I tend bar, not in one of those upscale things that serve weird drinks with funny names, where everyone comes after work for a nanosecond while the bar’s the hot spot and then move on when someplace else becomes trendy.
Nope. I tend bar in one of the old dives that still exist in neighborhoods, the kind that no sane person would enter without an invitation, and that invitation comes only from the universe. You know, you lose your job, your wife walks out, your friends tell you to stop whining, so you pass the dive bar you’d never think of entering when you’re on the trendy-bar side of life.
You walk in, see the decrepit unshaven guy sitting at the edge of the bar, a woman nursing a piss-colored beer at a table that hasn’t balanced since 1970, and one of those lighted bubbling beer signs for a brand that got discontinued when you were a kid. You doubt the bar’s been cleaned since then, either, although none of the surfaces you touch are sticky or dirty or dust-covered. The place is just so old that the dirt and the now-banned cigarette smoke are embedded into the walls.
I’ve worked in that kind of bar since the night Ronald Reagan got reelected, the night I decided to chuck it all and walk into one of those bars myself. Only I walked in, wearing a suit with a lace collar, bow-tie untied, and heels so high they looked like fuck-me shoes instead of what they really were, which was the required business attire of the day.
Yeah, I’m a woman. Yeah, you’re excused if you have no idea. Most people don’t know until I open my mouth, and some aren’t sure even then. They see the shaved head, the muscular fat, the T-shirt with ripped sleeves, and the biceps tattoos, and think “man.” They ignore the studs outlining the rim of my ears, the delicate chain around my neck that ends in a teardrop diamond, and the breasts that, granted, are a bit underwhelming, even with the extra fifty pounds I’ve gained since that horrid night.
This isn’t my bar, even though folks think it’s my bar. They never see Bancroft, the owner, who, let’s be honest, hasn’t crossed the threshold since his first AA meeting in 1991. He calls me on the landline when he’s coming by (he doesn’t have a cell), stops his Hog in the alley near the garbage cans so he can’t smell the piss and stale beer from the back door, and makes me hand him the books (on paper), the cash, and the hard-drive backup, which, in theory, he takes to the accountant, because Lord knows a man who doesn’t like cellphones doesn’t like computers, either.
Bancroft tells me I can do what I want with the place. I can redecorate. I can expand to the empty storefront next door (which he also owns). I can start making trendy drinks.
He doesn’t care, so long as the bar makes money.
I’m afraid if I alter a damn thing, the money will vanish, and if the money vanishes, then I actually have to confront a few things, like why I work in a dive bar in a redneck neighborhood, why I have the same conversations that I’ve had weekly for thirty years with the same people, and why even I’ve started to look at strangers with suspicion because, y’know, they don’t belong in this bar.
Which is how I look at the new guy when he staggers in. Maybe twenty-five, pretty in a sexually ambiguous kinda way, collar open, shirt askew, tie completely gone. He’s walking like something hurts, like a woman does when the high heels she’s worn all day hurt not just her feet, but her back as well. Only he’s not wearing high heels. His dress shoes are stained on top, but the sides shine.
He gingerly climbs onto a bar stool in the very center of the horseshoe bar, and if I weren’t paying attention to him, I’d assume he was being prissy—worrying that the seat wasn’t clean enough for the black silk pants that matched the shiny black silk suit coat.
I slap a bar napkin in front of him, and he jumps. Then he looks at my hand, resting on that bar napkin, as if he’s never seen a hand before.
I frown. And, for once, I modulate my tone so I don’t sound actively hostile.
“You want something?”
He raises his head, but his eyes don’t meet mine. “I don’t know. Jesus. A drink.”
Normally, I’d say, You are in a bar, buddy, but I don’t. Instead, I look closer at him. His hair’s spiky, and I don’t think that’s style. Either a bruise is forming along his chin or something has smudged there.
“Ah…beer,” he says, then shakes his head. “Um, no. Whiskey. Brandy. Something that burns.”
“Beer, whiskey, or brandy,” I say. “Which do you want?”
“Jack,” he says. “Just give me some Jack.”
I pour him a Jack Daniel’s, and set the glass in front of him. He’s already torn up the bar napkin. There’s dirt under his fingernails.
His manicured fingernails.
He leans over the drink like he doesn’t recognize it. I get another glass, and fill it with ice water, and set that in front of him, on a coaster this time, with a bar napkin beside it.
He doesn’t even look up. I’m not sure he notices.
My own mouth is dry. I look around the bar, to see who’s here. The same crowd is here day to day, so sometimes I don’t really notice who’s in the bar and who’s not. And I haven’t noticed until now.
Ma Kettle sits in her favorite booth, her gray wig askew, and her sweatshirt food-stained. Her real name is Cora Kattleman, but I think I’m the only one who knows that, and only because she opened her tab with a credit card fifteen years ago. Everyone calls her Ma Kettle at her insistence, and most folks don’t even know the reference, a clichéd but popular hillbilly movie character from the forties and fifties.
But then no one thinks about the nicknames. Most of us in this place have one, and we use it instead of our real names. It’s easier that way.
Ma Kettle comes in at noon, every day, and sits in her booth. I set the first vodka tonic in front of her, and maybe by the fifth, she’ll say hello. She doesn’t talk much, mostly watches the TV, which I have on mute, and stares at nothing.
She hasn’t seen the guy.
And no one else is here, although Rick Winters should come in at any moment. His shift ends at three-thirty, and he usually rolls in here by three-thirty-five.
Just me, Ma Kettle, and the new guy, who hovers over his drink like he’s about to puke.
The sleeve of his suit is split at the shoulder, and the silk in the back looks smudged, like silk does when it has encountered liquid it doesn’t like.
I’m shaking, just a little. I’ve been there. I’ve literally been there, right here, at this bar, in ripped clothes, aching all over, staring at a drink I don’t want, but not sure what else I can do.
Turning point: Last night of my professional life. Last night of my all-important career. Last night of ain’t-she-cute.
That’s how I know he wasn’t in a fight. Oh, he might’ve fought. But one of those knock-’em-down, drag-’em-out fights? Naw. Right now, everything’s scraped and raw and coming in images. He’s not thinking clear, and I don’t blame him.
I also don’t lean toward him to talk.
Bancroft leaned in that night, thirty-two years ago, and probably scared a decade off me. I still have nightmares about that moment, and I jump whenever Bancroft leans toward me. Not his fault, but he got roped into those images, those memories.
So this afternoon I slide the ice water toward the new guy and say, “Did you know him?”
The new guy’s hand shakes as he grabs the whiskey glass. His knuckles are scraped and his thumb is swollen and it hangs funny. It might be broken.
“Whatever you think you know,” he starts in a tone that puts me, a bartender, back into my lower-class place, “it’s wrong.”
His voice wobbles on the word wrong, and he swallows hard.
Naw. I’m not wrong. He wants me to be wrong. He doesn’t want me to see him at all, and I see too clearly.
Like Bancroft had with me. I’d said to Bancroft, Piss off, asshole. Let me drink in peace.
And he’d said, I don’t think you’re going to find peace tonight.
I don’t know what to say now. I know what not to say. So I go for short and succinct, flat tone, as if I don’t care. And I do care, even though I don’t want to.
“You want that thumb to keep working, you’ll need to see a doctor,” I say. I don’t say anything about his private parts, which’ve got to be just as bruised. Maybe more bruised. Maybe more than bruised.
I don’t want to scare him away.
Now his eyes meet mine. They’re brown, two shades darker than his skin. They’re also watery, and his lower lip is trembling.
“No,” he says in a tone that adds, Back off.
I shrug, grab the bar rag, and toss it over my shoulder. It smells of the vinegar solution we use to wipe down the back area. I walk away, keeping my eye on the guy in the gigantic mirror behind the expensive alcohol.
He starts to pick up the whiskey, grimaces, and keeps the glass on the bar. That thumb is the size of a dying balloon. With his other hand, he grabs the ice water. The glass shakes as he raises it to his lips. Some of the water drips onto his expensive suit.
The door bangs open. The new guy jumps and spills more water. Rick Winters stomps in and slams the door behind himself. That takes some doing, because I got the door on one of those slow swings, just so no one can slam it.
Rick looks older than he should—balding, a growing beer belly, and a whole lotta attitude. He’s staving off burnout by spending the afternoons here, but he doesn’t have much longer. Every day for the last six months, he’s come in mad.
I open a Heineken and set it at his usual spot on the bar, on the left side of the horseshoe, back to the door. He looks at the new guy.
“What’s the story?” Rick asks, with an edge.
I shrug. I don’t ask for stories. Rick should know that. It’s one reason he comes here. The relief bartender, who usually works weekend days, came in for me one afternoon, asked Rick what had him so pissed off, and got to hear the entire story about a five-car pileup on the expressway, which started with the sentence Fucking drunk drivers and ended with And of course, the asshole drunk walked away.
Rick might be a drunk himself, but the minute his fingertips touch a green longneck, he doesn’t go near a vehicle. He says ninety percent of the shit he deals with as an EMT occurs because someone who had too much to drink gets behind a wheel or punches the wife or plays with a gun. Rick says he needs to haul his ass to AA, but he’s not ready.
He’ll be ready when he quits the job. He’s not suited. It’s not the drunks he objects to. It’s all the blood.
Rick’s fingers haven’t touched the bottle. He’s still looking at the new guy. “Pretty messed up.”
“Yeah,” I say, not willing to add that I’d mentioned a doctor already.
“It’s probably none of our damn business,” Rick says.
“It usually isn’t,” I say, and wipe off an imaginary spot on the bar near that Heineken. Ma Kettle pounds her glass on the table—a sign that I haven’t been doing my job: I usually anticipate her drinking needs—and then there’s a large clatter and bang behind me.
I whirl in time to see the new guy’s head slide off the bar. He’d knocked over his water and his whiskey when he passed out. He would’ve fallen all the way to the floor, but somehow Rick levitates from his place at the end of the bar and runs to the new guy’s side, catching him before he bangs his head again on the nearby stool.
“Shit,” Rick mutters. “Shit.”
At first I think he’s commenting on working after-hours, at dealing with some drunk. We’d done it a hundred times, dragging some idiot to a chair where we throw water in his face, pick his pocket for his wallet and address, and call him a ride home.
Then I realize that Rick isn’t look at the guy or where he’s dragging the guy to. He’s looking at the bar stool.
He picks up the guy as if he weighs nothing, and swings him toward the door. Liquid drips—I’m thinking whiskey, when my brain registers the viscosity.
Blood.
The guy surfaces, looks up, sees Rick holding him, and screams. I’ve never heard a sound like that, raw and pain-filled, and completely anguished.
“Call Mercy General,” Rick says. “Tell them I’m bringing in a guy. I’ll radio.”
The guy claws at him, moaning now, kicking, trying to get free.
“You got your rig?” I ask. I’ve only seen it once, that ambulance he drives like it’s a tank.
“No, not that it matters. I got a radio in my truck.” Then Rick backs him out the door, and the guy screams again.
The sound fades as the door bangs closed.
“Jesus,” Ma Kettle says. “High drama.”
Then she holds up her glass.
I pour her another vodka tonic, just because it’s easier than fighting with her. I carry the vodka tonic around the bar and head toward her, careful to step over the blood trail.
In one move, I take the old glass and set the new one down on the wet bar napkin. It’s a sign of how distraught I am that I haven’t brought a new napkin. Automatic movements and all that.
I turn, look at my bar from the customer’s point of view. A thin line of blood drips off the new guy’s stool. How had I missed that?
I look at the door, see only a blood trail leading out. Either he hadn’t been bleeding that bad when he came in or the blood disappears in the general ambience of the place.
Here’s what I can do: I can call the cops, let them treat this place like part of a crime scene, not that it is a crime scene. It’s a crime scene aftermath. Technicalities and all that. I can leave it or I can clean up.
The cops’ll come here anyway. Mercy General will have to run a rape kit. Rick’ll insist on it, and because he’s there, he’ll file, as an EMT on the scene. Whether or not the new guy presses charges, well, that’s up to him.
Considering how he was sitting for so long in so much pain, considering how he didn’t want a doctor in the first place, considering that suit, that condescending tone, he’s not going to want cops involved. Hell, women don’t want cops involved, and it’s quote-unquote normal for a woman to get raped.
Guys, well, they’ve got even more stigma to overcome. Not just with the cops, but in their own head.
I go to the back, grab the fluids bucket, the oldest mop, and some bleach. At least three times a month, I clean blood off my floor. I’m damn good at it, after thirty years.
I can make anything disappear.
Except the memory of what came before.
That memory never leaves.
“He won!”
Confetti, balloons, hotel grand ballroom doing double-duty—half a party for the Reagan-Bush Reelection Campaign, the other half for Senator Dwight Corbin. Red, white, blue, the posters with their exclamation points and patriotic lettering lining the walls, including the stupid one, the one that always stopped me short—Ronald Wilson Reagan painted to look decades younger despite the wrinkles on his face, almost Norman Rockwell, an American flag behind him, an unrecognizable George H.W. Bush looking off to the side, and the slogan “Bringing America Back!” which always, always made me ask, “Bringing America back to what?”
If I’d been working national campaign instead of state campaign, I’d’ve advised against the slogan. I mean, after all, hadn’t Ronald Reagan been president for four years already? Bringing America back from the brink? Because we felt like we were on the brink: I just didn’t trust Mondale to do anything except flap his gums.
I was a great operator back then, a better operator for Reagan than Senator Corbin, although Corbin’s campaign shared me once everyone figured out just how well I could handle the press. Didn’t need a lot of press for the reelection campaign—they’d send their flunkies in when the president came to town, which ended up being all of three times. Needed lots of press for Corbin because he was young, because he was new, and because he was dumb as rocks.
I wasn’t really grooming him for a national senate seat or even governor once he finished with his state term. I was grooming me for the day when women in politics became more than a curiosity or a curious screw-up, like Mondale’s veep Ferraro, whose husband cocked everything up, the way husbands always do.
So celebrating, drinking, confetti in my hair—hell, confetti everywhere, including my hoo-ha when it was all said and done. I still don’t see confetti as anything but evil, even now.
The rest of the memory gets lost in campaign Sousa marches and cheers of “He won!” and laughter, lots of laughter. The laughter bleeds into everything, like clown laughter in a bad horror film, and then the lights get dim, and there’s a bed involved, one of those pasty hotel beds in one of those gold upscale rooms, and I’m holding champagne, and then I’m not, and I stand in the bathroom, aching everywhere, pulling confetti out of my hair and wondering if my lips look bruised.
I paste myself back together, adjust the suit coat, leave the stupid bowtie undone (who thought of bowties for women, anyway?), finger-comb my blond curls, wash off my face, and ignore my shaking hands.
Then I walk out the door, go back before it closes, grab my purse, leave again, and look at the elevator, think: maybe he’s in the elevator. Think: Maybe people’ll wonder why I’m in the elevator. Think: They’ll want me back in the ballroom. Think: Screw the ballroom, and walk to the stairs, conscious that I’m limping a little.
I blame the shoes. Even in my memory, I blame the shoes—too high, too pointed, too tottery. But really, that year, I lived in extra-high-heels, showing off my calves, my thighs, my ass, because you could go miles with the male operatives if you distracted them with some cleavage and a hint of sex.
That’s what I was thinking as I walked down the steps. My fault. Cleavage, hint of sex, only a matter of time. Reached the lobby, didn’t go out that way, went down one more flight to the parking garage, only it wasn’t a parking garage, it was the basement, a nearly empty function space that I hadn’t seen, and a door marked EXIT that I walked through to an alley that meandered like I was, until I found our street, this bar, one drink, and Bancroft saying I don’t think you’re going to find peace tonight.
But I did. Peace and oblivion, not in bottles, like Bancroft those first six years. But in the work. The mindless work. I cleaned up after him, tended bar when he couldn’t, slept in the back room because, hand to God, I didn’t want to walk outside again, and I didn’t, not that I noticed anyway, until someone (Bancroft?) told me the hotel’d gone bankrupt and the building was empty, and it was the last bastion of the Great Downtown, and it was finally, finally going away.
Thought of torching it myself. Instead, meandered up that alley, stared at the broken windows, the steel door, the now-faded glory, thought: Serves you right, you bitch, and wasn’t sure if I was talking to the hotel, or to me, or to the world in general.
Then turned around and headed back to the bar, but first, stopped in the barbershop half a block away, and when they wouldn’t shave my head, grabbed the electric razor and started it myself. Lots of screaming, lots of Don’t do it, honey, and I was wondering where the hell they were years before, when someone should’ve screamed (me, maybe?) and someone should’ve said Don’t do it, honey (me again?) and someone should’ve yanked his hand away, like they yanked the razor out of mine. But Gus, the barber, finished the shave, told me to go buy a wig, said, At least you got one of them perfect skulls, and I looked in the mirror, liked what I saw, none of that you’re-too-cute-to-work-in-politics-sweetheart, not anymore. Looked more like a Star Trek alien than the girl next door.
Took another year to get the tattoos. By then, the extra fifty I carried took away the cute as effectively as the hair. Stopped watching the news, stopped voting, stopped thinking about politics at all. Mostly listened to my drunks repeat the same stories over and over, finding comfort in their miserable little lives, happy that those lives weren’t mine, happy that I had a place and some usefulness and that sense I belonged, even if daylight had become foreign and the stench of stale beer normal.
I’da kept going, too, if the blood didn’t remind me, if the blood didn’t—
Ah, hell, it wasn’t the blood. It was the look on the new guy’s face, that shell-shocked, not-me look I’d seen in the mirror too many times, the dirt (blood) under the fingernails, the way he jumped when my hand got too close.
His wallet sits on the bar, drenched in whiskey, and I pick it up, wrap it in a towel, and put it in the safe. And I think about it, through the long normal night, like the wallet’s a talisman, thinking, thinking as Ma Kettle expounds drunkenly on her latest theory about tollways and city streets, as Screwy Marcus and the Donster argue about next year’s playoffs, and as five guys, fresh from their weekly basketball game, stop in on their way home.
Rick never comes back, though, and I wonder if tonight’s the night he finally gets clean. Then I wonder if the new guy died and Rick couldn’t deal. And then I wonder why I should care about either of them.
But the wallet…It calls me and calls me and calls me, and I know I can’t keep it forever. I wait until closing, when the Donster does his chivalric thing and offers (like he does every night) to walk Ma Kettle home, and she refuses, and he does it anyway, and they pretend like it’s something new.
I lock the door, open the safe, and pull out the wallet.
It’s calf leather, black, and stained now, not just from the whiskey, but probably from blood. That doesn’t gross me out. After tending bar for thirty-some years, nothing grosses me out, although behaviors often disgust me.
I take the wallet to the office, which has better lighting, and turn on the overhead, along with the gooseneck lamp that probably curved over the desk since the bar’s founding. I set the wallet on a wad of paper towels, even though I know I’m going to clean up the desk anyway. Bleach is a marvelous thing.
I flip the wallet open, see gold cards, platinum cards, and at least five hundred dollars in cash. Tucked in both sides of the cash flap are business cards, two wads of them, one white and one a light blue. I pull out the business cards first, expecting to see that he had organized a pile of them.
Instead, I see two different cards for the same man: A. D. “Andy” Santiago. One card, the blue one, with somewhat archaic type, lists his job as “consultant,” along with an email address and a phone number.
The white card has a red-white-and-blue logo on the front. The logo’s for the Jeff Davis for Senate campaign, and I damn near drop the card. I don’t like coincidence. Politics and rape and this bar. Thirty years apart, but still.
I glance at the driver’s license. Yep. A. D. Santiago is the owner of the wallet, the guy who stumbled into my bar, the man who looked like I did all those years ago.
Only we got him to the hospital. Bancroft never took me.
I make myself cling tighter to the white card, bending it slightly, and I focus on it. I focus on the now. In the lower left, the card reads “Andy Santiago, Media Relations,” along with a different phone number and a different email address from the other card.
This one’s newer, but I would have known that just from the campaign itself. Jeff Davis is in a dead heat with some other candidate whose name I can’t recall. The only reason I know Davis’s name is because of the billboards plastered on the expressway, accusing him of living up to his namesake Jefferson Davis, former president of the Confederacy.
WANT TO GO BACK TO 1861? the billboards ask. They have a Confederate flag as a backdrop. VOTE JEFF DAVIS FOR SENATE.
Every once in a while, my old calling catches me, and I have thoughts I can’t bury. Like who the hell thought that was a good campaign slogan? It doesn’t even name the candidate running opposite Jeff Davis, although, in fairness, who would want her name on a billboard like that?
I shake myself from the reverie, know I mentally walked that way because of the shock of seeing that poor A. D. “Andy” Santiago is a political operative just like I was.
And then he ended up here.
I slip both cards into my back pocket, clench my fist to stop my hand from shaking, and dig through the wallet a little more. The address on Santiago’s driver’s license is eight blocks from here, on a street that was gentrified ten years ago.
The money’s coming back to the neighborhood, as I mentioned to Bancroft a while ago. At some point, we’re going to have upscale the bar or sell it. He doesn’t want to sell it: Bancroft doesn’t like change. But that was when he gave me permission to remodel the place.
Bancroft isn’t the only one who doesn’t like change.
And I force my mind back to the wallet. I recognize the way my thoughts wander when there’s something in front of me that brings up my past. Only now, I want to face it, and I’m finding that as hard as running away from it.
I write the address down, then fold the wallet back up and carry it, wrapped in paper towels, back to the bar. I pull out a plastic sandwich bag from the stack I use for leftover garnish, and slip the wallet inside.
Then I sigh. Crunch time.
I can keep it here until someone comes for it. I can take it to the police. Or I can take it to the hospital.
I glance at the ancient clock emblazoned with the Christmas Budweiser Clydesdales in the snow. It’s quarter past eleven. We don’t stay open past midnight on weeknights: There’s no point.
It’s past visiting hours at the hospital, not that I want to look in on this guy. But it’s still early enough that someone on the staff with half a brain would be there, who would be able to trace the John Doe that Rick Winters brought in.
If Santiago registered as a John Doe. He seemed pretty out of it when Rick carried him out of here, but Santiago had been conscious. He might’ve used his name.
I slip the wallet in its baggy in the canvas tote I call a purse, grab my leather jacket, toss them both over a chair, and go through my lock-up routine. I have to follow the same routine, day in and day out, or I forget something.
When you do the same thing for decades, you zone out as you do it, and I’m no exception. Books balanced. Pour count entered. Cash in the safe in my office, receipts printed and tallied. Computers shut down. Lights dimmed. Bar gleaming.
Purse and jacket over my arm, check to see if the front door’s locked. Yep. Make sure the window bars are secure. Yep. Head to the back, set the alarm, let myself out, and lock up.
Alley smells of vomit again, with a bit of piss mixed in. Supposed to rain tonight, so the smell should be gone by morning. I step gingerly past any puddles, note that the garbage is particularly rancid as well, happy that the pickup arrives before I do tomorrow.
I slip my purse over my shoulder, my jacket over the entire thing, keys in hand, heart pounding like it always does—as if I expect some sex-crazed asshole to jump me in the twenty feet between the bar’s back door and the parking lot. Me, round and muscled. Me, who took so many self-defense courses that I can lay out a two-hundred-fifty-pound drunk with a well-placed shove to the chest. Me, who hasn’t had anyone look at her sideways in maybe fifteen years.
But every night, sure as I lock up, I also talk myself down from the panic, remind myself just how safe I am, remind myself that the asshole who changed the course of my life wasn’t some random sex-crazed idiot with a hard-on, he was one of the best-known politicians in the state, and goddamn if I shouldn’t’ve enjoyed his attentions because, after all, he spent some of his precious time with me.
That’s why I’m shaking. He’s still well known. Hell, he’s better known. And he’s not just in the legislature. He’s running it.
And he’s hoping to fill it with men like Jeff Davis, hoping to bring the world back to 1861. Just because I think the slogan’s bad politics for the opposition doesn’t mean I think the slogan’s wrong.
My vehicle’s the last one in the parking lot, just as it always is. Usually, I look at my black F-150 and smile, thinking Built Ford Tough, because damned if I don’t need a vehicle that’s tough and protective, since I’m still on my own.
But this night, I scan the perimeter, like I always do, then I unlock the truck and get inside, locking back up immediately. I don’t feel safe. I don’t feel unsafe. I feel jangly, a little outside my own body, as if I’m not in complete control.
Maybe the fact that I’m not in complete control is how I ended up at Jeff Davis’s campaign headquarters. I realized I was driving there halfway down a side street I don’t normally drive on.
Campaign headquarters are never on the beaten path. They’re not places voters go to. Campaign headquarters are places to keep voters out of.
I expected this one to have one light burning and a few die-hard true believers, all under the age of twenty-five, to be shuffling papers and manning the phones. Shows how 1980s my campaign memories are, because when I pull up, the entire place is lit up. Yellow light, not pasty fluorescents, illuminates everything behind the glass windows, initially designed for a long-dead retail establishment.
Inside, people talk, exchange papers, lots of papers, and stare at computer screens, which adds even more ambient light. And yes, everyone seems to be under twenty-five—and well dressed. No hoodies and ripped jeans, no T-shirts and old jeans, no jeans at all. Open-collar dress shirts, suit coats on the backs of chairs, matching pants that fit well—and everyone thin, or at least thinner than the average American.
Enthusiastic, well dressed, thin—Jeez, it looks more like a movie set than an actual campaign headquarters.
I can’t help myself. I pull the truck over, park behind a Prius, and feel tempted to go all Monster Truck on its ass. I ignore the thought and what it means (okay, yeah, I’m pissed, but I’m generally pissed, so what’s it matter?), grab my giant purse, and let myself out.
I can’t do innocent anymore, although I’m tempted. I almost revert to Girl Operator, the one who died, along with her blond curls and her innocence.
Instead, I square my shoulders and take a deep breath. No Girl Operator. Instead, Badass Bartender. Or, maybe, Concerned Friend.
As I walk down the sidewalk, I try on Concerned Friend for good measure. Won’t work. Everyone in the headquarters knows Andy Santiago, and I don’t. Can’t do Badass Bartender, either. Don’t have my bar, blocking me from the fighting customers. Don’t have my baseball bat for minor scuffles. Don’t have my gun for major ones.
Just me, short, squat, bald, and tattooed. Big, and muscled, and unexpectedly female.
That should surprise the little shits working to take us back to 1861.
I pull open the campaign office door and, of all things, a bell jingles above me. Conversation ceases. Everyone looks up, a sea of white surprised faces. I remember this now from my years in campaign headquarters:
Alert! Stranger in our midst! Reporter? Spy? Civilian? Volunteer?
Only it’s nearly midnight. Who the hell comes into a campaign headquarters at midnight?
I let the door bang behind me. No one approaches me, although someone should. There should be some flunky in charge, even this late at night.
Computers hum in the silence. No one moves, as if I’ve caught them selling drugs or laundering money. I’m not real fond of standing here, either.
So I meet their gazes, slowly, one at a time, acknowledging them. An I-see-you action that I learned in self-defense class. It works with drunks who’re acting up all the way across the room.
Once I’ve met everyone’s gaze, I say, “I was told I could find Andy Santiago here.”
In the back of the room, two women glance at each other. Another woman stands up. As she draws closer, I see that she’s a little older than the others.
“What do you want with Andy?” she asks.
“It’s personal,” I say.
“Uh-huh,” she says in a tone that says I don’t believe you.
“He’s not at his place,” I say, “and he’s not answering his cell. So a friend said to try here.”
Those women glance at one another again. Someone titters in the back.
“You think this is funny?” I ask in my driest voice. “I’m looking for someone. I was told you people could help. Can you?”
The woman glares in the direction of the titter. Then she looks back at me. Her makeup has faded on the right side of her face, as if she’s been resting her hand there, and the makeup came off.
“Can’t help,” she says. “He’s not part of this campaign any longer.”
“Really?” I ask. “Since when? Because he was still handing out your business cards a few days ago.”
Her too-red lips thin. “We parted ways this afternoon.”
He showed up in my bar this afternoon.
“Over what?” I ask.
“That’s personal,” she says.
“Huh,” I say. “Because he worked for you. So that should be business.”
One of the young men in front of me leans back in his chair. His mouth twists sideways. I think maybe he’s trying to smile derisively. It’s not working.
“We don’t have any room for Log Cabin Republicans,” he says.
“Jordy,” the woman cautions.
He glares at her. “It’s true. That’s what Jeff—”
“We parted ways,” the woman says. “It turns out that Andy’s agenda was different from ours.”
I smile, and I know my smile works. “Log Cabin Republicans,” I say. “Is he a card-carrying member of that particular organization, or are you rocket scientists labeling him that because you just figured out that he’s gay?”
“He’s not gay,” one of the women from the back says.
“Stop,” the woman in charge says. “This is no one’s business but ours.”
The woman in the back stands up. “Andy’s not gay—”
“Yeah, right,” says the guy in front of me.
“But he believes in equality for everyone. He’s been pushing—”
“An agenda that’s not consistent with the Davis campaign,” the woman in charge says over her. “So we told him to take his services elsewhere.”
The woman in the back is looking at me. She’s maybe twenty-one, with long blond hair, and the kind of cute that’ll get her dismissed in politics.
I should know.
“Two weeks before the election?” I ask. “That’s bit odd, isn’t it?”
“You’re a reporter, aren’t you?” the woman in charge asks.
“Actually, no,” I say. “I used to do your job, though, a long time ago in a land far away.”
She looks me up and down, making it clear without saying a word that a woman like me could never have run a position of authority in a campaign. Funny, I used to get dismissed because I was little and cute. And now that I’m neither, I get dismissed for being the kind of person who’s too militant to ever be taken seriously.
“Well,” she says, “be that as it may, Andy’s not here, he’s not going to be here, he’s not ever coming back, and we have no idea how to reach him. So you have no reason to stay here.”
“And no reason to vote for Jeff Davis, either, apparently, considering how nice and cooperative his staff is.”
“It’s midnight,” she says. “What did you expect?”
“It’s midnight,” I say, “and someone’s concerned about Andy. I would have expected some compassion, and maybe a little help.”
No one responds. I look at each of their faces again, as if I’m memorizing them. A number of the staff won’t look at me this time. The young woman in the back, the only one who spoke to me, glances at the woman in charge.
She doesn’t see anything. She’s still glaring at me.
I want to say Thanks for nothing, but that sounds childish, even in my head. So I just turn around and leave. I hear someone lock the door behind me.
I know if I turn around, I’ll see a few faces pressed against the glass, watching me go.
Strangely, that sense I had, that jittery, not-quite-in-control sense is gone. And so is the underlying panic that I usually feel in a strange neighborhood. You’d think it would be worse here, but it’s not.
I get in the truck and sigh. I glance at the clock on the dash. Maybe I can get the wallet to someone who knows Andy Santiago at the hospital desk, but I think that’s a true maybe. The other maybe is whether or not I should go home—
A knock on the driver’s-side window startles me. I swallow a scream, then curse myself. I still haven’t learned how to scream for help. Eight self-defense classes, and screaming still doesn’t come naturally to me.
I turn and see the face of that young woman, the one who spoke out of turn, looking up at me. She had to reach up to hit the window with the knuckles of her right hand.
She’s not wearing a coat. Her arms are wrapped around her torso and she’s shifting from foot to foot as if she’s cold.
I lower the window and don’t say anything.
“Why do you need to find Andy?” she asks.
“He left his wallet at my place,” I say, which is trueish, “and he’s not answering his phone,” which is probably true as well.
“Oh,” she says. “I thought maybe…”
I wait.
Her face scrunches up and she takes a deep breath. “He’s okay, then?”
“I can’t reach him,” I say, as if that’s an answer. “That’s unusual for a man like him.”
She sighs a little. Bites her upper lip, glances over her shoulder.
“They walked him out,” she says. “Jordy and three other guys. And it didn’t look friendly.”
I don’t interrupt.
“I’m worried about him,” she says and her voice breaks. She seems to be telling the truth. She looks over her shoulder again. Then she adds, “I left my stuff in there. I—they’ll—would you walk me back?”
Is she kidding me? After she just told me that four men marched Santiago out of the building and he ended up raped and beaten? Do they think I’m that dumb? Or do they think she’s so appealing that she’s going to be bait I would fall for?
I have no idea where that thought came from, but as soon as it crossed my mind, it made me angry.
“No,” I say.
Her lower lip trembles. She frowns prettily, and I resist the urge to roll my eyes. Badass Bartender doesn’t really exist outside of the bar, apparently.
“Tell you what,” I say. “I’ll back up, park in front of your headquarters, and watch as you go in. If anything goes wrong—”
“Forget it,” she says, voice plumy with tears. “I can handle it myself.”
She stomps away, then pauses just for a moment as if marshaling courage. It’s that little movement that catches me. I wheel the truck around and park across the street.
She sees me, then turns her head away.
She goes inside the headquarters. Everyone watches her, like they watched me. No one says anything.
They watch her walk to the back, grab her purse, a laptop bag, and a coat, and then the woman stops her near the door.
The girl isn’t bait. She’s genuinely scared. And I treated her badly.
I look around the neighborhood, then get out of the truck. I shove the keys in my pocket and walk to the door, keeping my eye on the girl and the woman. They’re arguing.
I pull the door open—apparently she left it unlocked—and say, “You fired her for talking to me?”
They all look at me now.
The girl’s face is pale. “I quit, actually.”
She can’t lie to save herself. That’s so different from me at that age. I was the queen of liars. That’s how I got and kept my job.
“And I’m leaving,” the girl says, pulling the laptop bag away from the other woman.
“The laptop is ours,” the woman says.
“The laptop is mine,” the girl says. “My personal laptop. I never ever used yours. I don’t like linked networks.”
“It has our work product on it,” the woman says.
I know where this conversation is going, and I don’t like it.
“So hire a lawyer,” I say to the woman. Then I extend my arm to the girl. “C’mon. Let’s get out of here.”
Her look is both startled and grateful.
The Jordy kid stands up. He’s taller than me, younger than me, dumber than me. Even though he’s not drunk, I probably have fifty IQ points and a whole lotta living on him. And I can put him down with a shove to the chest.
Only he doesn’t know that.
“She’s not leaving,” he says.
“What’re you going to do?” I ask. “Hold her hostage?”
I waggle my fingers at the girl, and she runs toward me. I hold the door open, watching everyone, Jordy, the woman, the other workers still at their seats.
The other girl in the back, the one who had exchanged glances with the one heading to my truck, she’s gone too. I hope she went out a back exit, and isn’t just in the ladies’ room.
But she’s not my problem. I’m neither cop nor superhero.
“You people are something else,” I say, then follow the girl outside.
She’s standing on the sidewalk, shivering.
“Do you have a car?” I ask, thinking maybe the Prius is hers.
She shakes her head. “I took the bus.”
Worse than a Prius, then. A True Believer, who can’t afford a vehicle. True Believers go all Ninja Avenger when they lose their cherry and discover their candidate is an ass and a cad. (They’re all asses and cads, at minimum. Often they’re crooks and egomaniacs, too.)
If she has writing skills, she’s going to blog.
If she doesn’t, she’s going to cause other troubles, and the problem is that the woman inside that campaign headquarters knows it.
“I’ll drop you,” I say to the girl.
She glances at me, then at the people inside. I can almost read her thoughts. She’s having two of them. The first: They’re going to think that I’m connected to this woman. And the other comes from a much younger, much more vulnerable place: I’m not supposed to get in a car with strangers.
The girl takes a deep breath, then nods. We cross the street to my truck, and, using the remote access, I unlock the door. I’m getting into a car with a stranger, too, something I haven’t done in more than thirty years.
Not that my problems have ever come from strangers.
“I’m D,” I say after we’re both inside the truck. I don’t explain that “D” is short for “Blondie,” which was what the patrons used to call me before I got rid of the hair. Then they called me “Baldie,” and all I could hear over the noise of the jukebox was the hard “D,” so I took on the name.
“Laney,” she says, her voice still shaking. She’s glancing out the window as if she expects Jordy and his friends to follow us.
I start the truck and put it in gear in one swift movement. “I take it you like Andy.”
“He’s a lot of fun,” she says, “and he’s really smart, and he was right.”
A girl with a crush, it sounds like.
I check the mirrors and the door to the campaign headquarters. The remaining staff is arguing. I don’t see the other girl.
I pull out and start down the road. “How do you know Andy’s not gay?”
“I just do,” she says. “I mean, he doesn’t seem like it, and he wouldn’t be, and he’s really nice.”
I suppress a sigh, wondering how anyone can be as naïve as she is and still function. I remind myself, as I often do at the bar, that it’s not my job to educate people. At the bar, it’s my job to help them forget their idiocies for a while.
Right now, I don’t really have a job, except maybe to get this girl home.
“Where do you live?” I ask.
“They’re not going to come for me, are they?” she asks.
I don’t ask who. I know who she means. “You got a roommate?”
She shakes her head.
“Deadbolts?”
She nods.
“Just don’t answer your door tonight,” I say, knowing it’s not a lot of comfort. But I’m not going to be responsible for this kid. “Call the cops if someone’s persistent.”
She makes a little involuntary sound of panic. I ignore it.
“Address?” I ask again.
She tells me. She lives all the way across town, near the university. Of course.
I wheel the truck in that direction, and wonder what I’m going to do with the information that the girl has given me. Call the cops? Tell Rick? Tell the hospital?
It’s really none of my business.
And I’m not the type who makes it my business. I tend bar, for god’s sake. Nothing is my business.
“Where were you when he left his wallet?” she asks.
I glance at her. I had said he left it at my place. Either she forgot that or she’s trying to figure out why Santiago would be with a woman like me.
We’re nowhere near the headquarters now, and something about being alone in the cab of this truck with this girl makes me decide on honesty.
“He came into my bar,” I say, my voice flat.
“Bar?” She frowns at me. “I thought—he says—he doesn’t drink.”
Maybe like Bancroft doesn’t drink. Because no nondrinker would order Jack. Although I had pushed him into it. And he hadn’t known what would hurt him.
Maybe someone he knew ordered Jack, and he parroted the order.
“He did,” I say. “And then he passed out—”
“He drank that much?” she asks.
I wheel onto the expressway. Not a lot of traffic this late at night, but the billboard is lit up from below. WANT TO GO BACK TO 1861?
“No,” I say, answering both questions. “He passed out from blood loss.”
“He got beat up in your bar?”
“He got beaten up and raped before he got to my bar.”
I let the words hang.
She’s shaking her head. “No. You can’t rape a…” And then she pauses and her breath catches. “No,” she says again, only this time, the tone is different. This no is a disbelieving no. She saw something, realized something, knew something.
“Where is he?” she asks.
“Mercy General,” I say. “We took him there.”
“If you know where he is, why did you come to campaign headquarters?” There’s anger in her voice now, as if it’s all my fault.
Why did I go to the headquarters? It was the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question. I hadn’t meant to, but I’m not sure I should say that to this girl.
“I thought maybe I’d find some of his friends there,” I lie. “I thought maybe I’d find someone who cared.”
She nods and goes silent. The expressway seems alien at this time of night, with the halogen streetlights leaving uneven pools of light across the smooth pavement. We’d gone several miles. We were due for another WANT TO GO BACK TO 1861? billboard real soon now.
“I care.” She says it so softly that I almost didn’t hear her over the hum of the tires. “Can we go see him?”
“It’s the middle of the night,” I say. “Do you know his family?”
She shakes her head. “Who do you think did this?”
“Who do you think did it?” I ask with more charge than I expect.
She turns away, thinking I can’t see her. But I can see her reflection in the passenger-side window. Her mouth has thinned, her eyes are narrow, and at first, I think she’s angry. Then I realize she’s holding back tears.
“If I go to the police,” she whispers, “I’m done.”
“You already quit,” I say, recognizing the irony as the words come out of my mouth. I’m pushing her to take action in a situation where I never would.
“No,” she says. “I’m done working in politics.”
“Maybe,” I say. But politics are different now than they were in my day. No one would believe a girl with a complaint thirty years ago, even if she had been bruised and battered and bleeding for days.
Now people would believe a girl, a sincere girl of the proper background, who saw something, knew something, accused something. And if she stood up, then maybe—
I smile at myself, mentally pat myself on the back and think, Hello, Girl Operator. I thought I’d trained her out of me, but she reappears like the undead, filled with naïveté, optimism, and hope.
“You want to keep working in politics more than you want to help a friend?” I ask.
“He’s not a friend,” she says too fast. “He’s…”
He was the hope of a friend. A boyfriend. Someone kind to her.
We’ve reached her neighborhood. I take the first exit off the expressway. Students sit outside well-lit bars, one hour before last call. My bar hasn’t been open to last call since Barack Obama got reelected, when the rednecks and the bigots were too scared and angry to go home.
I wonder what made Laney want to return to 1861. She fits into my bar—Bancroft’s bar—better than I do, and she doesn’t even know it.
I wind through a couple of side streets and find the run-down apartment complex where she lives.
She looks at me for a moment, as if she wants to say something. Then she opens the passenger-side door.
“Thanks for the lift,” she says, as if we’re old friends.
She gets out, slams the door, and half runs, half walks to the building. She doesn’t look both ways to see if anyone is lurking in the shadows. She doesn’t look back, either.
I watch her fumble with her keys, open the main door, and head inside.
I don’t know why I expect her to do the right thing, when the only person in this entire situation who has done the right thing wasn’t me. It was Rick. And he did it without hesitation.
I sigh, pull away from the curb, and drive away.
Eventually, I head home, because I can’t think of anywhere else to go.
Home isn’t much. It’s a condo only because I bought the entire building a few years ago, when I realized it was better to control who I had as neighbors than it was to suffer through another loud drunken party two floors below me.
I have the entire top floor, which sounds more impressive than it is. Living room with a view of the street, good-size kitchen with a view of nothing, a dining room that serves as a storehouse for mail that I forget to sort, and a large bedroom complete with TV and reading chair, and two windows, both locked and shaded. I installed air-conditioning and a good heating system, and if you came inside with me (which you never would) you’d think that the windows hadn’t been opened since the last century, and you’d be right.
Fresh air is for suckers, baby. And people who trust other people.
My kitchen table is always spotless. I hang my purse over one of the chairs, open the fridge, and take out the sub I bought that morning. I usually have something ready when I get home so I don’t have to think about food.
I unwrap the sub. The bread’s soggy from the oil and vinegar dressing I splurged on, but I don’t care. I eat a few bites, listen to the green pepper crunch, let the pepperoni bite my tongue, and start shaking again.
It’s hard to eat. My throat has closed up like it did in those first weeks after I met Bancroft. I trained myself to eat after that—too well, some would say—and I force myself to take a few more bites now.
No regression, no regrets. Just move forward.
Only that’s not really working for me right now. I know something. Laney knows something. And neither of us have taken any steps forward.
I cut the rest of the sub in half, and put the good half in the fridge for tomorrow—if I can eat tomorrow. I make myself finish the other half, chase it with some cold water, and head to the bedroom.
The queen-size bed doesn’t even look inviting. The entire room seems like a foreign place. I go to my living room, don’t turn on any lights, and sit on the couch, surveying the neighborhood.
Or so I tell myself. Part of me knows I’m reverting to the scared woman I’d been thirty years ago.
And part of me doesn’t care.
I wake up with my head jammed against the arm and back of the sofa, a crick in my neck so profound that I moan as I move. The light falling into the room is unfamiliar, and I have awakened much earlier than usual.
I get up, and as I make some much-needed coffee, I look at the clock on the microwave. It’s seven-thirty a.m.
Even though I don’t have to be at the bar until eleven, I know I can’t go back to sleep. My dreams were filled with confetti and laughter and cries of He won! I’m not going back there just to get a few more hours’ rest.
I shower, dress, manage to shove some Raisin Bran into my mouth, and chase the meal with coffee. Then, without really thinking about it, I let myself out of the condo.
Mercy General is fifteen minutes away on back roads in rush-hour traffic. I get there just as visiting hours open.
I’m not sure if I want to see Andy Santiago. My stomach is as twisted as my neck was this morning, the coffee mixing badly with the cereal. I ask for Santiago’s room, and receive the number with no fuss.
Apparently, he was able to tell them who he was.
Hospitals have the same smell—the sour scent of sickness overlaid by disinfectant and cafeteria gravy, with a hint of very bad coffee. I take the elevator to the fourteenth floor, wondering what, exactly, I’m about.
But I don’t turn around.
His room is halfway down the hall from the elevator. I pass rooms with moaning patients, beeping equipment, and loud televisions. The room number is displayed prominently on the blond wood.
Santiago’s door stands open. I slip inside, surprised to see that the room is private. It has a bathroom near the door and a bed in the center. Windows cover the outside wall, letting in sunlight.
Andy Santiago looks nothing like the man who came into my bar. His face is gray with pain and that bruise on his chin is five times the size it was yesterday afternoon. He’s smaller than I thought, and he wears a hospital gown instead of an expensive suit.
“Mr. Santiago?” I sit on the edge of the chair next to his bed. I don’t want to tower over him. In my experience, looming is as threatening as leaning in.
He opens one eye and slowly moves his head in my direction.
“You,” he says, his voice raspy with disuse.
I nod. I reach into my purse and remove the plastic bag with his wallet.
“I found your wallet.” I set it on the nightstand, near the TV remote. That’s when I realize the television is off.
“Thank you,” he mouths and closes his eyes again.
I wait a minute, just to see if he’ll talk to me. I start to get up, feeling very awkward.
You’d think I would know how to talk to someone in a situation like this. You’d think I would know what’s right and what’s wrong, how to pressure, how to comfort.
But I don’t. I don’t know any of it.
I don’t even say, I’m sorry for what happened to you, because even though the words aren’t empty, they sound empty.
I walk out of the room, feeling like I should have done more, but not sure what more actually is. I can’t tell him to go to the police; I never did. And I can’t offer him the comfort of some support group, because I never found them comforting.
I’m most of the way to my truck when I realize that all the things I would offer a friend, all the commonsense things people do for one another in times of crisis, all the ways our society says we should take care of crime and one another, I have done none of them for myself. Ever.
Coffee-flavored acid rises in my gorge and I swallow, hard. I lean on the truck for a moment.
Then I climb inside and drive to work, two hours early and thirty years too late.
I clean the front top to bottom in those two hours, and I keep cleaning through the slow arrival of the lunch drinkers. Ma Kettle finds her booth around one, and I give her the usual vodka tonic. A twenty-something couple walks in about one-thirty, looks around, and then gives me a sheepish look before leaving again.
I’m amazed they got inside at all.
I’m clock-watching, waiting for Rick. I’m not sure what I want to talk to him about; I just want to talk.
Then, at three-thirty-five, he arrives, like he always has. Only he doesn’t bang the door closed and he doesn’t seem quite as angry.
He also doesn’t sit at his usual spot at the bar.
He glances at everything, as if memorizing it. I’ve seen this from regulars before. They’re saying goodbye.
I head over, but I don’t grab the Heineken. I won’t, unless he asks.
“Hey,” I say. “I took that guy his wallet.”
Rick nods. “He’s pretty messed up.”
“Yeah,” I say.
“They used something—bottle, bat, I don’t know,” he says. “I didn’t ask. But he was hemorrhaging. If we hadn’t brought him in, he would’ve died.”
Jesus. In my bar. Right in front of me.
“If you hadn’t brought him in,” I say.
“What?” Rick asks.
“You did it, not me,” I say. “If I had been here by myself—”
“You’d’ve called nine-one-one,” Rick says. He looks longingly at the bar stool. I can feel him wavering. “Those bastards. He wouldn’t tell me who did it.”
“Guys he worked with,” I say.
“He told you?” Rick asks.
I shake my head. I don’t want to tell him about the campaign office—it’s too close, too personal, but…
Rick’s staring at me. “What, D?”
“Debra,” I say, surprising myself. “I’m Debra.”
And then I burst into tears.
Oh, I’d love to tell you everything’s hunky-dory now, and my life is perfect, and that big-name politician isn’t sitting like a slug at the statehouse. He is, and my life is still my life, and nothing’s hunky-dory.
But Rick knew the detective handling Santiago’s case, and Rick made me tell the detective about the campaign headquarters and the Log Cabin Republican comments and the sheer hostility.
They found Laney, and, it turns out, she was scared not just because she figured out what happened. Right after I had said Santiago was raped, just as she was going to tell me with all her naïve passion that raping a man wasn’t possible, a memory hit her, and made the sentence die in her throat.
She had seen the bloody dowel Jordy and his friends used, part of a broken towel rack someone placed near the back to take out with the recycling. She’d seen it, and, better yet, she helped the police find it.
Those four guys who used it to teach A. D. Santiago a lesson are going to learn some lessons themselves.
If this were one of those happy feel-good all’s-well-that-ends-well kinda of stories, I’d tell you that Santiago and I have become friends or that we bonded at our support group. I’d tell you this incident derailed the Jeff Davis campaign.
But none of that happened.
I’m still here, still tending bar, still wondering what to do with my afternoons.
Something’s different, though. I’m trying to figure out how to update the bar, so that we’re not the neighborhood eyesore as the gentrification continues. I’ve decided that I like what we are—that wayside, that haven, for the folks whose lives are in the crapper.
There’re plenty of trendy bars. I don’t like them much.
I prefer places where strangers wander in rarely, and when they do, they tend to stick around until they cross back over to the trendy-bar side of life.
I imagine that’s where Rick is. Or he’s in that same place Bancroft is, the one that knows about the reality of dive bars and the camaraderie of people hanging at the end of their ropes.
About a week ago, Santiago came back, he says, because he owes me. But I keep saying he owes Rick. Santiago doesn’t owe me anything.
But Santiago does know that I used to do his job, back in the day, the job he doesn’t do any more either, and he knows I once sat on the same bar stool with the same disillusionment.
I don’t know if that means anything to him. I’m not sure it means much to me.
I do know that, for the time being, he’s finding comfort here.
And who can argue with that?