Chapter Seven – Stephanie

 

I saw her for the first time in over a year just as I stepped behind the bar and took another order, this one for two beers and a shot of Jameson. The top of her steel gray hair cruised by through the crowd as she picked up bottles and plastic cups and glasses.

I nearly threw up in the sink.

Instead, I swallowed the bile in my throat, gripped the liquor bottle tightly, and began to pour the shot. It couldn’t be her. She was gone.

As much as I wanted it to be her, it just couldn’t.

My nerves were just rankling me, that was all. Or there was some kind of leftover addling from the adrenaline of the fight. Or from Centurion and Toga Girl cornering me in the alley. Or from that guy mentioning the joker girl having cat eyes.

But then I smelled her as I popped open the register on the back bar, smelled that weirdly comforting stench of those cowboy-killer smokes of hers. Cowboy killers that had eventually become bartender killers. Felt her looming over my shoulder as I counted out the change. Cash in hand, I stopped what I was doing.

“Mom?”

No response. Just the roar of the crowd behind me, the patrons rubbing against each other like flint over a tinderbox.

Funny thing was, I think I’d always imagined she’d come back. That she’d step in on a busy night like this, take over for me from behind the bar. Just turn to me, smiling, and give me a little nod of thanks for keeping the place open for her. Keeping the lights on, the booze stocked. Like nothing had ever happened. Like the cancer had never taken her from me.

I just never imagined it’d be like this.

Grief does funny things to daughters and sons. The hole a person’s passing leaves inside us makes it almost seem like the impossible could happen at any time. Like the one we love might come walking through that door, even long after we think we’ve finished the grieving process.

At least, that’s what my counselor told me.

“Told you to sell this place, Steph,” came Sharon Kaufman’s whisper in my ear.

I gasped as I turned around, my fist closing around the cash like a stress ball. My chest tightened, my eyes widened, as I searched for Mom’s face. As I searched for those tired, knowing eyes of hers.

Nothing. Just bar patrons giving me their own crazy looks to match mine.

Mouth dry, I stumbled over to the people lined up at the bar, slapped the cash down on the bar.

“You okay?” asked one of the guys, the rubber of his Donald Trump mask muffling his words. “You look really pale.”

“Yeah,” added the girl next to him, giggling so hard on the heels of her words, she bounced the chestnut barrel curls that sprouted from beneath her red hood. “Like you’ve seen a ghost or something!”

I forced a smile on my face, nodding as hard as I could. “Perfect! Doing just fine! Get you guys anything else?”

“Nope!” They both grabbed their drinks and melted back into the crowd, two random faces slowly sinking back into perfect anonymity. Maybe I’d see them again, maybe not. But, even as they left, they couldn’t take this feeling with them. Instead, Little Red Riding Hood had left behind her own unsettling acknowledgment of the problem.

A ghost. Mom’s ghost. I’d felt her.

The cat eyes on the patrons? Maybe that was just tricks of the light, of my nerves playing with my mind. Ryder didn’t see anything, did he? Like the guy who’d gotten beaten up had said, they were probably just contacts. Really high-dollar contacts, but contacts nonetheless.

But, Mom? I’d felt her. I’d smelled her. I’d heard her whispering words right in my ear. Could almost feel her Marlboro-Red-tinged breath as it brushed over the hair of my tingling ears, over the nape of my neck.

There was no doubt about it.

She’d been here.

I’d just heard a ghost.

Or had I?

Doubt’s a funny thing, though. It creeps in, not in the moment you’re seeing or hearing something, but in the cracks between the ticks of the secondhand in the minutes after.

Because hearing Mom’s voice was ridiculous!

I stuffed the tip money they’d left behind in the overflowing jar, and turned to the next in the crowd. I took their drink order and served it up, the whole time thinking about Mom’s last days.

It was like it had just been yesterday. The antiseptic stench of the hospital, the rhythmic beeps mirroring Mom’s heart. Incessant, even, until they weren’t. Then the time in hospice. Of being in a place where you knew the end was inevitable. Close, even.

Some nights, I still woke up in a cold sweat, thinking I was back at the clinical nightmare. Where everything is a polished veneer over the reality you’re experiencing.

Trying to take my mind off the apparition I may, or may not, have heard, I turned my thoughts to Ryder. What was his deal, anyways?

One look at him, and I thought of some action star. The kind of guy who talks with his fists as much as his mouth. The nervous laugh he’d given me when the guy laid out on the floor mentioned the cat eyes had been completely out of character, with what little I knew of him. After all, he didn’t exactly strike me as the nervous Nellie type.

Maybe he had actually seen something in the girl’s eyes? Seen the same thing the guy on the floor had? Maybe it made him nervous, too.

“Doing all right?” Ryder asked as he popped behind the bar, a pile of bottles held against his chest with one strong arm, the veins standing out from his forearm. He may not have worked in a bar anytime recently, but he was definitely getting back into the swing of things.

I couldn’t help it, but his presence seemed to push the thoughts about the supposed ghost of Mom right out the back of my mind. “Fine, yeah,” I said, beaming up at him despite how stressful all of this was. “Just ready for the night to be over, that’s all.”

“Really?” Glancing up as he deposited the bottles in the trash, he flashed me a smile. “I’m having the time of my freaking life here. Nice change of pace from my normal routine of actually sleeping through the night.”

I laughed as I popped another beer and passed it off. “Well, you volunteered!”

“Know what we always said over in the sandbox?”

“Sandbox?” I asked as I went to grab some more well liquor to mix a cranberry-vodka. “What’s that?”

“Sorry. Afghanistan. Did some time over there. We always said, ‘embrace the suck.’”

“Military, huh?” That would explain it! With the way he carried himself, I figured it was something along those lines. I shook my head as I delivered my customer’s drink and took her cash. “I really don’t even know what that’s supposed to mean, to be honest.”

“Well, it means: this sucks, but there’s no way out of it,” he said as I returned to my work, continuing to make drinks and dole them out. As a bartender, you develop a strong sense of multitasking. Of being able to do a thousand tasks at once, including listening to a cute guy say, “We signed up for a contract, and now we’re stuck with it. So, you might as well just hug it to death, I guess. Gear heavy? Embrace it! Food’s awful, eat it like a five-star meal. This is your life now, you know?”

I grinned over at him as I filled a plastic cup with water from the soda gun. “But it’s not like you’re on a contract here with me, or Stan & Sons. You volunteered.”

“Yeah, but I can’t just walk away after I volunteered, though.”

“Why not?” I asked with a shrug. “You hardly know me. Nothing’s holding you here—just walk away if you want. I wouldn’t stop you.”

He got a distant look on his face as he, presumably, searched for the right words. After a moment, a look of pain mixed with admiration came over his face, and he spoke. “A man’s word’s his bond. My pops used to tell me that. Kinda stuck with me.”

I didn’t say anything at first, just took money from the next customer as I kept one eye on the clock. We were nearly to two in the morning, and last call. Then it’d be time to shut down, and I could start looking forward to tomorrow. With the festival in full swing out on Anderson’s Farm, we probably wouldn’t see as much business tomorrow night.

But a man of his word? That was a good thing in my book. When in doubt, you could always count on people like that. Because at least they’d do what they said they were going to do. For good, or for ill.

“Well, my dad probably wouldn’t have said the same thing, even if he’d been around.”

“Real piece of work?” he asked.

“Something like that. Mom kicked him to the curb a couple years before she bought this place and dragged me along.”

“Doesn’t sound like he was in the picture much.”

“A birthday card would’ve been nice once in a while,” I replied, trying to keep my tone normal and indifferent. “Or Christmas, even. Or not. He was a real piece of work according to Mom.”

“Yeah,” Ryder said after a moment. “Sometimes I wish that’s what my pops would’ve stuck to.”

As he spoke, the seconds continued to tick by, dragging the minute and the hour hand right alongside them. Until, finally, that hour hand jerked over and hit two.

“He was a real hard—”

“All right, everybody!” I called, hands cupped around my mouth to either side like a megaphone as I roared out my warning. “Last call for alcohol! You ain’t gotta go home, but you can’t stay here!”