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Title Page Front a girl walked into the bar. I was hunched over, trying to open a box of Dewar's without my knife. I'd bent the blade the day before prying loose an old metal ice cube tray that had frozen solid to the side of the freezer. The box was sealed up tight with strapping tape. She waited there quietly, not asking for anything, not leaning oh the bar. She held her purse with two hands and stood still. I could see her sort of upside down from where I was. She was on the small side, pale and average-looking, with a big puffy winter jacket on over her dress. I watched her look around at the stuff up on the walls, black-and-white pictures of Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf in cracked frames, a knocked-off street sign from Elvis Presley Boulevard, the mounted head of a skinny deer. She pretended to be interested in things so she didn't have to look at anybody. Not that there was much of anybody to look at. It was February, Wednesday, four in the afternoon. The dead time of the deadest season, which is why I wasn't in any rush. The tape was making me crazy. It was very much like a hangover, but the dry, luckless kind that didn't follow any wild night of drinking. It was a hangover from not sleeping, from worrying about a cut near the eye but not in the eye, which led to bigger worries I didn't have names for. I lay on top of the covers all night with my clothes on until the room got slowly lighter. I stayed in bed, watching the clock while people went to work and came home for lunch and the woman in the apartment next door turned her soap opera on, which was always my sign that it was time to get up. Before long I was thinking I should head back to the bar. I stood in front of the bathroom mirror and wondered if I should take a shower and change. It didn't much seem like a next day, but I decided to clean up all the same, more in hopes it would make me feel better than any notion about what I ought to do. By this time I was feeling doubly bad, bad about Franklin and bad about not having slept. It wasn't so many years before that I could stay up for nights on end and then fall into a dead sleep on some strange sofa in some strange living room. I would have stayed at home, let things at work take care of themselves, if I thought for a minute that I'd have any better luck sleeping. If Franklin came home, I'd take time off. I'd be off for as long as he could stay, since the way I saw it I had about a year built up in overtime. Cyndi could run things okay. I could check in, unless Franklin and I decided to go over to the Ozarks to go fishing. Not that I knew anything about fishing, but I didn't see how it could be so hard. The time was going to come when I would be away from the bar, simple as that. I'd been thinking about putting Wallace on more anyway, and Fay, it hadn't been a week and already she was getting things down. She was smart, that one, and all the customers liked her because she had a sweet way. Mr. Tipton, the dishwasher, called her Little House on the Prairie. "I want Little House on the Prairie to bring me my iced tea," he said to me. "She knows how to fix it. Not like that Cyndi. She always remembers how many sugars I like." Everything hinged on the dead father. That's what I was thinking. Something had turned them inside out, made them do things they'd barely heard of before. You could tell, Carl wasn't a boy to go licking up everything in the medicine cabinet for the pure pleasure of the high. And Fay. What had happened to her that she would be putting her hand on my neck? Over and over again I saw her sitting in the car, her head resting on the window when she was tired. She was tired. She had been worried for her brother, thought maybe he was dead. Those thoughts shake a person as deep as they go, I know that. You want a little comfort. She had reached out in the wrong direction was all, gone to touch something at the end of a long night and touched me. If anyone had told me a dozen years ago that I would be going over to have dinner with the Woodmoores in the middle of the week for no other reason than that they asked me, I would have said you were thinking of the wrong man. But there I was, a Thursday night, stopping off to get some flowers and a pack of cigarettes. Mr. Woodmoore liked company that smoked. I quit back when Franklin was born. Marion said it wasn't good enough that I promised not to smoke around him, she said sooner or later I'd slip up. I had to quit altogether, she said. It was a matter of a good example. But her father was a man who liked to bum cigarettes. He would ask anybody down to the basement after dinner to see whatever little thing he was building. You weren't at the bottom of the stairs before he was asking you if you had a smoke. I don't remember him ever having any of his own. For a while he was asking the mailman to come downstairs, till finally the mailman quit smoking or started to lie about it. The first couple of times I went over there without cigarettes, Marion's father would get so angry he wouldn't speak to me for the rest of the night. This was back in the days when they all hated me to begin with. So I learned. He liked it best when I brought Pall Malls. He'd turn the little red pack over and over in his hands, taking pleasure in thinking about it before he lit up. I don't bring those anymore. His blood pressure is high. I buy him something light and mentholated. I tell him it's because nobody can smell it on you later. He breaks the filter off and taps the loose tobacco back in with his thumb. Middle of the day and Cyndi was flying. She had a stupid grin plastered on her face I'd never seen before. While she was standing at the bar waiting on her drinks she started slapping out a beat on the half-polished guardrail. Four light slaps and two hard, two light, two hard. It could have been the base for any one of about two thousand songs. I had fallen asleep. I looked at the clock and it said ten. I had to think for a minute, ten o'clock at night. Outside I could hear the rain going same as ever. "That was something," Wallace said. "What a surprise, them just showing up like that. It's not your birthday or anything?" When I got to work that afternoon, Fay was waiting for me. "What did you say to Carl last night?" she wanted to know. Was it possible that she was getting smaller? I wondered how fast a girl that age could lose weight. She looked like she was wearing somebody else's clothes, the clothes of somebody a whole lot bigger than she was. The tow was thirty. Taft let the AAA lapse last year to save a little money. Don Holland went to high school with Taft. He's done well. Used to be he did auto body out of his back yard, but it got to where he had so many cars they were parked all over the neighborhood and he had to get a regular shop. Now he's open on Saturdays, too. He answered the phone himself when Taft called this morning asking if he could go out and get the car off the road before the police found it. Taft came down to Don's place as soon as they'd brought the car in. When I saw Marion the next day I had half a mind to tell her that Fay had asked me to marry her in Doe's. I wanted to tell her like it was a story, something that happened a long time before or to someone else. "You'll never believe what one of my waitresses said to me last night," I'd say. I wanted to see her not believe me, open up her mouth dumbstruck for a minute and finally say, "Get out of here." And then I would tell her it was true, every word of it. Marion and I had struck up a weird sort of friendship over the years, after we had loved each other and then hated each other. We were used to telling things. That was the way we fought. We didn't hold anything back. Wallace came back and stuck his head in the open car window. "I, um, I don't have enough money. Either of you have any money?"
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