Reminders of Him: A Novel Read online

  Shit. The last thing I need is for her to try to set me up with a customer. She tries to play matchmaker plenty when she’s sober, so I can’t imagine how bad the tendency might be after a few drinks. I need to get them out of here.

  I take the waters to them and then hand my mother my credit card. “You guys should go down to Jake’s Steakhouse and have dinner on me. Walk there so you can sober up on the way.”

  “You are so nice.” She clutches at her chest dramatically and looks at my father. “Benji, we did so well with him. Let’s go celebrate our parenting with his credit card.”

  “We did do well with him,” my father says in agreement. “We should have more kids.”

  “Menopause, honey. Remember when I hated you for an entire year?” My mother grabs her purse, and they take the glasses of water with them as they go.

  “We should get rib eye since he’s paying,” my father mutters as they walk away.

  I release a sigh of relief and then make my way back to the bar. The girl is tucked quietly into the corner, writing in a notebook. Roman isn’t behind the bar right now, so I’m assuming no one has taken her order yet.

  I gladly volunteer as tribute.

  “What can I get you?” I ask her.

  “Water and a Diet Coke, please.” She doesn’t look up at me, so I back away to fulfill her order. She’s still writing in her notebook when I return with her drinks. I try to get a glimpse of what she’s writing, but she closes her notebook and lifts her eyes. “Thank . . .” She pauses in the middle of what I think is her attempt at saying thank you. She mutters the word you and sticks the straw in her mouth.

  She seems flustered.

  I want to ask her questions, like what her name is and where she’s from, but I’ve learned over the years of owning this place that asking questions of lonely people in a bar can quickly turn into conversations I have to maul my way out of.

  But most of the people who come in here don’t capture my attention like she has. I gesture toward her two drinks and say, “Are you waiting for someone else?”

  She pulls both drinks closer. “Nope. Just thirsty.” She breaks eye contact with me and leans back in her chair, pulling her notebook with her and giving it all her attention.

  I can take a hint. I walk to the other end of the bar to give her privacy.

  Roman returns from the kitchen and nudges his head in her direction. “Who’s she?”

  “I don’t know, but she isn’t wearing a wedding ring, so she’s not your type.”

  “Very funny.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  KENNA

  Dear Scotty,

  They turned the old bookstore into a bar. Can you believe that shit?

  I wonder what they did with the sofa we used to sit on every Sunday.

  I swear, it’s like this whole town is one huge Monopoly board, and after you died, someone came along and picked up the board and scrambled all the pieces around.

  Nothing is the same. Everything seems unfamiliar. I’ve been walking around downtown taking it all in for the last couple of hours. I was on my way to the grocery store when I got sidetracked by the bench we used to eat ice cream on. I sat down and people watched for a while.

  Everyone seems so carefree in this town. The people here just wander around like their worlds are right-side-up—like they aren’t about to fall off the pavement and land in the sky. They just move from one moment to the next, not even aware of the mothers walking around without their daughters.

  I probably shouldn’t be in a bar, especially my first night back. Not that I have an issue with alcohol. That one horrible night was an exception. But the last thing I need your parents to find out is that I stopped by a bar before I stopped by their house.

  But I thought this place was still the bookstore, and bookstores usually have coffee. I was so disappointed when I walked inside because it’s been a long day of traveling here on a bus and then the cab. I was hoping for more caffeine than a diet soda can provide.

  Maybe the bar has coffee. I haven’t asked yet.

  I probably shouldn’t tell you this, and I promise it’ll make sense before I finish this letter, but I kissed a prison guard once.

  We got caught and he got transferred to a different unit and I felt guilty that our kiss got him in trouble. But he talked to me like I was a person and not a number, and even though I wasn’t attracted to him, I knew he was attracted to me, so when he leaned in to kiss me, I kissed him back. It was my way of saying thank you, and I think he knew that, and he was okay with it. It had been two years since I had been touched by you, so when he pressed me against the wall and gripped my waist, I thought I’d feel more.

  I was sad that I didn’t.

  I’m telling you this because he tasted like coffee, but a better kind of coffee than the prison coffee they served to the prisoners. He tasted like expensive eight-dollar coffee from Starbucks, with caramel and whipped cream and a cherry. It’s why I kept kissing him. Not because I enjoyed the kiss, or him, or his hand on my waist, but because I missed expensive flavored coffee.

  And you. I miss expensive coffee and you.

  Love,

  Kenna

  “You want a refill?” the bartender asks. He has tattoos that slide all the way into his shirtsleeves. His shirt is deep purple, a color you don’t see in prison very often.

  I never thought about that until I was there, but prison is really drab and colorless, and after a while, you start to forget what the trees look like in the fall.

  “Do you have coffee?” I ask.

  “Sure. Cream and sugar?”

  “Do you have caramel? And whipped cream?”

  He tosses a rag onto his shoulder. “You bet. Soy, skim, almond, or whole milk?”

  “Whole.”

  The bartender laughs. “I was kidding. This is a bar; I have a four-hour-old pot of coffee and your choice of cream or sugar or both or none.”

  The color of his shirt and the way it complements his skin tone are no longer impressive. Asshole. “Just give me whatever,” I mutter.

  The bartender backs away to retrieve my basic prison coffee. I watch as he lifts the pot out of the holder and brings it close to his nose to sniff it. He makes a face, then dumps it out in the sink. He flicks the water on while refilling a guy’s beer while starting a new pot of coffee while closing out someone else’s tab while smiling just enough but not too much.

  I’ve never seen someone move so fluidly, like he has seven arms and three brains and they’re all going at once. It’s mesmerizing watching someone who’s good at what they do.

  I don’t know what I’m good at. I don’t know that there is anything in this world I could make look effortless.

  There are things I want to be good at. I want to be a good mother. To my future kids, but mostly to the daughter I already brought into this world. I want to have a yard that I can plant stuff in. Stuff that will flourish and not die. I want to learn how to talk to people without wishing I could retract every word I said. I want to be good at feeling things when a guy touches my waist. I want to be good at life. I want to make it look effortless, but up until this point, I’ve made every aspect of life appear entirely too difficult to navigate.

  The bartender glides back to me when the coffee is ready. As he’s filling the mug, I look at him and actually absorb what I’m seeing this time. He’s good looking in a way that a girl who is trying to get custody of her daughter should want to stay away from. He’s got eyes that have seen a thing or two, and hands that have probably hit a man or two.

  His hair is fluid like his movements. Long, dark strands that hang in his eyes and move in whatever direction he moves. He doesn’t touch his hair; he hasn’t since I’ve been sitting here. He just lets it get in his way, but then he’ll flick his head every now and then, the slightest little movement, and his hair goes where he needs it to. It’s thick hair, agreeable hair, want-my-hands-in-his-hair hair.

  My mug is full of coffee now, but he lifts a finger and says, “One sec.” He swivels and opens a minifridge and then pulls out whole milk. He pours some into the mug. He puts the milk back, opens another fridge—surprise, whipped cream. He reaches behind him, and when his hand reappears, he’s holding a single cherry that he places carefully on top of my drink. He slides it closer to me and spreads out his arms like he just created magic.

  “No caramel,” he says. “Best I could do for not-a-coffee-shop.”

  He probably thinks he just made a bougie drink for a spoiled girl who’s used to having eight-dollar coffee every day. He has no idea how long it’s been since I’ve had a decent cup of coffee. Even in the months I spent in transitional housing, they served prison coffee to the prison girls with prison pasts.

  I could cry.

  I do cry.

  As soon as he gives his attention to someone at the other end of the bar, I take a drink of my coffee and close my eyes and cry because life can be so fucking cruel and hard, and I’ve wanted to quit living it so many times, but then moments like these remind me that happiness isn’t some permanent thing we’re all trying to achieve in life, it’s merely a thing that shows up every now and then, sometimes in tiny doses that are just substantial enough to keep us going.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  LEDGER

  I know what to do when a child cries, but I don’t know what to do when a grown woman cries. I stay as far away from her as I can while she drinks her coffee.

  I haven’t learned much about her since she walked in here an hour ago, but one thing I know for certain is she didn’t come here to meet anyone. She came here for solitude. Three people have tried to approach her in the last hour, and she held up a hand and shot them down without making eye contact with any of them.

  She drank her coffee i
n silence. It’s barely seven in the evening, so she might just be working her way up to the hard stuff. I kind of hope not. I’m intrigued by the idea that she came to a bar to order things we rarely serve while turning down men she never even made eye contact with.

  Roman and I are the only ones working until Mary Anne and Razi get here. The place is getting busier, so I can’t give her the attention I want to give her, which is all my attention. I make it a point to spread myself out just enough so that it doesn’t seem like I’m in her space too much.

  As soon as she finishes the coffee, I want to ask her what she’s having next, but instead I make her sit with her empty mug for a good ten minutes. I might make it fifteen before I work my way back to her.

  In the meantime, I just steal glances at her. Her face is a work of art. I wish there was a picture of it hanging on a wall in a museum somewhere so I could stand in front of it and stare at it for as long as I wanted. Instead, I’m just getting in peeks here and there, admiring how all the same pieces of a face that make up all the other faces in the world just seem to coordinate better on her.

  People rarely come to a bar at the start of a weekend evening in such a raw state, but she isn’t dressed up. She’s wearing a faded Mountain Dew T-shirt and jeans, but the green in the shirt matches the green in her eyes with such perfection it’s as if she put all her effort into finding the perfect color of T-shirt, when I’m pretty sure she gave that shirt no thought at all. Her hair is russet. All one sturdy color. All one length, right below her chin. She slides her hands through it every now and then, and every time she does, it looks like she’s about to fold in on herself. It makes me want to walk around the bar and lift her up and give her a hug.

  What’s her story?

  I don’t want to know.

  I don’t need to know.

  I don’t date girls I meet in this bar. Twice I’ve broken that rule, and twice it’s bitten me in the ass.

  Besides, there’s something terrifying about this one. I can’t quite put my finger on it, but when I talk to her, I feel like my voice is trapped in my chest. And not in a way that I’m left breathless by her, but in a more substantial way, as though my brain is warning me not to interact with her.

  Red flag! Danger! Abort!

  But why?

  We make eye contact when I reach for her mug. She hasn’t looked at anyone else tonight. Only me. I should feel flattered, but I feel scared.

  I played professional football and own a bar, yet I’m scared of a little eye contact with a pretty girl. That should be my Tinder bio. Played for the Broncos. Owns a bar. Scared of eye contact.

  “What next?” I ask her.

  “Wine. White.”

  It’s a hard balance owning a bar and being sober. I want everyone else to be sober, but I also need customers. I pour her the glass of wine and set it in front of her.

  I remain near her, pretending to use a rag to dry glasses that have been dry since yesterday. I notice the slow roll of her throat as she stares down at the glass of wine, almost as if she’s unsure. That split second of hesitation, or maybe it’s regret, is enough to make me think she might struggle with alcohol. I can always tell when people are tossing away their sobriety by how they look at their glass.

  Drinking is only stressful to alcoholics.

  She doesn’t drink the wine, though. She quietly sips on the soda until it’s empty. I reach for the empty glass at the same time she does.

  When our fingers touch, I feel something else trapped in my chest other than my voice. Maybe it’s a few extra heartbeats. Maybe it’s an erupting volcano.

  Her fingers recoil from mine and she puts her hands in her lap. I pull the empty glass of soda away from her, as well as the full glass of wine, and she doesn’t even look up to ask me why. She sighs, like maybe she’s relieved I took the wine away. Why did she even order it?

  I refill her soda, and when she isn’t looking, I pour the wine in the sink and wash the glass.

  She sips from the soda for a while, but the eye contact stops. Maybe I upset her.

  Roman notices me staring at her. He leans an elbow onto the counter and says, “Divorce or death?”

  Roman always likes to guess the reasons people come in alone and seem out of place. The girl doesn’t seem like she’s here because of a divorce. Women usually celebrate those by coming to bars with groups of friends, wearing sashes that say Ex-Wife.

  This girl does seem sad, but not sad in a way that would indicate she’s grieving.

  “I’m gonna say divorce,” Roman says.

  I don’t respond to him. I don’t feel right guessing her tragedy, because I’m hoping it isn’t divorce or death or even a bad day. I want good things for her because it seems like she hasn’t had a good thing in a long, long time.

  I stop staring at her while I tend to other customers. I do it to give her privacy, but she uses it as an opportunity to leave cash on the bar and sneak out.

  I stare for several seconds at her empty barstool and the ten-dollar tip she left. She’s gone and I don’t know her name and I don’t know her story and I don’t know that I’ll ever see her again, so here I am, rushing around the bar, through the bar, toward the front door she just slipped out of.

  The sky is on fire when I walk outside. I shield my eyes, forgetting how assaulting the light always is when I step out of the bar before dark.

  She turns around right when I spot her. She’s about ten feet from me. She doesn’t have to shield her eyes because the sun is behind her, outlining her head like it’s topped with a halo.

  “I left money on the bar,” she says.

  “I know.”

  We stare at each other for a quiet moment. I don’t know what to say. I just stand here like a fool.

  “What, then?”

  “Nothing,” I say. But I immediately wish I would have said, “Everything.”

  She stares at me, and I never do this, I shouldn’t do this, but I know if I let her walk away, I won’t be able to stop thinking about the sad girl who left me a ten-dollar tip when I get the feeling she can’t afford to leave me a tip at all.

  “You should come back tonight at eleven.” I don’t give her a chance to tell me no or explain why she can’t. I go back inside the bar, hoping my request makes her curious enough to show back up tonight.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  KENNA

  I’m sitting on an inflatable mattress with my unnamed kitten, contemplating all the reasons I shouldn’t go back to that bar.

  I didn’t come back to this town to meet guys. Even guys as good looking as that bartender. I’m here for my daughter and that’s it.

  Tomorrow is important. Tomorrow I need to feel Herculean, but the bartender unintentionally made me feel weak by pulling away my glass of wine. I don’t know what he saw on my face that made him want to take the wine away from me. I wasn’t going to drink it. I only ordered it so I could feel a sense of control in not drinking it. I wanted to look at it and smell it and then walk away from it feeling stronger than when I sat down.

  Now I just feel unsettled because he saw how I was looking at the wine earlier, and the way he pulled it away makes me think he assumes I have an active issue with alcohol.

  I don’t. I haven’t had alcohol in years because one night of alcohol mixed with a tragedy ruined the last five years of my life, and the last five years of my life have led me back to this town, and this town makes me nervous, and the only thing that calms my nerves is doing things that make me feel like I’m still in control of my life and my decisions.

  That’s why I wanted to turn down the wine, dammit.

  Now I’m not going to sleep well tonight. I have no reason to feel accomplished because he made me feel the complete opposite. If I want to sleep well tonight, I’m going to need to turn down something else I want.

  Or someone.

  I haven’t wanted anyone in a long, long time. Not since I first met Scotty. But the bartender was kind of hot, and he had a great smile, and he makes great coffee, and he already invited me to come back, so it’ll be simple to show up and turn him down.

  Then I’ll sleep well and be prepared to wake up and face the most important day of my life.