It Doesn't Count If You Turn Around And Go Home

I had a car. I had an apartment. I went to work as a bartender two afternoons and three nights a week. An easel stood in my living room with a box of art supplies next to it. Paintings were slowly taking over my walls. Except for the fame and fortune, I finally had the life I’d been dreaming of for a long time. I finally had put together what I needed to be happy.

Except one thing.

One Thursday evening I was working behind the bar at Gridlock. I’d been working there for about a month now, and I was finally starting to get comfortable. My mother had brought me my car, and I was even getting into a routine. It felt good.

Some time after eleven, a small group came in, two girls and a guy with so much gel in his hair it looked like plastic. I checked their ID’s when they came in, learning that the serious, thin blond was twenty-three, and the bubbly, heavyset brunette had just turned twenty-one–making her a year younger than I was. The guy looked to be older than either of the girls, and I didn’t check his ID. They took their drinks to the end of the bar and sat down, and it didn’t take long for me to see the dynamic going on.

From the friendly way they shared cigarettes, I guessed the girls were friends, but the guy that was with them was doing his best to dissolve the bond. He lavished his attentions on the blond, actually standing hunched partly over her most of the time as if he was mate-guarding, keeping his back to the brunette. She did her best to laugh it off, and she threw darts at the electronic board to feign disinterest, but I could tell her feelings were hurt at being shut out.

In the space of forty-five minutes, the brunette had three glasses of gin and tonic, the blond had two beers, and the guy had something less than half a mug of light beer.

Then, shortly after midnight, I turned my back to the room to change the channel on the television at the office end of the bar. I turned back a moment later, just in time to see the back of plastic-hair man disappearing out the front door, his arm around the blond protectively. As I cleared away their glasses and wiped the bar where they’d been, I found a ten dollar bill they’d left as a tip, and that was nice.

A moment later, the brunette came out of the bathroom. As she surveyed the room with a long face, the situation became obvious to me, and I tried not to let her see my grim smile. I walked down to where she was carefully studying the bar, the stools, and the floor where they’d been sitting.

“Lose something?” I asked.

She curled her hair back behind her ear with her fingertips, but didn’t look up at me. “Susie said she’d leave me ten dollars for a taxi,” she said.

“Um, okay,” I said.

I returned the ten dollars, of course, and the girl–her name was Pam–used it to continue drinking gin and tonic. We talked. She smelled good.

By the time I announced last call, nothing was left of the ten dollars. “I hope the taxi driver will take a check,” Pam said.

“I don’t think they do,” I said. I paused a suitable time, then added, “But I could drive you home.”

I gave her a soda to drink while I closed out the register and shut down the bar, but she didn’t budge it.

I felt absolutely ambivalent at the prospect of driving her home. On one hand, I just might get lucky. On the other hand, I really shouldn’t allow that to happen. On the other hand, though, it had been a really long time, and this was the one part of my life still incomplete. I decided to take things slow and just see what happened.

It turned out she lived several miles from the bar, down across Central Avenue, just north of Thomas Road. We had talked for quite a while in the bar, and by the time I pulled my car along the curb in front of her house, it seemed almost like we were old friends. Or, was that just wishful thinking on my part?

She turned to me in the car, and the sweet scent of her perfume was nearly overpowering, and not really in a good way. As she leaned close, I could smell gin and cigarette smoke on her breath. “You want to come in?”

I said, “Okay.”

The night was quiet, and the grass of her lawn looked silver in the moonlight. She led the way up the driveway to the front of the house. A Japanese sport motorcycle sat in the shadows of the carport, and there was a car in the driveway, a little four-door clunker. I glanced through the back window as I passed it. There, in the shadows on the passenger, side was a car seat.

I frowned. “You have kids?”

She had stopped at the door to dig keys out of her purse, and she smiled back at me. “Just one,” she said, “a girl, Allison.” She went back to her purse.

Under my breath, I said, mostly to myself, “I like kids.”

Pam continued to dig in her purse for her keys, and I began to fear she had left them somewhere.

“Where is Allison now?”

Pam smiled at me again, this time with her eyebrows pointed down in the middle. “With her father. We separated a few months ago.”

“Does he live close to here?”

Her smile twisted down as she bit at the corner of her mouth. “Well, he hasn’t been able to save enough money to move out, yet, but he’s been staying in the spare bedroom for the last couple weeks.”

I said nothing. My mouth may have been hanging open.

“Oh, he doesn’t mind,” she said. She reached out to try to put a hand on my arm. “He knows it’s over, and he knows I’m moving on, whether he likes it or not.”

And at that, the matter was decided.