I step behind the bar, and she looks at me.
“Go,” I tell her with a lift of my chin. “It’s a Holiday Club rite of passage.”
With a grin, she does, and I can’t help but watch. Hollis shimmies her shoulders and shakes her hips as she laughs while Marv’s fists punch into the air with a washing-machine twist of his waist. The serious expression on his face as his head bobs is at complete odds to the playful atmosphere of the rest of the room.
I pour a beer, meeting her eyes across the room, feeling the smile on her face in every cell of my body.
Watching her laugh as she dances is like watching a sunrise on new snow. Better than any gift under any tree.
I drag my attention away from her long enough to talk with people at the bar coming and going. Friends of my parents. Regulars. A girl I went to high school with and her husband. When Hollis and Marv finish dancing, they slide onto two stools, and I set two beers in front of them.
“Tonight’s payment,” I say with a wink.
Marv offers Hollis a hot pepper.
She looks at him, me, the pepper, and surprises us all when she says, “I’ve been meaning to start putting hot peppers in my beer.”
“Your life will never be the same,” Marv promises, dropping peppers into each of their glasses.
She takes a sip and makes a disappointed face.
“It tastes like regular beer.”
Marv grunts. “Government food has desensitized your taste buds, Hollis.”
Hollis simply takes another sip.
“You know about Clyde Tombaugh?” Marv asks her. When she says she does not, he launches into a very thorough explanation—which I’ve heard multiple times—of who he is and why Pluto is still a planet in a place called Streator, Illinois.
I watch the whole conversation play out while I pour beers and say goodbyes. Marv is Marv—I appreciate that about him—but most people don’t. Hollis, however, takes him in stride. Sees his weird and lets it go. Even as I watch her try to wrap her brain around why anyone would give a damn about the planet status of Pluto, she doesn’t laugh—though I think she wants to—she listens. Like a fool, she even asks follow-up questions.
When the last guests leave, I join them for a beer—complete with a hot pepper—sitting right next to Hollis, my knee touching hers. At which she stares until her cheeks flush.
“But did we ever land on the moon, Marv?” I ask over the rim of my glass with a teasing wink to Hollis.
This sends Marv on his next tirade.
Hollis smiles and nods the whole time.
“You’ve done all these things every year?” she asks when Marv finally runs out of steam.
I chuckle. “There’s been some trial and error.”
“The errors have been Jays,” Marv fills in. “One year he insisted on a bonfire and that almost burned the forest down.”
Hollis’s eyebrows raise.
“Because you insisted on using a torch,” I defend. “And gasoline. And let’s not forget the year you wanted us to go ice fishing, and the ice was so thin you fell in.”
Marv’s expression goes conspiratorial. “Notice the government-run park district did nothing to warn me about that either.”
“And you think the government wanted you to drown?” Hollis asks.
Marv gives a wordless look that conveys how true he thinks this is.
“About next week,” I say, changing the direction this is about to take. “It’s Thanksgiving. Marv and I usually?—”
“I can’t be there,” she says, expression crashing a bit as she mindlessly traces her index finger along the condensation of the glass of beer in front of her. “It’s going to be too hard, you know? It’s not just the meal. We usually get a tree—a real tree—and decorate it at night while we eat leftovers. Since I’m not getting one this year, I don’t think I’ll be much fun.”
