THE STEWED CLAM was located just across the town line and had always reminded Caroline of the darker side of Bedford Falls from It’s a Wonderful Life, which it would have become if Clarence the angel hadn’t been there to stop George Bailey from committing suicide.
The few times Caroline crossed the line was to get her hair done at Gloria Wells’s salon. Gloria, who’d been doing her hair since she’d first come to town, had originally lived in a singlewide trailer. She was dirt poor, due to her husband getting in frequent trouble with the law, and rumors had floated around Honeymoon Harbor that Gloria was a prostitute. Which both Caroline and Sarah Mannion had never believed for a minute. The reason for men showing up at all times of the day and night was that Gloria was barely supporting herself, her daughter, Jolene, and her ne’er-do-well spouse by cutting hair cheaper than anyone else on the peninsula.
Caroline and Sarah hadn’t gotten their hair done at Gloria’s just because of the low price. Or because they’d wanted to show solidarity with another woman who hadn’t been as fortunate as they’d been. But also because she was kind and as talented as any stylist Caroline had gone to when she’d been growing up in the South, where hair was a big deal, as anyone who watched SEC football would realize. Having become an environmentalist on her trip across the country years ago, she didn’t even want to think about how much Aqua Net she and her girlfriends had sprayed into the environment.
Unfortunately, Gloria also possessed a lot of stubborn and a strong streak of pride, and except for the food stamps to feed her daughter, wouldn’t take charity from anyone. Clothes were bought at the Goodwill in town, and although both women had offered her loans, or even to invest in her business, she’d turned them down flat, not trusting her husband not to mess things up and cause them to lose their money.
Jolene, who’d swept up the hair, had dropped out of school at sixteen, gone to cosmetology school, then bought an old clunker and taken off down I-5 to Los Angeles, where, after a series of fortunate circumstances Gloria was always proud of sharing, she’d gotten a job working in the movies. Which had allowed her to send her mother enough money for a manufactured home, where Gloria had set herself up an actual, licensed salon in one of the bedrooms. The business had taken off, and now, with a small business loan and undoubtedly another investment from her daughter, she’d recently hired Seth to remodel the old, abandoned lighthouse keeper’s house into what would become a salon and day spa.
As furious as she was at her husband, Caroline smiled as she passed Gloria’s current salon with its Thairapy sign in the front window and a tidy front porch where customers could wait their turn outside during nice weather. Even now a mother, a daughter and an elderly man were sitting on rocking chairs. The mother and man were talking, while the little girl’s head was buried in a book that was undoubtedly taking her to faraway places that would seem so much more exciting than Honeymoon Harbor.
Another ten minutes past that bit of cheerfulness, she’d reached the bar, which, going back to the Bedford Falls/Pottersville analogy, reminded her of Martini’s, after the cheerful bar in the movie had turned into a sleazy dive run by a nasty and insulting bartender. The Stewed Clam was one of those places that didn’t even need a top shelf, because the clientele mainly came there to drink cheaply and get drunk quickly. Which explained the rule posted next to the door and above the bar that more than a single drink required a designated driver. It might be a dive, but the owner, a former alcoholic himself, was smart enough not to get slammed with accessory to any DWI accidents that might occur.
Compared to the darkness outside, the light, when she opened the door, caused several men to shout out a complaint and shield their eyes. She scanned the room, didn’t see Ben at any of the tables and decided he must be in one of the back rooms.
Playing poker for money was illegal outside the casinos or licensed poker rooms, which the Stewed Clam wasn’t, but the local law had always turned a blind eye to the poker games everyone knew went on in the back room, since the pots never got over twenty dollars, if that.
Heads swiveled, following her as she crossed a floor that was covered with peanut shells and probably hadn’t been washed since the Clinton administration. The wood-paneled walls were darkened by decades of smoke from before Washington State added bars and restaurants to their Clean Indoor Air Act.
In no mood for chitchat, she abandoned her Southern manners and simply asked the bartender, “Ben Harper?”
No more verbal than she, he merely continued to dry a smudged glass and nodded his head toward a door at the end of the bar.
Wishing she could hear what Sarah would have to say about all the fish and animal heads hanging on the paneled walls, she scanned the room that held five round tables and, wouldn’t you know it, her husband would be at the far one? Unlike in the main part of the tavern, no one paid the least bit of attention as she walked over the ugliest brown-and-orange tweed carpeting she’d ever seen. To high rollers in Vegas, the stakes might be penny ante, but apparently here the game was serious business.
Ben had his back to her, but when his longtime friend Jake Logan saw her coming, he said something that had her husband turning around.
She held up a hand before he could say a word. “I didn’t come here to talk. Since your phone isn’t taking texts, I just wanted to give you this.”
She handed him an envelope. You might be able to take the woman out of the South, but you couldn’t entirely take the South out of the woman. Eschewing email for notes handwritten on embossed stationery with matching envelopes for social or important correspondence was one of those things Caroline Harper had never given up.
“I’d suggest you take it seriously,” she added. Then, her business concluded, she turned to leave, hearing Ken Peters, a grizzled old retired fisherman, mutter to Ben, “I sure as hell wish you’d apologize for whatever you did. Because we do miss that woman’s sandwiches.”
That almost had Caroline smiling as she walked out of the room and out of the bar. Whether she walked out of her marriage was now up to her husband.