She grabs the empty glass my Jack was in. “I’ve spent the last seven years of my life bartending—the last three have been here at Jazzy’s. It’s only one dog everybody around here talks about—the big one.”
She stabs her long fingernail onto the hard surface of the bar. “And on a random Thursday night I finally get to see him in the flesh, but instead of telling me how he’s gonna fuck me when my shift is over, he’s asking me to make him the daintiest drink of all time. So again, what’s her name?”
My lips curve around the rim of the glass. “Baby…”
She snorts out a laugh and looks off to the side. “Well,‘Baby’must be strict. She doesn’t even let you look? She doesn’t know that it’s natural for a man like you to look? You must got you one of those young bougie spoiled girls from the suburbs who doesn’t understand the nature of relationships with a man like you.”
This time I laugh. “You really grew up around here? Or did you just visit when your daddy came to hang out at Lucky’s on Sundays?”
Her caramel cheeks turn red and she shrugs. “My daddy was raised here.”
“But you ain’t really from around here, are you?”
She pulls her towel from her back pocket, slapping it on the bar and buffing the spotless area between me and her. “I bounced back and forth between my mama and daddy. So that means I bounced back and forth between here and Richmond.”
“So you was one of them weekend babies that popped up in the Bottoms?”
She shrugs. “Weekends, holidays, birthdays—any day I could get over here. I was a daddy’s girl—always begging to run behind him any chance I got.”
“Hmm. I got you.” I nod. “Well, they always called my daddy the big dog around here—not me. I’m just Pup.”
I take another sip of my drink and savor it. Somehow I know it won’t be the best French 75 I ever had like she swore.
She rolls her eyes. “Let me guess, now you’re trying to school me on the neighborhood politics like the other dudes that come in here.”
“I don’t know nothing about that and even if I did, I wouldn’t talk about it with you. That’d be too ugly a topic for a pretty girl like you to hear. You a woman and I’m gon’ treat you as such.”
“Oh. Is that what you tell ‘Baby’,Pup?”
I tilt the glass and take the rest of the drink to the head before slamming it on the bar. “She calls me Rich.”
“Is Pup not sophisticated enough for her?”
“It ain’t even like that. I think she just met Rich before she ever met Pup. She from here too—right over off Chantilly.” I point behind me toward the entrance. “She went to Rhodes—the private school off Lafitte. Then she went to Lockwood.”
“So she’s a neighborhood girl, unlike me?”
“Yeah, but her people raised her up with some sense so she ain’t never been out in the streets pining over no dude that fight at Lucky’s.”
She scoffs. “If they raised her with so much sense, then how’d she end up with you?”
I laugh hard.
I think I get why Slim likes these soft ass drinks. They don’t make everything seem so bleak like Jack does. They leave a little space for hope…and humor.
“I don’t know. Because her young, bougie ass can have the pick of the litter, but for some reason she likes the scrappy runt—the one that folks never really wanted—the one that took a lil’ while to grow. In her eyes, nobody measures up to the runt, so why would I look at another woman?”
She stops wiping the bar and glances up at me. “It sounds like you’re wrestling with something.”
Another crackle of thunder shakes the building. I turn, glancing through the bar’s front windows. Heavy rain pours from the sky and pounds onto the cars in the parking lot like bullets pelting into sheets of metal.
“Scared of the rain?” Mel asks.
I turn back around. “Nah. I’m just…”
“Wrestling hard with Baby in your subconscious? It sounds like she’s whooping your ass.”
“Nah.” I swipe the back of my hot neck, nudging my empty glass. “Let me get another?—”
