Changes

by Judith Arnold

  Chapter Three

  Gus Naukonen wiped the bar down with a wet cloth. Once a week, she’d treat its glossy mahogany surface to a complete waxing and buffing, but most days a good scrub with water and cleanser was all it needed.

  She loved this time at the bar. Mid-afternoon, open but quiet. A couple of older women sat at a booth, sipping chardonnay and catching up on gossip. Ronnie Marzetto, who’d retired and passed his lobster boat down to his son-in-law a year ago, worked his way through a beer, a bowl of peanuts and a crossword puzzle at another booth. Carl Stanton slouched on a stool at the far end of the bar, nursing a coffee.

  Carl drank too much. Gus knew it. Carl knew it. She’d cut him off after his third whiskey and told him hiding in a bar and guzzling the hard stuff wasn’t going to solve his multitude of problems. “On the house,” she’d said, filling a mug with coffee for him. She’d brewed it hours ago, and now it was as dark as tar and smelled burned. But Carl wouldn’t know the difference. He just needed to sober up before Gus called his long-suffering wife and asked her to come and pick him up. Gus had already made him hand over his keys.

  At least he was a quiet, mellow drunk. Gus felt sorry for him. Out of work, and his wife was sleeping with Bruce Bauer, and everyone knew it. If Carl Stanton was Gus’s husband, she’d probably be sleeping with someone else, too. Not that Bruce Bauer was anyone’s idea of a heartthrob. It was one of those frying-pan-fire situations.

  Gus didn’t judge.

  Beneath her feet, she felt subtle vibrations as Manny Lopez moved crates of liquor around in the basement. Manny was thick and sturdy, his torso as solid and round as a beer keg, his arms as solid as granite, his legs as thick as the trunks of the centuries-old pines lining Forest Road. Yet he was a teddy-bear, always smiling, light on his feet despite his massive build. When he wasn’t literally doing the heavy lifting, maintaining her inventory, lugging boxes of bottles up the stairs and bins of glassware and plates to the industrial dishwasher in the kitchen, he was mopping the floor, backing up Gus and the other bartenders during surges in traffic, and breaking up the rare fight.

  People didn’t come to the Faulk Street Tavern to get into fights. It wasn’t that kind of place.

  It was Gus’s kind of place. Tranquil. Homey. A bar where a person could relax and get a generous drink at a reasonable price. Not a bar where crap was tolerated.

  The front door open with a familiar creak of its hinges. During peak hours, of course, no one would notice that creak, but in the mid-afternoon lull, Gus could hear every sound. The lullaby-soft murmur of the women’s voices as they sipped their wine. An occasional sniffle from Carl—either he had post-nasal drip or he was crying; Gus did him the courtesy of not searching his face for tears. The slap of her rag as she gave the bar a final swipe. Another thud and gentle rattle of glass from below. And the front door’s hinges.

  She smiled, expecting to see Ed Nolan sweep through the door. He usually dropped by around this time. “Just checking to make sure everything’s copacetic,” he’d say. “Had a fender-bender up on Wayne Road, and I’m in no hurry to get back to the station house and do the paperwork.” He always had an excuse for visiting the tavern during his shift, and Gus always pretended those excuses mattered to them both. Ed would never admit he’d stopped in because he wanted to see her.

  However, when the door arced wider, the person who stepped into the nearly empty bar wasn’t the tall, handsome cop who could make her body sing in the wee hours of the morning, after she’d shut the tavern for the night and crawled into bed with him. It was a young woman.

  Gus knew who she was. She didn’t recognize every person who entered her establishment, especially on a busy Saturday night, especially an out-of-towner. But she remembered this girl, with her softly waving honey-colored hair, her slim figure, her delicate features and big, goo-goo doll eyes. This was the girl the jukebox had bound to Nick Fiore.

  She was dressed in a tweedy brown jacket, a white sweater, a colorful silk scarf coiled loosely around her throat and skinny jeans that showed off her slender legs. Gus was six feet tall and raw-boned, so any normal-size woman tended to look graceful to her. But this woman was particularly well put together. Petite and elegant, she carried herself like someone who had spent more than a few precious years of her childhood in ballet classes.

  Gus recalled her own mother signing her up for ballet classes at the Brogan Point rec center, back when she’d been a kid and the lessons had been dirt cheap. After a few sessions, the teacher, a skinny woman with a beak nose, a Russian accent and a spine as straight as a flagpole, had urged Gus’s mother to sign her up for basketball, instead.

  Gus was still grinning at the memory when the young woman neared the bar. As she’d walked across the empty dance floor, she’d kept pausing and glancing over her shoulder at the jukebox, which sat idle at the far end of the room.

  When the girl reached the bar, she turned back to Gus. Her cheeks and the tip of her nose were pink, probably from the brisk late-winter air outdoors. Her brows dipped in a slight frown. Silent, she stared at Gus as if not really seeing her. She might have been looking at the row of bottles standing along the shelf behind Gus, or at her reflection in the smoky mirror behind the bottles.

  “Can I get you something?” Gus asked.

  Her voice seemed to jolt the girl. “Oh.” She blinked, then smiled shyly. “It’s really too early for a drink.”

  The stale old joke about how it was five o’clock somewhere drifted through Gus’s head. She let it pass. “I’ve got soft drinks. Coffee, tea, soda, lemonade….” The woman still seemed to be in something of a stupor. “A glass of water?”

  “That would be nice. I’ll pay for it,” the woman added.

  Gus snorted and turned to fill a glass with ice and water from the tap. “On the house,” she said, placing a square cocktail napkin beneath the glass as she set it down. No sense letting the glass sweat all over the bar just minutes after she’d wiped the surface clean.

  “I feel bad, taking a stool and not ordering something.”

  “Especially when the place is so crowded,” Gus said, waving her hand at the nearly empty room.

  The young woman glanced behind her, laughed, and then stopped laughing as her gaze alighted on the jukebox. She turned back to Gus. “You’re going to think I’m insane, but…can I buy that jukebox?”

  Yeah, Gus thought she was insane. She hooted a laugh. “Buy it?”

  The girl looked earnest. “I work for an antiques dealer in Boston,” she said. “I’m sure that’s an antique. I’d pay you a very generous price—”

  “Sorry,” Gus cut her off. “It’s not for sale.”

  “It’s an amazing piece.”

  No kidding, Gus thought.

  “Can you tell me about it?” the young woman asked. “Do you know anything about its provenance?”

  There was a fancy word. Fortunately, Gus’s vocabulary was up to the challenge. “All I can tell you is, it was here when my husband and I bought the place.”

  “Really?”

  “Standing right there. We never moved it. For all I know, it was standing there when this was just an empty lot, and they built the tavern around it.”

  The girl’s frown intensified, and then she realized Gus was joking. She allowed herself a small laugh. “It’s gorgeous.”

  Gus couldn’t argue that. “Yeah.”

  “So beautiful. The woodwork, and those gorgeous peacocks… Just amazing.” She smiled and gave Gus a direct stare. “Are you sure I couldn’t write you a check right now and take it off your hands? There would be a lot of zeroes on that check.”

  Gus liked checks with lots of zeroes on them as much as anyone else. But the jukebox? No way. She shook her head. “Sorry.”

  “You must have it serviced, right? What does the service guy tell you about it? Has he ever mentioned its age or vintage?”

  “It hasn’t been serviced since we bought the place. We had a guy com
e in then. He showed us how to open the money box and get the coins out. He said to contact him if we wanted to change the records inside. It was all records, vinyl. Back when we took over this place, CD’s didn’t exist, let alone MP3’s.”

  “So what do you do when you want to change the records? Does someone from Wurlitzer take care of that?”

  Gus tossed the cleaning rag she’d been using into a hamper at the far end of the bar. Swish—three points. She’d definitely been better suited to basketball than ballet. “I’ve never changed the records. The songs keep changing on their own. At least that’s what it seems like. Who knows? Maybe there are a few hundred records inside there. Only vinyl records. The jukebox never plays any songs more recent than around the mid-80’s.”

  “It changes the records on its own?” The girl’s frown returned, even more intense.

  Gus shrugged. “It plays what it wants. People slide in a dime or a quarter, punch some buttons, and then whatever comes out comes out. Folks around here think it plays whatever song someone needs to hear.”

  “Someone needs to hear?” At Gus’s nod of confirmation, the girl shook her head. “That doesn’t make any sense.”

  “Lots of things in life don’t make sense.” Gus busied herself emptying trays of clean glasses from the dishwasher rack onto the shelves beneath the bar.

  “But you empty the coins?”

  “Donate them all to charity. The local food bank, a battered women’s shelter, the American Cancer Society.”

  “That’s very generous.” The girl traced her finger around the rim of her glass. Her nails were manicured, the polish reminding Gus of pearls. “What do you mean, it plays whatever song someone needs to hear?”

  Gus stopped fussing with the glasses and leaned on the bar. Compared to the girl’s hands, her own were large and blunt, the nails cut short and unpolished. The last time she’d had a manicure was the day before her wedding, thirty some-odd years ago. After that, she’d worked alongside Joe running the tavern until she’d had the boys, and then she’d been a barkeep and a mother, and then a barkeep and a widow. Who had time for manicures?

  Fortunately, Ed Nolan wasn’t a fussy kind of guy. He seemed to like her hands just fine.

  “You were in here Saturday night,” she said, deciding that the poor girl needed a bit of direction. She might be an antiques expert, she might have gorgeous hands—and that diamond ring adorning her left ring finger was probably worth as much as the jukebox’s charity earnings over the past ten years. But she seemed bewildered. Gus decided to enlighten her. “You were sitting over there—” she gestured toward the table where she’d seen the girl“—and the jukebox played ‘Changes.’”

  “Yes. The David Bowie song.” The girl laughed sheepishly. “My parents and my uncle listen to a lot of classic rock.”

  “That song was talking to you,” Gus explained.

  “It certainly felt that way.” The girl still looked sheepish, perplexed but fascinated. “So it was telling me to make changes?”

  “What do you think?”

  “I think the whole thing is bizarre.”

  Gus lined up her shakers and strainers. “The song says, ‘Turn and face the strange.’”

  “It does? I never really listened to the lyrics. Just that stuttering thing he does. Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes.” She rested her arms against the bar, apparently growing more relaxed in Gus’s company. “Do you know all the lyrics to all the songs?”

  “Just the ones that leap out at me. That one did. Probably because it hit Nick the same moment it hit you.”

  “You know Nick?” Her cheeks grew redder—and the color couldn’t be blamed on the chilly March air. They were indoors, and the radiators were working.

  “He’s a local. I’m a local.” Gus let the woman finish the thought for herself: you’re not a local.

  “Does he need to make changes, too?” the woman asked.

  “I guess you’d have to discuss that with him.” Gus noticed movement at the door and heard the familiar whine of the hinges as it swung open. There he was—Ed in his uniform. He’d made detective nearly a dozen years ago, but he still worked as a patrolman a lot of the time because Brogan’s Point just didn’t have much call for police detectives. That was fine with Gus. She liked the way he looked in in navy blue, with his thick leather holster and his shiny badge.

  “Hey,” he called out, striding into the tavern. “I was in the area and thought I’d see how things are going.”

  “They’re going fine,” Gus said as he approached.

  “Not so fine for Carl.” Ed angled his head toward the moping guy at the end of the bar.

  “He’s drying out.”

  “Have you got his keys?”

  She dug into her apron pocket and produced the jangling key ring. Carl peered up from his coffee and scowled. “Those are mine,” he said, his voice slurring.

  “Don’t worry,” Gus called down the bar to him. “I’m taking good care of them.”

  “I should probably let you get back to work,” the girl said, inching away from the bar.

  “This is my work,” Gus assured her. “Giving people who come in here drinks. Even if it’s only water.”

  The girl reached into the leather purse dangling from a strap on her shoulder. “I must owe you something.”

  “Not for water. Come back later and buy a drink.”

  “I would,” the girl said dubiously, “but I’m afraid the jukebox will play some other song and send me another message I don’t understand.”

  “You’ve already heard your message,” Gus said. “Let it sink in. Maybe you’ll understand it in time.”

  The woman nodded, although she didn’t look entirely convinced. She took a few steps toward the door, then turned back and extended her right hand. “I’m Diana Simms.”

  Most customers didn’t introduce themselves. Either Gus knew them or she didn’t. This gesture was a surprise—a pleasant one. “Augusta Naukonen,” she said, shaking the woman’s hand. It was so small and fine-boned, Gus had to take care not to bruise it.

  “Everyone around here calls her Gus,” Ed piped up.

  Gus released Diana Simms’s hand and the girl took another step toward the door, then hesitated and asked, “So you think the song was sending a message to Nick, too? Is he supposed to change?”

  “Like I said, you’ll have to discuss that with him,” Gus told her.

  Diana had the prettiest frown Gus had ever seen—and she’d seen it several times now, so she felt qualified to judge it. “I guess I will,” she said on a sigh, then turned and walked to the door.

  Gus watched her leave, then turned to Ed. “Do I need to keep an eye on her?” he asked.

  Gus shook her head. “No. She’s just trying to puzzle out the jukebox.”

  Ed snorted. “That jukebox. It makes people crazy.”

  “Either that, or it makes them sane,” Gus said.

  He smiled. “You make me crazy,” he murmured before leaning over the bar and planting a kiss on her lips.