He picked it up. His fingers closed around the collar with effort I could see from six feet away. He lifted it, aimed for the hook, and it slid off again. Landed in a heap at his feet.
I came around the bar.
Not fast. Not with the kind of obvious hustle that would make it a thing, a moment, a transaction requiring gratitude. I just came around, picked up the jacket, hung it on the hook, and went back behind the bar. Set a glass under the tap. Poured his usual — draft lager, three-quarters full, the way he liked it — and placed it on the coaster in front of him.
“How’s your daughter doing, Frank?” I asked. “Last you said she was waiting on the biopsy results.”
His eyes moved from the beer to me. The gratitude was there — for the jacket, for the beer, for the question that said I was listening last time and I remember.
“Got the results Tuesday,” he said. His voice was rougher than usual, which could have been the morning or the joints or something else entirely. “Benign. She called me crying, thought I‘d be worried.”
“Were you?”
“Course I was worried. I was just worried quiet.”
I almost smiled at that. Worried quiet. I knew the concept.
“That’s good news,” I said. “About the results.”
“Best news I’ve had in a year.” He took his first sip with both hands on the glass, steadying it, and I watched him without watching him — peripheral vision, the bartender’s trick — and then I went back to the speed rail.
The bottles needed finishing. I crouched behind the bar to check the backup stock, and while I was down there, I spotted the napkins.
They were shoved to the back of the service shelf, behind the regular cocktail napkins and the stack of bar menus nobodyused. Children’s napkins. Paper, the cheap kind, printed with cartoon bears in blue and pink. Round-bellied bears with big eyes, sitting in a row, wearing what looked like tiny overalls. Rusty had ordered them by mistake — some mix-up with the supply company — and rather than send them back, he’d jammed them behind everything else and forgotten about them.
I pulled one out.
The bears were simple. The kind of illustration you‘d find on a juice box or a paper placemat at a family restaurant. One of them was holding a star. Another was sitting in a little wagon. They were —
I didn’t have a word for what they were. Or I had one and I kept it in the same place I kept the shoebox. Somewhere below the floorboards of the person I‘d built, somewhere I didn’t go during operational hours, which was all hours.
Something moved across my face. I could feel it — a softening in the muscles around my eyes, a loosening in my jaw. The particular relaxation of a guard dropping that I hadn‘t authorized. For maybe two seconds I stood there behind the bar holding a napkin with cartoon bears on it and feeling something I couldn’t name and wouldn’t try to.
Then I turned it face-down. Slid it to the bottom of the stack. Put the regular napkins back on top.
Stood up. Wiped my hands on my apron.
The old man was watching the pines through the window, both hands around his beer, the light catching the tremor in his fingers. The guy with the laptop hadn’t moved. The cooler hummed. The dust kept drifting.
I picked up the well rum and put it back in its place. Third from the left. Right where it belonged.
Some things you could fix by putting them in order. Some things you couldn’t. The trick was knowing which was which,and the bigger trick was not thinking too hard about the ones that fell into the second category.
I didn’t think about the bears.
I went back to work.
***
I wrung the rag out in the sink and started on the last stretch of bar top. Last call had come and gone twenty minutes ago. The place was thinning — two guys finishing their beers in the corner booth, one woman settling her tab at the register where Rusty was making change with the slow deliberation of a man ready to lock his doors. The jukebox had been unplugged. The fryer was off. The particular quiet of a bar winding down settled over everything like a hand pressing gently on a lid.
The front door opened.
Two men. Both big, both wearing leather cuts over dark shirts, both moving with the unhurried confidence of men who expected the room to rearrange itself around them. I clocked the cuts before I clocked the faces — the patches, the rockers, the name I’d heard enough times in six weeks to know what it meant. Diablos.
They came to the bar. The one in front was the bigger of the two — shaved head, thick neck, hands that looked like they’d been broken more than once and hadn’t been set carefully any of those times. Mid-thirties, maybe, though he wore it older. He moved the way men move when they want you to understand the amount of space they’re capable of filling. The one behind him was smaller, quieter, already looking at the bar top as if he’d rather be somewhere else.
I set two coasters down. “What can I get you?”
