arriving it would need to be sold pretty quickly.When the straights moved into uptown and drove up standards and prices, they also drove the bohemian element out. The same thing would happen with Bernie’s, it was just a question of selling before the buyer understood that within another year or two Bernie’s would once again stop being the cool place to hang out.
Yes, yes, a fun way to pass the time, thinking thoughts like these when the days—like today—dragged by.
Liza called her sister’s number.
“Hi, Jennifer. I’ll be finished here soon. Is he sleeping?”
“Like an angel.”
“Any dinner left?”
“It’s in the refrigerator. But hurry up, they’ve changed the schedule again and my last bus goes just before midnight.”
“Oops, then I better catch an earlier bus myself. See you.”
Liza hurriedly put the evening’s cash away in the safe and turned off all the lights, the clearing up could wait until tomorrow. She put her jacket on, set the alarm, knew it would hurt her hip but ran for the bus anyway. Got there just in time to see it pull away from the stop and disappear into the night.
“Shit!” she said loudly and pulled out her phone.
“Second that,” said a voice.
She looked up.
A man stood leaning against a Ford parked by the sidewalk. She recognized the coat before she recognized the rest of him.
“Second what?” she said.
“It’s shit. I second that opinion.”
“What is?” she said without interest as she scrolled back to her sister’s name.
“Most of it, I’m guessing.”
“Like just missing a bus?”
“No, right there we’re lucky.”
“We are?”
“I can drive you to wherever you want to go.”
She looked up from the phone. He had a bump on his forehead but seemed to have sobered up from earlier in the day.
“Thanks but no thanks,” she said. “What are you doing here?”
“I’m waiting for you.”
She felt something stir inside her, a memory, an old fear that had never quite died away. “Because?”
“Because I want to apologize.”
“Apologize for what?”
“For being an asshole.”
