Absence of Alice

by Sherry Harris

  “Want to do the honors?” Joaquín asked, holding up the cocktail shaker.

  I glanced at the row of women sitting at the bar, one almost drooling over Joaquín. One had winked at him so much it looked like she had an eye twitch, and one was now looking at me with an openly hostile expression. Far be it from me to deprive anyone from watching Joaquín’s hips while he shook the cocktail.

  “You go ahead,” I said with a grin and a small tilt of my head toward his audience. The hostile woman started smiling again. “Have you ever thought about dancing professionally?”

  “Been there, danced that,” Joaquín answered.

  “Really?” the winker asked.

  “Oh, honey, I shook my bootie with Beyoncé, Ricky Martin, and Justin Timberlake among others when I was a backup dancer.”

  “What are you doing here, then?” I was astonished.

  “My husband and I didn’t like being apart.” Joaquín started shaking the cocktail, but threw in some extra moves, finishing with a twirl. “Besides, I get to be outside way more than I did when I was living out in LA. There, I was always stuck under hot lights on a soundstage. Here, it’s a hot sun out on the ocean. Much better.” He winked at the winker, and she blushed.

  The women had looked disappointed when he mentioned his husband, but that explained Joaquín’s immunity to the women who threw themselves at him. He didn’t wear a ring, but maybe as a fisherman it was a danger. My father didn’t wear one because of his plumbing, but he couldn’t be more devoted to my mom.

  “Put three olives on a pick, please,” Joaquín asked. While he finished his thing with the shaker, I grabbed one of the picks—not the kind for guitars; these were little sticks with sharp points on one end—fancy plastic toothpicks really. Ours were pink, topped with a little flamingo, and I strung the olives on as Joaquín strained the drink into a martini glass. “One dirty martini,” Joaquín said with a hand flourish.

  I popped open a beer and poured it into a glass, holding the glass at an angle so the beer had only a skiff of foam on the top. It was a skill I was proud of because my father had taught me when I was fourteen. Other fathers taught their daughters how to play chess. My friends knew the difference between a king and a rook. Mine made sure I knew the importance of low foam. You can guess which skill was more popular at frat parties in college.

  As I distributed the drinks, I thought about Boone Slidell, my best friend since my first day of college. The promise that brought me here? I’d made it to him one night at the Italian Village’s bar in downtown Chicago. We’d had so much fun that night, acting silly before his deployment to Afghanistan with the National Guard. But later that night he’d asked me, should anything happen to him on his deployment, would I come help his grandmother, Vivi. He had a caveat. I couldn’t tell her he’d asked me to.

  “Yes,” I’d said. “Of course.” We’d toasted with shots of tequila and laughter, never dreaming nine months later that my best friend in the world would be gone. Twenty-eight years old and gone. I’d gotten a leave of absence from my job as a children’s librarian and had come for the memorial service, planning to stay for as long as Boone’s grandmother needed me. But Vivi wasn’t the bent-over, pathetic figure I’d been expecting to save. In fact, she was glaring at me now from across the room, making it perfectly clear that she neither needed nor wanted my help. I smiled at her as I went back behind the bar.

  Vivi was a beautiful woman with thick silver hair and a gym-perfect body. Seventy had never looked so good. She wore gold, strappy wedge sandals that made my feet ache just looking at them, cropped white skinny jeans, and an off-the-shoulder, gauzy aqua top. I always felt a little messy when I was with her.

  “A promise made is a promise kept.” I could hear my dad’s voice in my head as clear as if he were standing next to me. It was what kept me rooted here, even with Vivi’s dismissive attitude. I’d win her over sooner or later. Few hadn’t eventually succumbed to my winning personality or my big brown eyes. Eyes that various men had described as liquid chocolate, doelike, and one jerk who said they looked like mud pies after I turned him down for a date.

  In my dreams, everyone succumbed to my personality. Reality was such a different story. Some people apparently thought I was an acquired taste. Kind of like ouzo, an anise-flavored aperitif from Greece, that Boone used to drink sometimes. I smiled at the memory.

  “What are you grinning about?” Joaquín asked. Today he wore a neon-green Hawaiian shirt with a hot-pink hibiscus print.

  “Nothing.” I couldn’t admit it was the thought of people succumbing to me. “Am I supposed to be wearing Hawaiian shirts to work?” I asked. He wore one every day. I’d been wearing T-shirts and shorts. No one had mentioned a dress code.

  “You can wear whatever your little heart desires, as long as you don’t flash too much skin. Vivi wouldn’t like that.” He glanced over my blue tank top and shorts.

  “But you wear Hawaiian shirts every day,” I said.

  “Honey, you can’t put a peacock in beige.”

  I laughed and started cutting the lemons and limes we used as garnishes. The juice from both managed to find the tiniest cut and burn in my fingers. But Vivi—don’t dare put a “Miss” in front of “Vivi,” despite the tradition here in the South—wasn’t going to chase me away by assigning me all the menial tasks, including cleaning the toilets, mopping the floors, and cutting the fruit. I was made of tougher stuff than that and had been since I was ten. To paraphrase the Blues Brothers movie, I was “on a mission from” Boone.

  “What’d those poor little limes ever do to you?”

  I looked up. Joaquín stood next to me with a garbage bag in his hand and a devilish grin on his face. He’d been a bright spot in a somber time. He smiled at me and headed out the back door of the bar.

  “You’re cheating,” Buford yelled from his table near the retractable doors. He leaped up, knocking over his chair just as Vivi passed behind him. The chair bounced into Vivi, she teetered on her heels and then slammed to the ground, her head barely missing the concrete floor. The Sea Glass wasn’t exactly fancy.

  Oh, no. Maybe incidents like this were why Boone thought I needed to be here. Why Vivi needed help. The man didn’t notice Vivi, still on the floor. Probably didn’t even realize he’d done it. Everyone else froze, while Buford grabbed the man across from him by the collar and dragged him out of his chair knocking cards off the table as he did.

  I put down the knife and hustled around the bar. “Buford. You stop that right now.” I used the firm voice I occasionally had to use at the library. Vivi wouldn’t allow any gambling in here. Up to this point there hadn’t been any trouble.

  Buford let go of his friend. I kept steaming toward him. “You knocked over Vivi.” I lowered my voice, a technique I’d learned as a librarian to diffuse situations. “Now, help her up and apologize.”

  He looked down at me, his face red. I jammed my hands on my hips and lifted my chin. He was a good foot taller than me and outweighed me by at least one hundred pounds. I stood my ground. That would teach him to mess with a children’s librarian, even one on a leave of absence. I’d dealt with tougher guys than him. Okay, they had been five years old, but it still counted.

  He turned to Vivi and helped her up. “I’m sorry, Vivi. How about I buy a round for the house?”

  Oh, thank heavens. For a minute there, I thought he was going to punch me. Vivi looked down at her palms, red from where they’d broken her fall. “Okay. But you pull something like that again and you’re banned for life.”

  Sherry Harris is the Agatha Award–nominated author of the Sarah Winston Garage Sale Mystery series and the upcoming Chloe Jackson Sand Dollar Saloon Mysteries. She is a past president of Sisters in Crime, a member of the Chesapeake Chapter of Sisters in Crime, the New England Chapter of Sisters in Crime, Mystery Writers of America, and International Thriller Writers.

  In her spare time Sherry loves reading and is a patent-holding inventor. Sherry, her husband, and guard
dog Lily are living in northern Virginia until they figure out where they want to move to next.

  Website: Sherryharrisauthor.com

  Blog: Wickedcozyauthors.com