He watches as she consoles another regular, listens attentively to a story of love gone wrong, the inability to find someone new, the futility of trying.
“You just haven’t met the right person,” Riley says. “But you will. You have so much to offer.”
In one month, Cole has heard these same words come from that beautiful mouth at least ten times before, spoken to at least ten different women with ten different ex-girlfriends. Well, sometimes the ex-girlfriends overlap; it’s sort of that kind of a bar.
An hour later, she is pouring a club soda for a repeat wagoneer who is obviously hanging on by a weakening thread. “One day at a time,” Riley says, without apparent irony, and the gal repeats it.
“Yes,” she says.
Riley says, “Maybe a meeting?” Gently. No judgment. It’s that kind of bar too, sometimes. “I think there’s a two o’clock at St. Kevin’s.”
“You’re right, there is.” She downs her soda, squares her shoulders, and reaches across the bar for Riley’s hand. “You’re a doll, sweetheart. Thanks for saving my life, again.”
Riley pats her hand. “You’re going to be fine.”
When the woman leaves, Riley sighs. “Whoa,” she says, and pours herself a shot.
“Everyone loves the bartender,” she tells Cole later. “It doesn’t matter who it is.”
It does matter, he thinks, but it is just like her to believe it doesn’t. It matters that she’s nice to people and doesn’t act like she’s something special just because she can reach the bottles without climbing over the bar. And she’s funny. And pretty, sometimes. She has that mouth; he loves watching it — the way it never seems to be able to stay still even when she isn’t talking. And he loves how she gives everyone a bunch of second chances, because she knows that human beings are flawed. He knows this because she has told him, but he is not supposed to tell anyone else.
He brings her presents: strawberries, pizza, Valium, flowers he’s picked out of someone’s yard. When he brings the Valium, she says, “How did you know my favorite color is blue?” She cuts one in half, chases it down with a beer. She picks the toppings off the pizza and feeds the crust to a dog someone’s tied to a parking meter out front. The flowers go in a chimney glass, set on the bar by the beer taps. Customers ask where they came from. “My new boyfriend,” she says, and laughs. Cole watches her mouth when she does it.
He plays songs on the jukebox for her when he can tell she’s starting to wear down. Songs like “Brown Eyed Girl.” Even though it is not one of her very favorites, when he plays it he knows that she knows it is for her, even though her eyes are green, like his mother’s eyes were, the way he remembers them. The Van Morrison song she really loves is the one about Jackie Wilson, the one about heaven, and smiling. He sings the chorus to her, and often she will smile when he does, and this is what they do: flirt harmlessly, avoiding any complication, any chance of collateral damage.
The orphan joke is on him: he really is an orphan, his parents dead of a car wreck in the California desert east of Barstow, where the Mojave begins, and doesn’t end again (as far as his mother was concerned) until Albuquerque. She kept a diary, and in it she hated, with a steadfast determination, the desert; envisioned breaking down and having to walk until their knees buckled, the sun so bright and hot it filled the sky, with only a narrow, pale-blue band of not-sun just at the horizon. She imagined their skulls bleaching alongside cow skulls and scaly armadillo skeletons, and she didn’t like it at all. But there was contract work at Los Alamos, and a couple of times a year they had to go. When the station wagon rolled, Cole was thrown clear. He was six, and still dreams sometimes of sliding face-first through the sand, hands out in front of him, like a runner trying to touch third base before the throw comes wicked hard and fast from the outfield.
“Did I ever tell you,” he says, bouncing a quarter, in some trick manner, off the wooden floor and snatching it out of the air on its way back up, “that I was named after John Coltrane?” He knows, since he’d been in the bar last night with her until past closing, that she has a hangover, and he is hoping to maybe distract her from it. He doesn’t get hangovers. Not really. She has told him it is because he is young. “Just wait,” she says. “You’ll get yours too.” But he doesn’t expect to live long enough to be old enough for that. Does not count on it at any rate.
“Only about a hundred times,” she says, smiling with that mouth. She stacks just-washed glasses on the stainless-steel drain board and dries her hands on the white bar towel she pulls from her back pocket. Takes two more aspirin and washes them down with Kahlúa-laced coffee. She’ll be cured — or drunk again — by the end of her shift, but she’ll keep it together; like always. Almost always. At least more often than not.
“How about the one—”
“Where your heart was turned around backward when you were born?”
“Yes. That one. Did I ever tell you that one?”
“No,” she says, coming around the bar to sit next to him and listen. “Tell me the story about your heart.”
It is not a long story, but it comes with illustrations: before and after. On a small white bar napkin, he draws with a black felt-tip pen the outline of what is ostensibly a baby boy. He draws it without lifting the pen so it ends up looking like the outline of a chunky adult chalked on the sidewalk, the aftermath of a drive-by down at Army and Folsom. He draws the heart, shaped exactly like a Valentine candy one, and reaches across the bar for another napkin. The second drawing looks almost exactly like the first, except on one he letters a small B on the heart, and an F on the other one. “See,” he says, putting the pen in his back pocket, “that’s how they did it. Unhooked it, flipped it over, and hooked it back up again. Good as new.” He pats himself on the chest like a Boy Scout in the bleachers, waiting for “The Star-Spangled Banner” to get to the good part.
It isn’t good as new, though. His heart isn’t. It needs special care, and instead he feeds it pints of Anchor and shots of Beam. Speed sometimes, when he can get it. Riley, unlike the other bartenders, is stingy with the whiskey. He knows it is because she cares about him, and because he tends to get sullen on the brown stuff; it makes him feel sorry for himself. He doesn’t want to feel sorry for himself, but he does want the warm numbness, the feeling of invincibility he has heard most young people have until they are at least thirty. He has some years to go yet and would like to feel that way for a few of them anyway.
Spring comes on a Sunday, and they walk to the flea market at the bottom of the hill. Riley lets Cole hold her hand, for a little while. It makes him happy, makes him feel safe, or as if he is taking care of her. He pretends he has a girlfriend; a version of Riley who could be that. The market smells, in turn, like diesel fuel, Mexican food, and the bay, and Cole sees a group of men in animated conversation in another language. They all look very serious, despite the fact that one of them is wearing a foam hat shaped like a wedge of cheese. Cole points the group out to Riley.
“Très chic,” Riley says. And they laugh, go on to paw through tarnished silverware and cheap jewelry. Riley tries on a ring made from an old silver spoon. Cole wants to buy it for her, but she says, “Don’t be silly. I don’t need a ring. I’d just lose it.” She puts it back in the case and walks away. Looks back to make sure he isn’t up to something.