Evenfall (23 page)

She can’t really blame him. There’s a large strip of silvery duct-tape running along the back of his seat, gray stuffing oozing from around the edges. When the room’s sole waitress drops off their menus, the plastic covers are smudged and sticky.

“So what’s good?” Neal says. The waitress, an older blonde, looks at him as if he’s joking.

“The beer,” she says.

Neal smiles at her. “Oh, come on now,” he says, and Andie can see her relent.

“Anything fried is probably safe,” she says and walks away. Andie can tell Neal thinks she’s kidding, until he looks at the menu and his eyebrows go up.

When the waitress comes back, Andie orders a platter of buffalo wings and a pitcher of beer. Neal gets a house salad, a cheeseburger, and fries.

The television above the bar is showing the game, and a cheer goes up when a Red Sox player rounds second base, dreadlocks bouncing above his shoulders. The bartender stops wiping glasses and turns to watch, and the waitress pauses on her trip back to the kitchen.

“Slow night,” Neal says. Andie just nods. It’s hard to talk over the noise at the bar, so they watch the game until the waitress comes back, carrying Neal’s salad in one hand and the beer and glasses in the other. She pours them each a drink, tilting the glasses expertly so there’s only a slight head of foam atop each one.

Neal waits until the waitress leaves before clinking his glass with Andie’s.

He leans forward, puts his hand on Andie’s, and gives her his best full-watt smile, then tucks a damp strand of hair behind her ear with his other hand. “You are so lovely,” he says softly.

For just a moment, the noise of the bar recedes. She shifts in her seat. A buzz starts in her middle, spreads up, making it hard to concentrate. Neal knows the value of a thing, can judge its worth with a fingertip, and it’s clear, the way he’s looking at her now, that he’s rediscovered her appeal. There’s not a woman in this room who wouldn’t change spots with her right now, and so long as Neal’s looking at her this way, Andie’s not giving her seat up.

The guys at the bar groan and shout, and they both look
up, startled. The Sox have struck out and the game is over. The bartender snaps off the television, shaking his head.

“Lazy bums,” the waitress mutters. She slides their food onto the table. “For a million bucks even I could hit better than that guy. You two want anything else?”

“No, I think we’re good,” Neal says, and she walks away, still muttering under her breath.

“Well, it’s not Cafe Mondo, but it’ll do,” Neal says. He releases her hand.

Cafe Mondo was just a block from their apartment. The last time Andie ate there, she had antipasto and braised lamb, with baby potatoes and a carafe of the house red wine. Neal was twenty minutes late meeting her, and when he came in he was wearing a shirt she’d never seen before. Now, it occurs to her that his affair had probably already begun. She takes a swig of her beer. The glow she’s been feeling recedes. She decides not to warn him about eating the salad.

She looks at her food. The wings are glistening with fat, and there’s a pool of blue cheese in the center of the plate. What the hell, she decides. She picks up a wing, dunks it in the sauce, takes a huge bite, and swallows. The hot sauce burns her tongue, so she washes the rest of the wing down with a gulp of beer.

“Not eating?” she asks Neal, who’s stabbing a piece of lettuce with his fork.

“I’m just not a fan of iceberg, I guess. Maybe we could still make it to that other restaurant, get a late table. What do you think?”

“On a Friday night? It would never happen,” she says.
“Besides, it’s been a long time since I’ve had fried food and beer, and I’m not planning on depriving myself now.”

“To calories, then,” he says, and clinks her glass with his again.

The room is beginning to fill up, but Andie’s had enough beer to take the edge off, and she no longer checks the door every time it opens. There’s a jukebox on the far side of the room, and now that the game is over, somebody’s put a quarter in. John Prine’s froggy voice fills the room, paired with Bonnie Raitt’s melancholy alto.

“Good tune,” Neal says. The jukebox sits in the corner of the room, and Andie can tell when he spots it by the way his eyes widen. It’s a Wurlitzer 1015, with the rounded top and bubble tubes. It still plays on quarters, and on nights when the bar is too rowdy, the owner shuts it down and throws a cover over it.

“It’s all that’s left of the original Johnny,” Andie says. “It’s been here since I was a little girl.”

“You actually came in here as a little girl?”

“Not with my aunt or uncle. My dad sometimes brought me down,” she says. “It was Richard’s idea of a bonding experience.”

Bonnie’s singing about dreams being thunder and lightning desire, but Andie can tell Neal’s no longer listening. She’s seen the signs before.

“Jesus, that thing’s gotta be worth a fortune,” he says. “What do you think the chances are they’d sell it? I know a couple of people who would pay big money for it. That guy over at the antique depot, for one.”

“No chance,” Andie says. Johnny was a fat man who died young of a heart attack, but she can still remember how light he was on his feet, grooving in the late afternoon gloom of the bar to an old blues song on the jukebox. There’s a handful of classic rock records in the stack, but most of the music is blues, pure and simple.

“I gotta ask anyhow—I’d kill myself if somebody else bought it. Do you know the owner?”

When Johnny died, the bar passed to his son Jake, a close-clipped, ex-Marine who frowned on his dad’s habit of passing out free beers to his old buddies. Cynical teenager that she was, she remembers feeling vaguely amused by her father’s outrage when he’d had to pay for his own drinks on his annual trip to the farm.

“Mark my words, the place won’t last a year,” he’d said.

She’d long since lost the habit of paying attention to anything Richard said, but she made it a point to update him on how Johnny’s was faring in the summer missives Clara insisted she write. And over the years, it had fared rather well. About the only change—besides the wide-screen television above the bar and the repaved parking lot outside—was the large sign on the wall behind the jukebox. She’d heard Jake added it after a drunken pool player busted a stick over the machine’s top. The sign read: “Management not responsible for damage.” The pool player went to the hospital that night with two broken ribs and stitches to his lip, and the jukebox has remained untouched ever since.

A couple of guys are cueing up at the table now, and Andie can see Jake standing behind them, framed in the
doorway of the back room. It’s been a while since she’s seen him, and his crew-cut is going gray, but the muscles in his arms look as tight as ever from here. She nods and points him out with her chin to Neal.

“That’s the owner, over there.”

He swivels to take a look. “The guy in the black T-shirt? Think he’d remember you?”

Between her father and the time he busted her trying to use a fake ID, Andie’s pretty sure Jake remembers her. And since he’s the kind of guy who keeps pretty close tabs on his customers, it’s likely he’ll realize she’s here soon enough. So there’s no good reason to say no, yet she finds herself shaking her head.

“I doubt it. It was all a long time ago.”

“Too bad. Still, a guy’s got to try, right? Want to come over with me?”

“I’m not so good with the sales thing, you know that.”

“I keep telling you, you’re looking at it wrong. It’s not sales, it’s opportunity,” he says. He leans across the table and kisses the top of her head before sliding out of the booth. “Back in a bit.”

She watches him go. She can’t help but observe that the shorts stretch nicely across his ass. There’s a sudden flurry of activity in the booth of women across from her, and she knows she’s not the only one to have noticed. One of them elbows her seat mate and whispers something, and they all giggle. She feels a quick flare of the old jealousy, and she looks away from them.

Across the room, Neal’s all hearty smiles and handshakes,
just one of the guys. Jake sends a flicker of a glance her way, enough to tell her that Neal’s dropped her name. The guy closest to Neal says something, he answers, and the crowd laughs, a few of the men nodding appreciatively. She can tell Neal’s just warming them up. Already, he fits in here in a way she never has. If she wanted to, she could walk through the crowd, past the women who admired his ass, and stand next to him. He’d place an arm around her, draw her to his side without even thinking about it, and just like that it would be clear that they were together, that whatever mantle of charm he had extended to cover her as well. In Italy, the slipstream of his allure had carried her all the way to belonging. She’s tempted, for a moment. Then some guy in a Springsteen shirt stops to listen, blocking her view.

She drains the last of her glass, stands and threads her way carefully through the crowd to what her father used to call “the ladies.” It’s a tiny room, cornered off at the far end of the bar, with an alcove that hides it from view. The air-conditioning isn’t on as high in here, and the room smells strongly of disinfectant. She takes her time, reading the graffiti scrawls as she washes her hands. She doesn’t recognize any of the names, although there’s no reason she should. “Joleen is a skanky whore,” one reads, and she wonders who Joleen pissed off.

She reapplies her lipstick, brushes back a few stray wisps of hair that have escaped her ponytail. When Neal comes back to the table, they’ll go. Heat outside be damned.

Outside the bathroom’s alcove, she stands for a moment to get her bearings. She’s pleasantly lightheaded, and she sees
from the way the bar floor is filling up that she’s not the only one. A few couples are swaying in place to the music, arms wrapped around each other, as the jukebox pumps out another tale of true love gone wrong. She looks toward the booth but doesn’t see Neal.

“Searching for your boyfriend?” a voice asks, and the buzz she’s been cultivating vanishes. Cort’s leaning up against the alcove wall, arms folded against his white T-shirt. He’s got a few days’ worth of stubble on his cheeks, and his hair’s standing on end, as if he rolled out of bed this morning and hasn’t given it another thought. She’d like to smooth it down for him, and finds herself tucking wisps of her own hair behind her ears instead.

“What?” he says, pushing off from against the wall. “No quick answer? No snappy comeback? I’m disappointed.”

It’s the way he slurs the last word that tips her off. Even with her own brain cells doing happy little high dives to their deaths, she can tell he’s had a few—a good many few—more beers tonight than she has. She scrutinizes him. True, he’s standing straight, but he’s also not moving much, and as if to prove her point he uses her silence as an excuse to collapse back against the wall.

“What?” he says again, but this time the words are defensive.

“How drunk are you?”

“Drunk enough to dance,” he says. “Or is that not what you’re looking for tonight?”

“What I’m not looking for is a fight. Okay?” She tries to move past him, but he sticks an arm out and blocks her way.

“That’s it? That’s all you got for me?”

“I never, ever, meant to hurt you, Cort,” she says, and wishes he knew how much that were true. “When I came here, I thought Neal and I were through. I didn’t know he’d show up.”

“And when he did, you told him it was over, right? That you were with somebody else? Because from where I stand, it looks like he didn’t get that message.”

“Look,” she says. She’s so, so tired suddenly. “What Neal and I have, what we had…We’ve been together for a long time. There are things between us. That doesn’t just go away overnight.”

“You’re telling me? Christ, Andie, I’ve been chasing after you with my heart in my hand since I was six years old, and you act like I’m the one who’s in the way here. Like I’m the newcomer.” He pushes off the wall and stands closer, so that he’s towering over her. “But there’s always going to be some guy, isn’t there? Some other guy who’s older or richer, with a nicer car or a bigger house or a trust fund. It doesn’t matter, just so long as it’s some other guy who’s not me. You don’t even see what’s in front of you, not until it’s walking away.”

He sways a little bit, so that his hip brushes hers and for a second in her drunken haze she thinks he really means for them to dance, but then he straightens up.

“Well, take a good look then, Andie, because I’m going. I’m gone.”

He pivots away and pushes through the crowd, disappearing in the general direction of the door. She’s still standing
there, waiting for her breathing to settle, when Neal finds her.

“Hey there, looking for a partner?” he says, grabbing her around the waist.

She tries to smile. “How did it go with Jake?”

“Well, he remembers you. But he’s not what I’d call a chatty guy, although he’s fond of a few select words. Like no, for example.”

“He won’t sell?”

“Doesn’t look like it, at least not this time. Interesting guy, though. I may try him again later.”

“Sorry,” Andie says, though she’s secretly glad. She can’t imagine Johnny’s without the jukebox.

“No worries. You know me—there’s always another opportunity around the corner.”

He spins Andie once, twice, three times, and as the room blurs past she tries hard not to think about the opportunities she’s missed, the chances that just walk away.

IT occurs to Gert, not for the first time, that she’s come full circle. The worthless animal bleating in front of her could be a great-great-granddaughter of those her family kept, for all its fancy pedigree and funny-looking ears. She prods its kid gently with her foot, and it maas in response.

She’d found the kid sprawled on the ground just past dawn this morning and walked back to the cottage to call Cort and fetch a bottle of mineral oil. Then she’d returned here, but she’d be damned if she was going to be the one to wrestle the oil down the animal’s throat. Although if Cort doesn’t get here soon, she might have to.

At last she sees his pickup truck bouncing up the hill. He’s got that ridiculous animal with him, sticking its head out the passenger-side window and grinning. Why it can’t
ride in the truck bed like a normal farm dog is beyond her.