Bittersweet Homecoming (10 page)

“Not for me.”

“I’m sure it’s only temporary,” she encourages.

“I hope so.” I return my attention to my notebook and the half a dozen failed starts and stops on the page. “It’s worrisome though,” I admit out loud. “What if the words never come? What if I’m a one-trick pony and can’t sell another play?”

“Don’t you have a Plan B?”

“Not really,” I admit. “I put all of my eggs into this writing basket. I never really planned beyond that.”

“Surest way to make God laugh,” she remarks. “Make plans.”

“What was your Plan A?” I ask.

An eyebrow arches. “What, you don’t think being a bartender in Grand Marais was Plan A?”

“No, I-I’m sorry,” I stutter out. “That was incredibly rude of me.”

“It’s okay. You got out of this town for a reason. I had Amelia before I could think about Plan A.”

“So here’s a question,” I pose. “And don’t answer if you don’t want to … You work at a bar, but you don’t drink.”

“I don’t drink
anymore
,” she corrects me. “After Amelia’s dad …” She closes her eyes and I watch her features struggle with a mountain of complex emotions. “Let’s just say I wasn’t in a good place when he and I split. I’ve made a lot of mistakes in my life—things that the average person would want to forget or have the opportunity to do over. But my biggest regrets became my biggest joy.”

I nod, knowing what—knowing
who
—she’s referring to: Amelia.

I glance once in Amelia’s direction. She appears unconcerned or uninterested in her mother’s new friend. I watch her lips wordlessly move as her eyes scan the pages of a book laid out before her.

“Does she know how to read already?”

“She’s got a few sight words, and she knows her letters and the sounds they make,” Charlotte says. “I read to her all the time at home, but when we come to the library, she usually just wants to look at the picture books and make up her own stories.”

“That’s basically what I do for a living,” I chuckle.

I grab one of the hardcover picture books from a nearby shelf and flip through its pages. It’s one of those wordbooks that don’t tell a story, but rather label the items and the people on the pages.

“This is nice,” I observe.

“You really don’t have to hang out with us,” Charlotte gives me an out. “I’d understand if you didn’t want to waste your day at the library with a six year old and her mom.”

“There’s no place I’d rather be.”

“In the whole wide world?” she challenges.

“Okay, let me amend my previous statement: there’s no place in
town
I’d rather be.”

“And here I thought you were starting to become a fan of the bar.”

A blush takes residency on my cheeks. I flick my gaze in Amelia’s direction, but she’s still quietly making up stories to herself. “Yeah, um. The beer is cold.”

“And the company is pretty good, too, I hear,” she smiles knowingly.

“Are you still working tonight?” I ask. I discover I want to keep hanging out.

“I’m heading over there once I drop off Little Miss Independent at the house,” she confirms.

“Want some company?”

“I wouldn’t say no.”

+ + +

It may not seem logical, but culturally there’s not much difference between small towns in the upper Midwest and in the Deep South. It’s not just the politics or in the misgivings about all things foreign—it’s in the alcohol they drink, the guns they covet, the music they listen to, and the four-wheel-drive trucks they drive. The scene that plays before me could be any small town in Alabama instead of northern Minnesota.

Roundtree’s is busier than usual tonight because of the four-piece band covering a mix of popular country songs and classic rock. I’m turned on my stool to watch the festivities, and even though it’s not my favorite kind of music anymore, my feet can’t help but keep the beat. There’s no proper stage, so the band performs in center of the bar with patrons playing pool or darts on either side of them. A few people have partnered up to dance on a small wooden dance floor. I vaguely recognize most of the band members; I think the bass player might have been my third grade teacher.

“Care to dance?”

I look away from the band and the dancing couples to see a man in his mid-thirties standing beside me. He’s attractive in a Northwood kind of way—blond hair, square jaw, five o’ clock shadow one shade darker than the hair on his head. I don’t recognize him, which is a little disorienting. I don’t know anyone in Los Angeles, but I thought I knew everyone in Grand Marais.

“No thanks.”

“Oh, come on,” he prods with an affable smile. “Just one little dance.”

“Sorry,” I apologize. “I’m not much of a dancer.”

“Are you sure?” His voice lifts with the question. “Last chance.”

“Yeah,” I nod, “but thanks for asking.”

The man shrugs, not visibly injured by my refusal, and moves on to someone else.

From behind the bar, Charlotte scolds me: “Abigail Henry, stop trampling on my patrons’ egos.”

I spin around in my chair. “Do you know that guy?”

“Not really. I think he works on one of the fishing boats. You should have given him a chance.”

“I don’t dance.”

“What if he had been a girl?”

“I still don’t dance,” I insist.

“Bullshit,” she calls me out. “You at least have the two-step buried away in your memory banks. We all had to learn it in junior high gym class.”

“Yeah, but that was almost twenty years ago.”

She wipes her hands on a clean towel and tosses it on the bar top. “Then I guess it’s time for a refresher course.”

She strides out from behind the bar and I watch her cross the room, over to the band. She cups her hands and speaks directly into the lead guitarist’s ear. He nods once and the band is suddenly playing a different, more upbeat country song.

Charlotte stands at the edge of the dance floor with her hands at her hips, trapping me under her steely gaze. I watch her over the rim of my pint glass. My beer is empty, and I doubt I’ll get a refill if I reject the bartender. I stand from the bar stool and straighten out my legs. My hands go into the front pockets of my jeans and I shuffle to where Charlotte stands, my feet dragging the whole time.

Her expression hasn’t changed. “I’ll be the guy,” she says.

“Can’t we both be the girl?”

She rolls her eyes. “Such a feminist.”

“Or lesbian,” I correct.

“Fine, I’ll
lead
,” she says with a shake of her head. She taps my right thigh. “Put your weight on your right foot because that’s the foot you’re going to start with. I’ll lead with my left, so we’re mirror images of each other.”

“Okay.”

“The two step is a six-count dance, and we go quick-quick, slow-slow, quick-quick, slow-slow.” Her feet start to move as she speaks, and my own feet begin to mirror her movements.

“There you go,” she approves. “You’ve got it.”

While her eyes are focused on our feet, I firmly grab her right hand and my other hand swoops under her left arm to settle on her shoulder blade.

I speak directly into her ear. “Now
I’ll
be the guy.”

Her eyes widened slightly, but she goes with it, and soon I have her two-stepping around the small dance floor. I raise our joined hands to let her know I’m going to spin her. She steps out to the right and appropriately spins beneath our raised arms before I pull her back in, right hand settling on her shoulder blade again.

“Think you can handle a cape?” I ask. It’s a pretty basic move in the two-step, but there’s still a challenging lilt to my voice.

“Do your worst,” she shoots back.

I raise her hand again and she spins beneath our joined arms. Instead of bringing her back to the base position, I keep my hand up and she spins a second time while I switch hands in the air. When she finally stops spinning, my arm is draped across her shoulders like a cape and our bodies are in line with each other instead of facing each other.

“For someone who claims to not know how to dance,” she remarks, “you keep up pretty well.”

“I never said I didn’t know how to dance. I said I
don’t
dance.”

It’s gratuitous, but every time I spin her around and we come back together, my right hand slides across the side of her ribcage before coming to a stop on her scapula. The bare skin there is soft, and the adjuster on her bra strap presses into my palm.

She humors me for a second song, but too soon she has to get back to work. “That was fun,” she remarks after sliding back to her station behind the bar. “I’m guessing you don’t have much opportunity to two-step in Hollywood.”

“You’d be surprised. There’s nothing the gay community likes more than a themed dance party.” I settle back onto my bar stool with an odd sense of familiarity. “I suppose I should thank our gym teacher for the lessons.”

“Do you like it out there?” She reaches into the cooler beneath the bar top and pulls out another beer for me. I didn’t order it, but there’s something about this woman’s demeanor and mannerisms that makes it impossible for me to resist giving in to her.

I take a sip of the beer. It’s crisp and light, and I could probably drink a case without feeling a thing. “I don’t mind it.”

She smirks. “I’m overwhelmed by your enthusiasm.”

“It’s big. Sometimes too big,” I admit. “But I like the pace of city life. Coming back here,” I gesture to the scene around us, “it’s nice for vacation, like I’m hitting the reset button, but I could never live here again.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know. Isn’t there some saying or some book about that? You can never go home?”

“Sure. Thomas Wolfe,” she nods. “It’s a classic. He writes about how the place where you grew up may be frozen in time, but you yourself have changed. It’s kind of like that saying how you can never step into a stream in the same place twice.”

I cock my head to the side. She’s so much more than a small-town bartender—so much more than a pretty face. There’s substance there that I think I underestimated. “You really
do
read a lot,” I remark.

“No more than you, I’m sure,” she rejects.

I shake my head. “When I’m working on a new play, I can’t read anything else. If I get sucked in by someone else’s creative creation, it makes me second guess my own writing.”

“That’s too bad,” she remarks. “I don’t know what I’d do without my books. Reading is the great equalizer. I can be or go anywhere in my mind. Don’t get me wrong—I love my life—Amelia, the bar, this town, but sometimes it’s nice to have an escape like I get reading a book.” She stops herself. “And, I’ve gotten carried away.”

“I like it,” I say with an encouraging smile. “Not too many people call themselves readers anymore. I’ve got some novelist friends, and they’re always lamenting to me their loss of readership. As long as people don’t stop going to plays though, I should be fine.”

“I should read one of your plays.”

“Oh, God. No.” I shake my head hard. “Don’t do that.”

“Why not?”

“It’s too embarrassing. Nerve-wracking. Something.” My features scrunch together. “I actually considered writing under a penname so no one would know it was me.”

“That’s ridiculous. You should be incredibly proud of yourself, Abby. Not everyone can do what you do.”

“It’s one thing to have strangers read your work, but quite another to have people you actually know look over it.”

“I guess that makes sense. Not a lot of sense,” she quantifies with a smirk, “but just enough.”

It’s in the early hours of the morning by the time the last of the customers have left the bar. It’s also the second night in a row that I’ve stayed until close, and I walk Charlotte to her car again as I’ve done before.

“Thanks for keeping me company today,” I say.

“Thanks for the dance,” she returns. She leans against the driver side door of her Jeep. “I feel pretty honored to have witnessed that once-in-a-lifetime occurrence. It was like seeing a comet or a solar eclipse.”

I can’t help the grin that’s stuck to my face. “Think I could bump into you and Amelia at the library again tomorrow?”

“It’s supposed to be sunny tomorrow,” she says, “But don’t quote me on that; I’m still just a bartender.”

“So does that mean I’ll see you at the beach?” I ask.

“If you can find us.”

CHAPTER SIX

The next morning, I wake up to find the sun high in the sky. It’s a cloudless, sunny day, which means no library for Charlotte and Amelia. Even though Grand Marais is situated along the shoreline of Lake Superior, hardly anyone swims downtown except for the tourists. Instead, locals pack up their vehicles and go west on County Highway 61 to find isolated patches where the rocky shoreline has been crushed into smaller pebbles. Along Minnesota’s northern shores, beaches don’t have sand; they have rocks.

I park my car on the side of the road behind Charlotte’s Jeep. Sitting in an empty cup holder in the center consol, the screen on my silenced cell phone illuminates indicating I’ve got a new text message. It’s only Emily asking where I am, but the glow of the phone is a reminder that I haven’t really spoken to Kambria since the Fourth of July. And even then, it wasn’t much of a conversation.

It hasn’t escaped my notice that last night was the first night I didn’t try to call Kambria. This thing, this time I’m spending with Charlotte is unlike me. I’ve never been unfaithful, despite my bad habit of casually crushing on women who aren’t my significant other.