Tracy helped Greenie light the candles, then she Windexed the whole bar and wiped it down while he did inventory on the wine. When she returned to her stool, he handed her something that didn’t taste like Sprite.
“Little something extra in there for ya,” he said.
“Is that vodka?” she said.
She sucked it down to ice quick before any of the servers came by.
“I used to work for Absolut,” Tracy said, nodding at the bottle behind Greenie.
“Yeah?”
“I worked a few events for them,” she explained. “I was gonna get into marketing, go corporate with them. But they wanted to relocate me. They wanted me to go to New York City.” She spun an earring between her thumb and index finger. “But I said no can do. This was back when my mom was sick.”
A drink ticket appeared on Greenie’s machine and he ripped it off and speared it. He poured a martini for a server who came by for it a moment later.
Steve looked at the drink. “I said up, Greenie. Geez, man.”
Greenie pulled the ticket back from the stack and examined it in front of a candle. “My fault. It’ll just be a minute.”
Tracy waited until Steve had disappeared into the kitchen then she spoke with a lowered voice, “Steve can be a real prick.” She said it conspiratorially, leaning near to Greenie; it was her and him against the rest of them.
“These guys are real uptight,” Greenie diplomatically agreed. “I don’t know if I can hack this place.”
“You’ll get used to it. It can be funny sometimes.”
Tracy told Greenie the story of the valet kid, who just a few weeks earlier had been tackled by several policemen while entering a BMW in the lot behind the restaurant, on Chippewa. The kid tried to tell the cops he was a restaurant employee entering the car legally, but the cops weren’t buying it. They walked him into the restaurant in cuffs and Tracy had to vouch for him. They’d all had a good laugh about that.
Greenie laughed now too, and it was big and pleasant.
“See? You’ll like it here,” Tracy said, feeling triumphant. “Give it a little time.”
She went to the bathroom. She kept a cosmetics case in the cabinet beneath the sink, behind the stacks of toilet paper. She pulled out her lipstick and applied it. Her hair was full and nicely highlighted. She did the highlights herself. The year after graduating high school, she’d done a semester of cosmetology school and still had a knack for color. She’d dyed her mother’s grays a nice honey blond for nearly a decade until it had all fallen out.
Tracy brushed bronze eye shadow onto her brow bone. She had been at the restaurant for several years and often found guests to flirt with, but Greenie was the first staff member she cared to impress. He was too young, she knew that, young men weren’t good to her, and for that matter she generally preferred married men. Or, not necessarily the men themselves, but the victory in it, the validation. But Greenie was something new. Beneath those muscles and the spiked hair there were eyes that were so pale and soft. There was someone in there who seemed a bit unsure of himself, a bit lonely in a nice way.
Tracy returned to the bar.
Greenie poured her another drink and when he handed it to her he winked with his whole face.
“What’d you say you studied in school again, Greenie?”
“Sports management.” He balled up a bar rag and threw it toward a garbage can at the other end of the bar. It loosened in the air and landed with a flop several inches shy of the can. Tracy liked how he moved. She swung her feet from the stool and let the backs of her shoes fall free from her heels.
“I thought about doing something in sports too for a while,” she said. “Broadcasting.”
“Oh?”
“I took a class in it. My teacher said I had the right look. It would have been weird hours though, like really early mornings sometimes.” She split her ponytail between her two hands and pulled to tighten it.
“What sports do you do?” she said.
“Nothing serious anymore, but I did swimming and basketball. Captain of the swim team, three years in a row.”
“I never learned how to swim,” Tracy said. She blew her nose into a cocktail napkin.
“Is that right?” Greenie said. “I thought everybody did swim lessons when they’re little.”
“Not I,” said Tracy. “Maybe you can teach me.”
Greenie smiled. She admired his teeth. A few too many for the size of his head, she thought, but all of them very straight and very white. She’d noticed this about others his age and wondered what the secret was.
In the kitchen, Tracy found Chef standing over a Sports Illustrated magazine and eating a ham sandwich. He was wearing a wrinkled and bloody white apron over a Bills jersey, and green kitchen scrubs. The collar of his jersey looked too tight around his neck and the lettering in the back was pale pink—Tracy guessed he had done his own laundry and washed the colors in hot. His black Crocs were dusted with flour and she could see the pale top of his feet through the ventilation holes.
Tracy tore a piece of bread from a loaf that had been sitting out and gone cool and hard. “Don’t mind if I do.” She dipped the crust straight into the soup kettle.
“You like that Greenie kid or something?” Chef said without looking up from the magazine.
“Nah,” said Tracy.
She ate too much bread and felt less happy with her outfit.
The radio was on and the guys on 93.9 were between songs and weather advisories, talking football now. Over the weekend, the Bills had traded their second-string quarterback for a wide receiver, and everyone had their opinion about that. Tracy spun and walked out of the kitchen, the swinging doors crashing behind her before settling back into place. Sometimes the kitchen guys whistled at her, sometimes they didn’t.
With only twenty minutes left until close, the restaurant was nearly empty and the servers had gathered at the bar to cash out when Tracy heard the jangle of bells at the front door.
She slid off her barstool and met four girls at the door. They wore tiny dresses beneath North Face coats. Tracy didn’t offer menus right away.
“Four of you?” she said. She tried to stand wide between the girls and the bar so that Greenie wouldn’t be able to see them. The petite black-haired girl had glitter on her cleavage. She said, “We just wanted to get one drink.”
Tracy made a disapproving face. “We close in ten or fifteen, but there’s a nice bar two blocks down and they’re open later. They have fun cocktails, chocolate and stuff. We just have a really basic bar.”
“That’s fine,” the girl said, then, “You trying to chase us off or something?” She wore the dumb, defiant expression of a six-year-old.
Tracy followed the girls to the bar and said, “Card them,” to Greenie.
She went back to her hostess stand and watched Greenie pour drinks for the girls. She overheard him ask if they were students. They were, seniors at Buff State. Tracy didn’t like the way they talked to Greenie; smiling big at his jokes, leaning their breasts all over the place, their laughter like metal on metal, the sharpening of blades. They talked about graduation and how they were all moving away after, for jobs in New York or Boston.
At eleven o’clock on the dot, Tracy lowered the volume of the music and she went to the bar and started to blow out the candles.
“Kids,” she said after they’d left, giving Greenie a weary look, as though they could share this sentiment. “They don’t have a clue, do they?”
“They left me a nice tip,” Greenie said.
Something in Tracy smarted. “Probably all on Daddy’s tab, you know those Buff State girls,” she said. “I’ll be out front when you’re ready.”
She smoked a cigarette while she waited for Greenie to close out. The air was dense with cold and dried salt crunched under her feet. The moon was low and thin. She pretended to be on her phone when she saw him approaching.
“Bills game is tied at halftime,” she said, snapping her phone shu
t.
“Is that right?” Greenie said. “I might pop into a bar to catch the second half.” He danced athletically on his toes, underdressed for the cold in just a gray hoodie over his work clothing. He pulled the hood over his head, arranged it at his cheeks. “Oh,” he said quickly, “Scratch that, I don’t want to make you wait til the game’s over to drive me.”
“You know,” Tracy said, “I just got a flat-screen a few weeks ago. It hasn’t gotten near enough use. A couple of my neighbors might come over to watch the end of the game and have a beer. You want to come?”
Greenie rocked the crown of his head back and forth within the hoodie.
“Or I could just run you home first.” Tracy said casually. She ran her tongue over her lips and followed Greenie’s gaze across Chippewa. Neon pinks and greens lit the entrance of Venue. The girls from the bar were midway through a line of people waiting to enter the club. A man stomped and clapped his gloves together behind his smoking soft pretzel cart. An airplane inched across the night sky, winking red.
“Do whatever you want,” Tracy said. She reached into her purse for another cigarette.
“I’ll come over,” Greenie said.
“Whiskey or beer?” she called from her kitchen.
“Whichever you’re having,” he said.
Tracy hoped he didn’t notice the smell in her house. She had run the vacuum sweeper that morning. There was something rank and rotting in her vacuum and it made the house stink like a dairy farm every time she swept. She kept meaning to replace the bag and clean the nozzle. Well, at least the carpet looked clean, anyway. She stared at the door of her refrigerator and pulled down a magnet from a friend that said: “I’m Like Fine Wine: Aged, Sophisticated, and Full-Bodied.” Tracy glared at it in her palm then set it upside down on the counter. She centered the Polaroid of herself and her cousin Shelly, taken when they were children, their eyeballs soft and maroon in the old photograph.
She brought a bottle of whiskey out with two tumblers and set them on the coffee table. The radiator in the corner hissed and spat a rusty vapor into the room as it kicked on.
“My granddad played for the Bills,” she said.
“That right? What’d he play?”
“Running back. He got his knee all tangled up at the start of his second season though, and never played again.”
“So do you get to lots of games then?” Greenie said.
“No, I’ve never been.”
“Really? Even with your granddad and everything?”
“Nah, he wasn’t around much, and me and my mom couldn’t afford it.”
“It’s a racket,” Greenie agreed. “Fifty bucks for a nosebleed.”
Tracy wondered if this meant he was one of those guys who suited up in Zumba pants, a jersey, and a foam finger just to watch games at home.
“I’m saving up to go, though,” Tracy said. “Saving up for a seat at the lower-level sideline. I’m going next fall for my birthday. I figure if I’m gonna get to a game, I want the best seat in the house.”
“How much do those run?”
“Six, eight hundred.”
Greenie whistled softly through his teeth. “That’s something else about your granddad. Too bad about the injury. What’d he do after that?”
Tracy said, “I don’t know. Not too much of anything.”
After the Bills won, the two of them did a celebratory shot, then another one for the hell of it.
“Your place is really big,” Greenie said.
“Yeah, me and my mom shared it for a long time. It’s the right size for two, too big for just little old me. I’m looking to buy a smaller place.”
“Yeah,” Greenie said. “The Southtowns are the pits.”
“Oh, I’m not talking a different neighborhood. I don’t aim to leave the Southtowns. Just buy a smaller place and use the extra money to open a business.”
“Oh yeah?” Greenie was scrolling through the channel guide and didn’t look away from the television.
“I wish I had something decent to offer you to eat,” Tracy said. She had cooked a lot for her mother in those last few years, and their refrigerator was always full of rich, cheesy leftovers in a nine-by-thirteen pan. These days, Tracy ate strange little meals by herself above the sink; mayonnaise on crackers, cold pasta from a can, a stack of pepperoni.
“I’m gonna order from Paglio’s,” she said. “What toppings do you like and how much will you eat?”
Greenie wrestled his shoes off and put his feet up on the edge of the coffee table. His socks had a yellow line across the toe. “Sausage and green peppers. And I’m probably good for three pieces.”
Tracy dialed the pizza place on her phone and while she was on hold she covered the mouthpiece and said to Greenie, “I’m not keeping you, am I? I could run you home right now.”
“Nah,” he said.
Once the pizza had been ordered, she refreshed his drink, then announced that she was going to take a shower.
“I hate smelling like restaurant,” she said.
She tossed a towel over the bathroom linoleum where it was peeling up in the corner, exposing rows of mucus-yellow glue and rotting wood. Mildew bloomed across the ceiling, but there was nothing she could do about that. She hoped her shower wouldn’t blare like a foghorn like it occasionally did when she first turned it on. After her shower, she put on a small pair of shorts and a tank top with no bra. She applied just a little bit of makeup, not enough that he would notice. She had the beginnings of one varicose vein on the back of her left knee. She spread a Band-Aid over it. She went out to the living room with her hair still dripping.
Greenie had finished his drink. She poured him another one and they ate pizza, then he pulled her tank top off over her head and stared at her breasts for a moment before touching them.
Tracy got on top. She watched herself in the reflection of the window. Greenie was very drunk. She pulled his hands up from where they rested beside him on the couch to place them at her waist so that it looked better.
He went to the bathroom afterward then said, “Do you mind if I check my email?”
She showed him to her desk in the dining room, where he parked his bare ass on the folding chair in front of her laptop. Tracy tried to sit on his lap, and he scooted the chair back to accommodate her.
“What happened to your leg?” He pointed at the Band-Aid.
“I cut myself shaving.”
He clicked on her Internet browser, which immediately opened the job-aptitude website she’d been looking at earlier that day.
“What’s this?”
“Nothing,” she said. “Well... it’s just this site that asks you a bunch of questions about yourself, your personality and stuff, and it tells you what you should be.”
“What did it say you should be?”
“I didn’t finish it yet.”
Greenie opened a new window and checked his email. He signed out of his email account and signed into Facebook.
“You like that stuff?” she said.
“What, Facebook?” Greenie shrugged and scrolled through his newsfeed. He yawned into his fist. “Mind if I get something to drink?”
Tracy got off his lap. She followed him into the kitchen, where he stared into her refrigerator for a minute, then he reached for the gallon of milk and bottle of chocolate syrup. Tracy handed him a glass. Greenie squeezed a noisy black slurp of chocolate into a glass of milk and stirred up a muddy little tornado. He pointed at the rotary phone on the wall. “I didn’t know people still had those.”
“My mother’s,” Tracy said. “I just haven’t gotten around to disconnecting the thing.”
Greenie drank his milk quickly then returned to the couch and fell heavily onto it.
Tracy returned to her computer, reopened her job-aptitude test and finished the remaining questions. She clicked “Find Results” and waited a moment. A list appeared: “Administrative Assistant, Early Childhood Care, Shopkeeper, Bookkeeper, Customer Service.”
&n
bsp; Tracy went to the kitchen to pour herself some water and found that Greenie had spilled some of his chocolate milk on the linoleum. She wiped it up with her American flag dishtowel and ate a handful of Frosted Flakes.
At her computer, she closed the results window and refreshed the test. Perhaps, she thought, she didn’t always adhere strictly to her routine; she could be spontaneous. She reached the section on creativity and considered her outfit from earlier; maybe she did have a strong sense of style.
She submitted the new set of answers and the “Results” window popped up a moment later: “Public Relations, Performing Arts, Arts Management, Interior Design, Fashion Design.”
Tracy unplugged her laptop and took it to the living room. Most of the gel was gone from Greenie’s hair and it was soft across his forehead. He slept with his lips parted and a sliver of one of his eyeballs was exposed through the lid. He was only wearing his boxers, and his thighs were thin and pale. Tracy faced the laptop toward him and brightened the screen.
“Hey, look what it says, Greenie,” she said. She took his shoulder hard in her hand and shook it. “Look what this thing says I should be.”
THE RICHEST HILL ON EARTH
Jim didn’t care too much for Butte, with all those hills and the headframes that loomed over town like black skeletons. Unlike other mining towns, the operation in Butte had taken place in residential areas, and remnants of the industry could be found right outside the window of Jim’s apartment. Rust and shadows and “No Trespassing” signs. He also didn’t like the little Bert Mooney Airport that he’d flown into, with the greeter in a red suit who had practically forced a local chocolate upon him, but couldn’t tell him the address of the nearest liquor store. Oh, and of course there was the nursing school located at the center of town, with the young students who wouldn’t give Jim a second look, except when it was one of foreboding distaste. It seemed he’d reached an age where eye contact with an undergraduate was considered either a threat, or just plain laughable.
Another Place You've Never Been Page 7
