Taft

A girl walked into the bar. I was hunched over, trying to open a box of Dewar's without my knife. I'd bent the blade the day before prying loose an old metal ice cube tray that had frozen solid to the side of the freezer. The box was sealed up tight with strapping tape. She waited there quietly, not asking for anything, not leaning on the bar. She held her purse with two hands and stood still. I could see her sort of upside down from where I was. She was on the small side, pale and average-looking, with a big puffy winter jacket on over her dress. I watched her look around at the stuff up on the walls, black-and-white pictures of Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf in cracked frames, a knocked-off street sign from Elvis Presley Boulevard, the mounted head of a skinny deer. She pretended to be interested in things so she didn't have to look at anybody. Not that there was much of anybody to look at. It was February, Wednesday, four in the afternoon. The dead time of the deadest season, which is why I wasn't in any rush. The tape was making me crazy. Before I even got the box open, Cyndi walked out of the kitchen and headed right for her. "What can I get you?'' Cyndi said. Then I straightened up because the girl in the puffy coat wasn't of a drinking age. She was eighteen, nineteen. Could've been younger. When you'd spent as much of your life in a bar as I had, you recognized those things right away. Cyndi, she knew nothing about bars other than getting drunk in them. She was just a girl herself, and girls were no judge of girls. "Get her a Coke,'' I said, and headed over to them. But the girl put up her hand and I stopped walking just like that. It was a funny thing. "I'm here about a job,'' she said. Well, then I could see it. The way she was overdressed. The way she didn't seem to be meeting anybody but didn't seem like she was there to pick anybody up either. We got plenty of girls through there. We got the college girls looking to make money to pay the bills who wound up trying to read their books by the little light next to the cash register when things were slow, and then we got the other kind, older ones who liked the music and liked to pour themselves shots behind the bar. Those were the ones who walked out in the middle of their shift with some strange customer on a Friday night when the place was packed and then showed up three days later, asking could they have their job back. Those were the ones the regulars always took to. "You over at the college?'' I said, and Cyndi looked at her hard because she didn't like the college girls. The girl nodded. A piece of her straight hair slipped out from behind her ear and she tucked it back into place. "How old are you?'' I said. "Twenty,'' she said, so quickly that I figured she'd practiced saying it in front of a mirror. Twenty. Twenty. Twenty. She didn't look twenty, but I would bet money that her ID was fake. It didn't so much matter in Tennessee. Seventeen could serve a drink as long as they kept it clear of their mouths. "Any restaurant experience?'' I looked at her hard, trying to tell her age from her face. "Ever work in a bar?'' I was out of those employment forms. I made a mental note to order a box. She nodded again. Quiet girl. "Not around here, though. I'm not from around here.'' Cyndi and I stood there on the other side of the bar, waiting for her to say where she was from but she didn't. "Where?'' Cyndi said. "East,'' the girl said, even though that could mean anywhere from Nashville to China. East was the world if you went with it far enough. I didn't think she was trying to be difficult on purpose. The way she stood so straight and kept her voice low and respectful, it was plain that she needed the job. I liked her, though I didn't have a reason. Even when I just saw her standing there, when she put up her hand and for a second itPatchett, Ann is the author of 'Taft' with ISBN 9780345433534 and ISBN 034543353X.