Page 85 of Handful

By eight there were people dancing between the tables who had absolutely no business dancing, and I let them, because it was my floor and my rules and tonight the rule was yes.

My parents had flown in from Vermont. My father has tenure, three degrees, and a lifelong policy against using the word proud in any sentence concerning his children. He didn’t say much. He walked the whole eight feet of the bar, ran one hand down the walnut the entire length of it, and stopped at the sign.

“The Wickham,” he said. “Charming, faithless, ruins everything, and people line up to buy him a drink regardless.” He took in the roaring, packed room. “I always said he’d make a marvelous bar.” Then he spotted the shelf—the row of battered novels wedged between the rye and the gin—and his whole face opened. “Are those novels?”

“Decor.”

“Those are someone’s reading copies.” He leaned in, delighted, a man who could spot a loved book at forty paces. “Whose?”

“Long story.”

My mother, meanwhile, had Jamie backed against the stockroom door, interrogating him about our distributor with the focus of a woman taking a deposition. The markup on the house gin. Who negotiated it? Does she sleep? Jamie’s face begged me, over her shoulder, for rescue. I let him drown a little. It builds character.

Emma facetimed from Chicago. I carried the phone around the room so my lawyer sister could see what I’d made of myself, and she went quiet. “Wait. Is that him? Behind your bar?”

“That’s him.”

“Huh,” she said, and left it there.

I’d staffed the night properly. I didn’t need anybody. But Jamie hit the weeds around nine the way you do—the bar four deep, tickets stacking—and before I could even cross to help, Tyler was already through the gap in the bar with his sleeves shoved up, and Fewin was beside him, Fewin who’d come in on his own night off and planted himself behind my bar.

“Just here to help, boss,” Fewin said, already building two Old Fashioneds. “Place looks incredible, by the way. The ceiling. Did you do the ceiling?”

“She did all of it,” Tyler said, not looking up, stirring. “Don’t get her started on the ceiling, we’ll be here till close.”

And then I just watched him for a second, because I could.

He’s good. All those months of him at my bar learning my entire pour spec while I thought he was reading about manners. He stirred, he didn’t shake. He let the number land last. He built a Manhattan I would put my own name on. And his sleeves were up, and there it was, the thing I still hadn’t gotten used to and was in no hurry to.

My name. All over him.

Every one of those ridiculous pin-up girls I’d traced in the dark a lifetime ago carried it now—in a banner, along a hip, tucked in a corner. And under the shirt, plain, no banner, over his heart, where I get to put my hand on it. And on the back of the cut hanging in our house: Property of Austen.

I love it. I love that the man who spent his whole life making sure no woman could say she owned him now walks around with me written into every inch of his skin, where the whole club can read it.

“You arranged the bikes,” I said, when I finally got a second next to him behind the bar.

“Don’t know what you mean. I was getting ice.”

“Tyler.”

“Couldn’t say.” He passed two glasses across to Jamie without looking. “Dutch likes a parade. You’d have to ask him.”

“Forty men flipped their visors up on a hand signal. That’s not Dutch liking a parade. That’s formation practice in a parking lot.”

“Sounds like a lot of work.” He finally looked at me, and there it was, the boyish grin, the one that started all of this trouble at a wedding, back when I told him my name was Ruby. “I was getting ice, Austen. Ask anybody.”

“Hey.” He nudged a fresh Manhattan across the walnut to me, mine, made to my own spec in my own bar. “Drink your drink, boss. It’s a good night.”

Epilogue 3

❧

— Handful —

Nine months later

The two of them had their heads together over by the empty stage, my old lady and Glitch’s, and they were laughing about something in the low, conspiratorial way women laugh when whatever it is would get a man arrested, and I could not for the life of me hear a word of it.