Page 8 of Wrong Number, Right Grumpy Bouncer

"You contain a fire hazard is what you contain." She nods at the laminated sheet, now bristling with sticky flags. "It's not a bad system, though. Weirdly."

Weirdly is doing a lot of work in that sentence, but I'll take it.

The Old Fashioned becomes my personal nemesis somewhere around six o'clock. Muddle the sugar, three dashes of bitters, one large cube, and I get every single element right except the part where it comes together into something a customer wants to drink. My third attempt tastes like a candle. My fourth attempt is, inexplicably, worse.

"Ainsley." I hold up the glass like evidence in a trial. "Taste this and tell me what I did."

She takes a sip, considers it with the face of a woman being diplomatic. "It has notes."

"Notes of what?"

"Regret, mostly."

I dump it and start over, because starting over is the one skill eight years of corporate life actually prepared me for.

Lottie, who is the well known town busy body, arrives at seven with a cane in one hand and a tin of banana bread in the other, and takes the stool closest to the register like she's reserved it since birth, which, judging by the way the waitress Belinda greets her, she probably has.

"New girl," Lottie says, studying me over her reading glasses with the specific intensity of a woman assembling a dossier. "Ainsley says you're the marketing gal turned bartender."

"That's me. Learning as I go." I gesture vaguely at the mess of sticky flags on my laminated sheet, in case the visual helps.

"Mm." Lottie's not looking at the sheet. She's looking past me, over my shoulder, toward the door, where Archer's standing in his usual spot doing his usual thing of looking like a piece of furniture that could also kill someone if it needed to, except right now the furniture is watching me pour a beer with the focused attention of a man studying for an exam. "He knows you're new?"

"Everyone knows I'm new. I broke a glass forty minutes ago."

"That's not what I asked." She sets the banana bread on the bar like a peace offering, or bait, and doesn't take her eyes off Archer for a full three seconds, long enough that I turn to check what she's seeing. He looks away half a beat too late to pretend he wasn't looking in the first place. "Huh."

"Huh? What?"

"Nothing." The word comes out unconvincing, wrapped around a smile she's not bothering to hide. "Man's been standing at that door for six months looking like he's guarding a bank vault. Tonight he's restocked the same napkin shelf three times."

"He likes napkins."

"He likes something." She pats the stool beside her like she's inviting a witness to the stand. "Sit a minute. Tell Lottie about yourself."

I don’t sit. I have four tickets up and an Old Fashioned that's personally offended me, and also I don’t trust the specific gleam in Lottie's eye, the gleam of a woman who has never once in her life minded her own business and sees no reason to start now.

Archer checks in around eight, which I only notice because I've started keeping track, a habit I refuse to examine too closely, given how well that worked out for Beck.

"You're doing that thing again," I tell him over the bar, low enough that it stays between us.

"What thing?"

"The door guy business thing. Where you find a reason to be standing near the register that has nothing to do with the door."

"Restocking napkins." He holds up a stack of napkins like Exhibit A, entirely unbothered.

"We have four hundred napkins back there."

"Four hundred and twelve, now." He sets the stack down without looking at it again, eyes on my hands instead, on the shaker I'm holding wrong, apparently, based on the small twitch at the corner of his mouth. "You're going to dislocate something doing it like that."

"I have a system."

"You have a grip that's going to end your bartending career in one shift." He doesn't reach for it. Doesn't correct me outright, doesn't take the shaker from my hands the way I half expect, half want him to. Just watches, amused, patient, letting me flail my way through it like he's got all night to enjoy the show. "Wrist, not shoulder."

I adjust my wrists. The drink comes out marginally less violent.

"There it is." Something that isn't quite a smile moves across his face and disappears again before I can call it one. "Spreadsheets."