“Nice names.”
“—I don’t even care who Sigourney Weaver is. I just … want a drink.” I smacked my lips. “That’s all I want. All I want to do now.” I looked him in the eyes. “Whatever else I might have been before … it’s gone now. Okay?” I patted him on the shoulder, almost sarcastically, like I was giving him reassurance in the locker room after a hard defeat.
“Okay,” Harry said as I went for the door. He didn’t say anything else.
The guy who could predict anything I was going to say, could counter any argument I might make …
He didn’t say a damned thing.
He just let me walk out so I could go get stinking drunk.
And that was when I knew I was right.
It really was over.
I was done.
35.
“Hey,” Cassidy said, looking from her computer monitor as I came into the grandma’s living room. “I was just reviewing tape, and I think—”
I held up a hand to shut her up, and pinpointed the door most likely to be the front door. There was a quilt on the back of the couch, and I grabbed it, wrapping myself up as I went. It looked dark beyond the cracks of the curtains, no natural light shining in, which meant it was almost certainly well below freezing out there, and my clothing was pretty frigging useless against the weather by now.
“Where are you going?” Eilish asked, emerging from a bathroom as I stalked past toward the door.
“Sienna’s going to get a drink,” Harry answered from behind me. I did not look back as I opened the front door, which was helpfully unlocked.
The subzero air hit me full in the face as I stepped out onto a quiet street. Squarish, boxy houses stood all up one side of the street and down the other, but we were situated on a corner; the street came to an intersection to my right, and it looked like a main road. US Highway 61, if I was not mistaken, which snaked through St. Paul heading north.
I picked my direction and headed out onto the main drag of 61. The area was a little run down, but not terrible, and as I reached the corner I could see a half dozen bars just from where I stood.
There was one with a neon sign that said “Pete’s,” and although the T was burned out, I got the idea. I thought, briefly, of being a defiant ass and just ignoring Harry’s guidance, but I wanted a drink a lot more than I wanted to get into a tangle with the cops, so I made myself a makeshift cowl with the purloined quilt and headed toward Pete’s—Pee’s, without the T, actually—crossing 61 at a jog, my blanket trailing behind me like a cape.
Stepping into Pete’s was like dragging myself into a junkyard. There was no pretense about this place; the bare concrete were floors unrepentantly cracked, and the old plaster on the walls suggested to me that St. Paul’s building inspection team was either falling down on their jobs or their code was at third-world standards. A motley collection of old signs and beer memorabilia was the primary decoration, but none of it looked like it had come from this century.
I bellied up to the bar, encouraged by the many, many bottles on the shelves behind the bartender, and tried to ignore the collection of older, biker-looking dudes at one end of the bar, a couple of leather-clad gals with them giving me the eye, like I was going to steal their men or something. Draped in a freaking quilt and wearing clothes that looked like they’d been barbecued. Ladies, if I could steal your man dressed looking like this, you have bigger problems.
The bartender was a gruff old guy with a squint. “What’ll you have?”
“Got any scotch?” I asked. He nodded. “Whatever’s good, then.” As he walked away to fetch me a drink, I fumbled for my wallet and found it gone. That was going to be a problem at some point.
A jukebox played a classic rock tune, maybe Roy Orbison, though it was hard for me to tell. I put my elbow on the bar and then my face on my hand. There were no TVs in here, which was good, because I needed the outside world to intrude on my serious drinking like I needed to get into a brawl with all those old biker guys. Sure, I’d kick their asses, but what the hell good would that do? The Terminator and the Predator would still be out there. All I’d have done would be adversely de-stimulate the St. Paul bar economy and inject a few Medicare dollars into the local hospital. And Pee’s (I sniffed; the name almost fit) seemed like it could use all the help it could get staying open.
The bartender dropped off a drink for me and asked, “Get you anything else?”
“A refill, once I go through this,” I said, and he nodded, then meandered off, probably planning to return once I’d done some damage to my scotch. I hoisted it, preparing to drink; it wasn’t going to take long.
“You’re her,” a cracked voice said, and I almost slopped scotch down the front of me. I turned my head to look, and found myself staring at one of the biker gals. She was all done up in boots and with a leather jacket all her own, faded straw hair and looks that had probably really been something once, before now. Now she was a biker grandma who was trying real hard to just look like an aging, cool, biker mom. No amount of hair dye could hide the wrinkles and hard lines, though, and her sandpapery voice suggested cigarettes had been a constant fixture in her life.
“I’m a her,” I said, holding my scotch just inches from my lips. The heavy smell of alcohol rose into my nostrils, begging me to complete the circle, to dump it back down my throat, to let the healing begin. Or at least the numbing effect.
She sat down next to me, unasked, and I started to favor her with a vicious look that would send her skittering away. She didn’t skitter, though, instead looking around, left and right, surreptitiously, like she was about to confess something that she’d rather no one hear. “I know I don’t look it, but I’m a grandmother.”
I stared at her, trying to contain my shock. “You don’t say.”
“I had a baby at seventeen,” she said, keeping her eyes forward. “A little girl. Her daddy and I used to sit down by the river in Minneapolis … so I called her Mississippi … Missi for short.”
“Original,” I said, scotch still perched in front of my lips, wondering what the hell this had to do with me.
“She got married to a man who works for Lifetime Fitness out in Chanhassen,” she went on, treating me to the worst dinner theater I’d ever seen—because the dinner theater out in Chanhassen (actually a real thing) was quite good. Also, my scotch was my dinner, so that didn’t add any points to the current experience. “And they had a little baby of their own. Called her Clara.”