“But them’s the breaks,” he had told Emily Kindler after he’d interviewed her for the waitress job. In fact, she’d hardly been required to say a word. All she had to do was listen and nod occasionally as he retold the story of his life, altering her expression as required to look sympathetic, interested, angry, or happy, according to the dictates of the plot. She believed that she knew his type: genial; smarter than he appeared to be, but with no illusions about his intelligence; the kind of guy who might fantasize about making a pass at her but would never act on it, and would feel guilty for even thinking such a thing. He told her about the lawyer, and mentioned the fact that he had been married way back, but it hadn’t worked out. If he was surprised by how much he was willing to share with her, then she was not. She had found that men wanted to tell her things. They exposed their inner selves to her, and she did not know why.
“Never was able to talk much to women,” Harbaruk told her as the interview drew to a close. “Might not seem that way now, but it’s true.”
The girl was unusual, he thought. She looked like she could do with a little fattening up, and her arms were so thin that he was pretty sure he could entirely encircle the widest point of her biceps with one meaty hand, but she was undeniably pretty, and what he had first taken for fragility, to the extent that he had almost dismissed the possibility of hiring her as soon as he set eyes on her, was revealing itself to be something more complex and ineffable. There was strength there. Maybe not physical, although he was starting to believe that she was not as weak as she looked, because one thing Ken Harbaruk had always been good at was judging the strength of an opponent, but an inner steeliness. Harbaruk sensed that the girl had been through some hard times, but they hadn’t broken her.
“Well, you talked okay to me,” she said.
She smiled. She wanted the job.
Harbaruk shook his head, knowing that he was being played, but he still found that he was blushing slightly. He felt the heat rise in his cheeks.
“It’s nice of you to say,” he replied. “It’s just a shame that everything in life can’t be handled with an interview over a soda.”
He stood, and extended his hand. She took it, and they shook.
“You seem like a good kid. Talk to Shelley over there. She’s the bar manager. She’ll fix you up with some shifts and we’ll see how you get along.”
She thanked him, and that was how she came to be waitressing in KEN HARBARUK’S SPORTS BAR AND RESTAURANT-LOCAL HOME OF THE NHL, as the sign above the door announced in big black-on-white letters. Beside it, a neon hockey player shot a puck then raised his hands in the air in triumph. The hockey player was dressed in red and white, a nod to Ken’s Polish ancestry. He was always being asked if he was related to Nick Harbaruk, who had enjoyed a career spanning sixteen years, from 1961 to 1977, including four seasons with the Pittsburgh Penguins in the 1970s. He wasn’t, but it didn’t bother him to be asked. He was proud of his fellow Poles who had succeeded on the ice: Nick, Pete Stemkowsk Z ate Stemkoi, John Miszuk, Eddie Leier among the old-timers, and Czerkawski, Oliwa, and Sidorkiewicz among the new boys. There were photographs of them on the wall below one of the TVs, part of a little shrine dedicated to Poland.
The shrine was close to where the girl was now working, picking up glasses and taking last orders. It had been a long night, and she had earned every lousy dollar in tips. Her shirt smelled of spilled beer and fried food, and the soles of her feet were aching. She just wanted to finish up, go home, and sleep. She had a day off tomorrow, the first day since she had arrived here that would not involve working at either the coffee shop, or the bar, or both. She intended to sleep late, and do her laundry. Chad, the young man who had been circling her, had asked her out on a date, and she had tentatively agreed to go to a movie with him, even though her thoughts were still filled with memories of Bobby Faraday and what had befallen him. Still, she was lonely, and she figured a movie couldn’t hurt too much.
Ken killed the postmatch commentary in an effort to move folks along a little more quickly, and replaced it with the news. The girl liked the fact that life didn’t begin and end with sports for Ken. He read some, and he knew about what was going on in the world. He had opinions on politics, history, art. According to Shelley, he had too many damn opinions, and he was too willing to share them with others. Shelley was in her fifties, and married to an amiable slob who thought that the sun rose when Shelley awoke and that nightfall was the world’s way of mourning the fact that soon it would be deprived of the sound of Shelley’s voice while she slept. He was already seated at the bar, sipping a light beer as he waited to drive her home. Shelley was fair and worked hard, but as a consequence she didn’t like to see any of her “girls” working less hard than she did. She worked three nights behind the bar, sometimes overlapping with Ken if there was a game on. The girl had so far worked for her five times, and after the first night she had been grateful for the comparative peace of the third night when Ken had taken charge and everything had been a little more relaxed, if also a little less efficient and a little less profitable.
There were only two men left in her section, and they had reached that point of near intoxication where, had the bar not been about to close, she would have been obliged to cut them off. She could tell that they were about to progress from melancholy to mean, and she would be relieved when they were gone. Now, as she cleared away the glasses and empty chicken wing baskets from the table to their right, she felt a pair of taps on her back.
“Hey,” said one of the men. “Hey, honey. Hit us again.”
She ignored him. She didn’t like men touching her like that.
The other one giggled, and sang a snatch of a Britney lyric.
“Hey.”
The tap was harder this time. She turned.
“We’re closing,” she said.
“No, you ain’t.” He ostentatiously examined his watch. “We got another five minutes yet. You can see us right for two more beers.”
“I’m sorry, guys. I can’t serve you any more.”
Above their heads, the news story on the TV changed. She glanced at it. There were flashbulbs and police cars. Photographs were superimposed upon the sce Z aupon the ne: a man, a woman, and a child. She wondered what had happened to them. She tried to figure out if it was someplace local, then saw NYPD on the side of one of the cars and knew that it was not. Still, it couldn’t be anything good, not if they were showing photographs. That woman and the little girl were either missing or dead, maybe the man too.
“What do you mean you can’t give us no more?”
It was the smaller yet more belligerent of the drunks. He wore a Patriots shirt smeared with ketchup and wing juice, and his eyes were glazed behind his cheap spectacles. He was in his midthirties, and there was no sign of a wedding ring. A sour smell rose from him. It had been there right from the moment he arrived. At first, she had thought it was because he didn’t wash, but now she suspected that it was a substance he secreted, a contaminant from within that mingled with his sweat.
“Let it go, Ronnie,” said his friend, who was taller and fatter and also far drunker than his buddy. “I got to hit the head.” He stumbled by her, mumbling an apology. He wore a black T-shirt with a white arrow that pointed toward his groin.
The picture on the screen changed again. She looked up. Another man, different from the first, was caught in the glare of the lights. He looked confused, as though he’d wandered out of his house expecting to find quiet, not chaos.
Wait, she thought. Wait. I know you. I know you. It was an old memory, one that she couldn’t quite place. She felt something stir inside her. There was a buzzing in her head. She tried to shake it away, but it grew louder. Her mouth filled with saliva, and there was a growing pain between her eyes, as though a pin were being inserted into her skull through the bridge of her nose. Her fingertips began to itch.