I CAN’T GO HOME, IS THE THING. I CIRCLE THE blocks, thinking about what I’m going to do. Emmalee’s, maybe. But instead of heading back, I turn aimless. Soon the Lemon Drop Lounge looms up across the street. Cherry’s hangout, I remember her saying. I find myself drawn toward it. Cherry knows how to handle things. How to handle men. Cherry can help me.
I’ve never been inside, of course, but that doesn’t stop me from slipping across the street. The metal door flops open easy when I pull. I slip inside to the music of the slightest hinge creak.
I don’t know what I expected, but it isn’t the relative quiet. People line the bar, sit at small tables in pairs and trios, and no one is talking in loud voices. Ella Fitzgerald sings out of a record player somewhere. I expected something fancier, not a dark tile floor and chipped wood paneling. The light is low, from sconces along the walls and above the bar. You can’t really make out people’s faces until you get within a certain distance.
I cross to the bar, trying to hold myself tall. Bartender looks down at me.
“You can’t be in here.” His beard and mustache cover his mouth. The voice sounds like it’s coming from somewhere else.
“I’m not staying,” I say. “I’m looking for Cherry.”
He throws a dingy towel over his shoulder. “Gotta go, kid.”
“It’s important. Have you seen her?”
He pulls the towel off, wipes down the counter. Throws it back on. “It’s not a good time,” he says. “You should wait till the morning.”
“But she’s here?” I squint around, trying to catch sight of her.
Bartender sighs. “In the back.” He points toward a thick red curtain hanging in a narrow doorway.
“Thanks.”
I slip behind the curtain. The room is small and the light is even lower back here. Several of the wall sconces have burned out.
I hear the metallic clicking before I even see her. I recognize the sound of a handgun being cocked ready to fire.
“Cherry?” I turn toward the sound, to my left. Her silhouette blooms from the darkness. As my eyes adjust, I can make out her features. In the candle-like light I can see that her face is washed in tears. What shocks me more is the way she’s holding the gun, trained on me.
“Oh, it’s you.” Cherry lowers the gun to the tabletop.
“Yeah.” I’ve intruded on something. Something terrible. “What’s happened?” I whisper. She’s alone in the dark, and packing. “What’s wrong?” I look over my shoulder, like whatever Cherry fears might be right on my heels.
The curtain settles, and so do the shadows it casts. “Things you can’t understand,” she says, voice low like the music in the background.
Cherry lifts a short glass to her lips and drains it. “What are you doing in here? It’s not the right kind of place for a sweet girl like you.”
“Looking for you.”
“Well, you found me, girlie. Sure as the sun shines out your ass you did.” She laughs, and the curtain stirs so more light pours in. Whiskey light flashes in her eyes, glowing bright beneath heavy, shadowed lids.
“You’ve been drinking?” I murmur. It’s not against the rules to drink off duty, but it’s never allowed to drink when you’re packing a gun.
Cherry leans her forearms on the low table. “See, this is what I’m talking about. Go home and go to bed, little darlin’. That’s where you belong.” She reaches beneath the table and extracts a bottle, half empty. Liquor sloshes over the edges of the glass as she pours. The pungent scent assaults my nostrils, ugly and familiar.
“I’d offer you a belt, but . . .” Cherry snorts, waving the bottle at me, then thumping it back down beside her.
“I need your help.”
“What do you want?” Her voice thrums low from her chest. For a second I’m drawn close to her in some woman way that makes me feel older, like a friend, a confidante. Which satisfies me down deep, because it’s why I’d come.
“I wanted to talk to you—”
“But what is it you’re looking for.” Cherry sighs. “After the talking’s done.”
“I—”
“Don’t tell it to me pretty,” she says. “Tell it to me real.”
So I tell her. Everything.
Cherry sips her drink till it’s gone, listening. When I’m done she’s pushed the glass away and lit a smoke.
“I want to be a real Panther, like you, not like a kid.” Panthers can protect the neighborhood. Panthers can protect their homes.
She nods slightly. I wait for her to speak, but after a moment her head nods lower, like she’s going to lie down and sleep.
“Cherry?” I put my hand on her wrist. Too personal. She jerks away, awake. Two fingers bracing her cigarette, the other three stroking the gun. Her free hand, the one I had touched, comes back across at me. She touches my cheek, all gentle and sad.
“Child,” she slurs, in a way that makes six years seem like everything. “Be careful what you wish for.”
“I know what I’m asking,” I insist. “I know it’ll be hard, but I’m ready.”
Cherry lifts her smoke to her mouth and draws deeply on it. She’s smoking this one slow, and though it’s more than half smoked, the whole tail of the ash hangs on, useless, but like it’s waiting to serve another purpose.
When she lowers her hand, she looks at it like she’s seeing it for the first time. She holds it out to me. “What is this?” she says. “What do you see?”
“A cigarette?”
Cherry shakes her head, her eyes drooping.
“Ash? Something burning?”
“No. Tell me what this is,” she says softly, tracing her thumb beneath the thick line of burned ash still hanging. I don’t understand the game.
“What?”
“What do you want it to be?” The glistening sweat on her skin flashes as she leans in toward me. “The truth? A promise? Love?”
My eyes catch the precarious tremble of the thin, burning stick between her unsteady fingers. A tiny breath lodges in my throat of its own accord.
Cherry grins. A flick of her wrist and the long ash falls to dust.