Just Like Home(35)

She stared at the road in front of her and tried to have a thought, but none would come. Snatches of songs swam through her head, none of them catching. She was far from herself, far from the idea of a self, far from the thing she had seen and the things she had heard and the thing she had cleaned off the woman who she could not, in this moment, pretend to know at all.

She stayed there at the stop sign, her foot on the brake and her hands on the wheel, her breath coming slow and shallow, until someone pulled up behind her and waited long enough to honk. Then she drove, because it was the only thing to do in a car that was running.





CHAPTER TWELVE


Vera had never been a drinker. She didn’t like the slippery feeling of alcohol in her brain, the threat of drunken carelessness.

She had a long-held suspicion that drunkenness would be a threat to her. It was a suspicion which had been confirmed by that short-lived bartending job she hadn’t been able to keep. She’d watched people trust each other without thinking, watched them share secrets and space, watched them melt into each other and exchange room keys with strangers. Strangers who could be anyone once a hotel room door was closed. Strangers who could ask anything, say anything, do anything.

It wasn’t for her.

But Vera needed a place that wasn’t the house her father had built, a place where she could catch her breath and eat something other than a microwaved meal from her mother’s lonely freezer and drink something other than metallic tap water or lemonade. Anything to drink but lemonade. Most crucially, beyond anything else, she needed a place where she could sit without being noticed. Without being remarked upon.

She needed a bar.

Nobody in a bar wanted to look at her. In the right bar, she could be alone without having to be alone. In the right bar, she could move among people without having to pretend to be one of them.

That was precisely what she needed: a moment alone. Not the kind of alone she felt when she was pouring lemonade for her mother, and not the kind of alone she felt in her childhood bedroom, with the walls of the house pressing in close around her like a cupped palm.

She needed a moment alone that didn’t feel like a punishment.

Vera drove for an hour without bothering to notice where she was headed—the only thing that mattered was that she was going away. After that hour had passed, she pulled off the road and looked up local bars on her phone. There was one a block away, and it sounded like the kind of place that promised to be dimly lit and sparsely populated.

Perfect.

She hoped that she looked tired enough to avoid having to show anyone an ID with the name Crowder on it. She could have changed that name—probably should have, certainly should have. But she was a Crowder, just like him. How was she supposed to give that up?

Vera walked into the Cat’s Medallion with her head down and her hands in her pockets. She took a stool in the far back corner of the bar, near the wall but not near the entrance to the bathrooms—the spot where no one wants to sit and no one wants to look. The place was a little too well-lit, but otherwise, it was perfect. She kicked her feet back and forth between the stool and the bar, feeling the squeak of her shoes against metal and wood.

The bartender clocked her right away with a salesman’s intent. He was a young guy with a cool enough haircut and bright enough eyes that Vera would have put money on him being from somewhere that wasn’t Around Here. It was too much to hope that he wouldn’t know about her father, but she hoped anyway. Maybe if she paid cash, he wouldn’t connect her to her father. He was short, puffed out with marshmallowy muscles as if to make up for it. His smile was the kind of sharp that made Vera think the word amateur without knowing what, precisely, she was judging him for.

He made too much eye contact with her. It was as if he hadn’t noticed that she didn’t want to be looked at. She frowned at him and he just smiled right back at her. The smile was too sharp, and it didn’t reach his eyes, which were filled with a blank flavor of anxiety that let Vera know she hadn’t chosen the right bar at all.

He was going to be relentless. She could tell. This was a kid who prided himself on remembering customers, who would want to make conversation, who probably thought of himself as a charmer, who probably thought that he got tips because of his personality and not because his customers were scared to be assholes. Sure enough, he put a glass of water in front of her and leaned his elbows against the bar as if they were both people.

Vera did not want this. She did not want to be a person. She did not want his smile or his elbows or the elaborate mixed drink he was going to try to convince her to try.

“A glass of white wine,” she said. “Dry. Whatever you like best.”

The bartender winked at her, made a clicking noise with the corner of his mouth, and Vera felt a vicious flutter in her belly.

Something old moved in there, something she’d spent years ignoring, something James Fucking Duvall had woken up with the smooth new skin of his belly, stretching outside his truck.

Foulness.

Reckless.

“Nothing wrong with keeping it simple,” the bartender said, pouring the wine with an unnecessary flourish of his wrist. He set the bottle on the bar and turned the label toward her with the kind of precision that she could tell he prided himself on. His forearms were heavily veined, his fingernails short and clean and whole, and Vera clenched her jaw at the sight of them.

Being home was pulling something out of her that she didn’t want. Not worth it, she reminded herself. The bar wasn’t air-conditioned. In the unmitigated heat and humidity of the day, condensation was already forming on the side of the wineglass.