“You don’t know him?”
“I haven’t been here in a while,” Adele said. If a while meant eleven years. She’d been far away from Darling Bay, sometimes as far as a person could get. “When do you think he’ll be here?”
Norma frowned and held one of her necklaces, looking upward as if the answer hung in the cobwebbed rafters. “Soon.” Then she filled a glass with Coke and slid it towards Adele. “Here you go. Now, tell me everything. How’re your sisters? You know, my dad – may he rest in peace – died before y’all got famous, but I always think he would have loved you. When your dad died, I asked my dad to bring him into heaven with a big ol’ hug. Felt so bad for you young gals. Are you getting the band back together? You know we talk about you all the time. And those magazines, they stopped printing those stories about y’all, and that’s a good thing, but we never believed a word they said anyway. How’s the little one? Lana?”
The back of Adele’s throat itched. “Fine.” She had no idea how Lana was since she never answered Adele’s phone calls. The ache of it was dull and familiar. “Do you mind if I have a look around? While I wait for Nate?”
“Sure, sure.” Norma bobbed up and down behind the bar, spinning into action. Tomato juice, sliced celery, vodka. “A Bloody Mary doesn’t just appear out of nowhere. Gotta work at it.” She frowned and looked upward again. “Unless you stare into the mirror, you know? And say those words? I’m not gonna do that. Okay. There.” She added a dash of Tabasco. “Mine isn’t as good as Nate’s, but I’m getting there. Just gotta keep working on it.”
Adele wandered towards the rear of the saloon. It was just as she remembered it, dark and dusty, smelling of splintered wood and spilled beer. The old jukebox glowed neon blue and green in the far right corner. Next to it was a skinny ATM that had been added since she was last here. To the left of that ran the long bar all the way to the back wall. How many buckets of ice had Adele hauled out of the old storeroom? The girls had loved being there in the saloon, still under-age, helping Uncle Hugh with stocking and refilling in the afternoons. They’d begged to be allowed to stay as late as they could, listening to the music, not leaving until Sheriff Tate came in after his shift and raised his eyebrows at the little girls doing their homework in the far left corner on the big, scarred wooden table.
The table was still there. Adele touched the top of it, feeling the ridges with her fingertips. People still carved their initials into it, using penknives and ballpoint pens. They didn’t cut deeply (out of respect, perhaps – surely they would have dug more deeply into a tree) and the well-worn initials looped over each other, years and years of couples who had loved and lost and loved again. When Adele and her sisters had done their math homework here, they’d had to make sure their notepads were under their papers, or their pencils would stab through into the table’s scars.
Somewhere on the table were their initials, too. All three of them, AD + MD + LD. Adele and Molly and Lana. Hidden now somewhere, buried by the map of other letters.
Adele realized she was humming and closed her throat. She heard the refrain of “You’ll Never Leave” in her mind. Then she wandered back towards the front door. To the right was the stage. Just a couple of feet higher than the floor, it was made of the same old wood and, if she remembered right, just as rickety. Impulsively, she jumped up onto it, stretching her arms wide. A light snapped on above her head, and she grinned in delight. Even when they were kids, Uncle Hugh had kept that motion-activated light there, and they’d loved the way it had shone down on them like a spotlight.
“Sing us a song!” called Norma from the other side of the saloon.
Oh, hell, no. Adele swallowed her grin and raised a hand. “Maybe later.” Or maybe never.
The old pool table stood in the same spot it always had. Adele could imagine a tsunami sweeping in and taking out the Golden Spike, carrying away the saloon and the café and the old hotel – the whole town of Darling Bay itself – but that pool table, as heavy as sin and older than Eve’s apple, would stay right there, right where it had always been meant to sit. At some point over the years, the felt playing top had been repaired. Chalks, the old square kind, were lined up on the rail, and a half-dozen cue sticks leaned drunkenly against the short inner wall.
Adele could almost hear the crack of the balls. Molly had been their ringer, always willing to bat her eyes innocently at whatever guy thought it would be fun to show off his pool prowess to teenage girls. Molly would run the table, stick the guy’s money in her pocket, and then ask Uncle Hugh for a round of root beer floats for her and her sisters.
Molly. She wanted Molly here.
She pulled out her cell phone. Remember the root beer floats?
Holding her phone in her hand in case the text actually managed to soar out to the cruise ship somewhere on the ocean, Adele used her other hand to lift up the bench seat in the front window alcove. There they were, all the board games they’d spent so much time with. She’d be willing to bet that the Monopoly set was still missing all the Get Out of Jail Free cards. (Sheriff Tate had gotten his feelings hurt one night when he’d been on a particularly expensive Monopoly losing streak.) And the Sorry! game . . . She pulled it out and lifted the lid. Yep, there they were. Each piece had little teeth marks at the top, marching all the way around. The blue piece was missing the round knobby top altogether.
While Adele raced around the board, passing her sisters with a cheery “Sorry!” Lana would get so mad she’d chew the pieces, leaving her tooth marks behind, or in the case of the blue one, biting the top right off.
Adele glanced left. Norma was looking into her Bloody Mary as if it were telling a fortune, so Adele quietly slipped the headless blue piece into her jeans pocket. From the layers of dust inside the bench seat, no one would miss the piece anytime soon.
She looked out the side alcove window. Across the middle parking lot stood the old café. Funny, she’d assumed it would still be open, that Hugh’s employees would still be running it. But it was shuttered and dark, an unbearable sense of loneliness coming from the ripped awning. She looked right, up to the slight rise behind the saloon and café. That was the hotel, the third old building that she’d called home every summer of her youth. It was where she would sleep tonight. She yearned for that, for this already-long day to speed up until she could just lie down, close her eyes, and breathe in the ocean-scented air.
The phone – the real one that hung on the bar’s back wall – jangled. Adele jumped. Norma grabbed it without hesitation. “Golden Spike, this is Norma!”
There was a pause. “Yeah.” She grinned. “Right again. You bet. I’ll keep ’er running, boss. Yeah. Okay. And hey? I forgot to tell you I need a raise.” She slammed the phone down with a hoot of laughter. “That was him!” She looked at Adele as if suddenly surprised to see her. “Oh! I should have told him you were here.”
“No, that’s okay. I’ll see him when he gets here.”
“So I guess you’re the boss around here now.” Norma was obviously startled by the thought, her grey eyebrows shooting higher. “Of course you are. Oooh.” Her drink wrapped tightly in her hand, she leaned forward from her bar stool. “You should tell him to hire me. I wouldn’t drink all the booze, I swear I wouldn’t.” But there was a twinkle behind her expression that said the opposite was true, and that they both knew it.
CHAPTER TWO
Nate shouldn’t have answered his cell phone that morning, but he was a sucker for a blonde. Especially if the blonde happened to be ninety-one and living on the boat he’d sold her five months earlier. Ruthann Suthers had asked, “Does it matter, dear, if my extension cord in the kitchen smokes a little?” Nate thought of the electrical fire at the hotel, and told her to call 911. She said, “I already did. They said it was okay, but they shut off my power.” Nate had sighed and spent the next two hours crawling around the baseboards in the boat’s mess. He’d installed three new surge protectors, and he’d tested each outlet. By the time he’d finished, he’d b
ruised a knuckle and ripped his favorite Merle Haggard T-shirt.
And he was late.
At least Norma had been at the bar to open up. Unless a wandering tourist or two showed up, she’d probably be the only customer until three, anyway.
He parked his truck in front of the post office. Getting out, he pulled his Charlie’s Feed and Seed ball cap on backward. What he really needed was another shower. Maybe he could bribe Norma with a couple more drinks off her tab to stay a little longer while he cleaned up. He took the two shallow steps up off street level with one long jump.
Inside the saloon it was dim compared to the bright morning sunlight. Norma grinned at him from her regular bar stool. “Boss!”
“You keeping out the riffraff?” Too late, he noticed that someone else was in the saloon, way over by the bench full of board games. “Whoops.” Not even a tourist – a pretty tourist, at that – wanted to be called riffraff.
“Nah, they’re getting in. And hey, guess who it is.”
He looked again. The woman was standing straighter now, pretending not to hear them. She kept her eyes out the side alcove window as if there was something more than just the old, closed Golden Spike Café across the parking lot to look at. And she wasn’t just pretty. From this angle, she was a sight closer to beautiful. God, who did she remind him of? She must have driven up from the city or something. Some model, waiting for her photographer to shoot her on the beach. He’d seen it plenty of times before, pretty girls thinking it would be good to get shots of themselves in the water, or leaning against the high cliffs down at Fenton’s Cove, not realizing that the fog bank usually made it not only a shoot in bad light, but also a shoot where they’d freeze their dang nipples off. If they stayed till October, maybe. That’s when the sun came out around here, after the summer tourists had given up all hope and left. But this woman, with her honeyed hair and that perfect long nose, those lips that were quirking into something that looked like it was close to a smile, she’d be shivering in her two-piece soon enough.
“Howdy,” he said politely. If his ball cap had been forward-facing, he would have touched the brim, but as it was he left his arms at his sides.
She turned to face him, and in that motion his heart dropped to the old floorboards and went right through, straight down to the dust and packed earth below, not stopping until it hit the world’s molten core.
Adele Darling. Out of freaking nowhere.
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