Shelter(25)

*

The twenty-dollar bill is for emergencies. He keeps it in his wallet, folded tightly into a square, hidden behind a stack of old photographs and receipts. He can’t remember how long it’s been there, but he knows what it’s for. Things of an urgent, unexpected nature—a category to which alcohol doesn’t belong. Tonight, however, is an exception. Tonight, he considers it necessary. Urgent, even, in its own way. The question is: Where? Twenty dollars hardly buys anything these days. He needs to find a dive, a real one, the kind of place where a twenty can still get him good and drunk. Kyung makes one left turn after another, tracing the town’s grid to its outermost edges. The cell phone on his dashboard keeps blinking, the red light angry and insistent. He’s only been gone for an hour, but Gillian has already left five messages. When it rings again, he turns it off and decides to tell her he misplaced it. Kyung has a habit of forgetting where he left his phone, something they’ve argued about in the past. She says he should be more careful with it in case she needs to reach him, but he’s willing to risk an argument later rather than explain why he had to leave now.

Just past the veterans’ hospital, Kyung pulls over at an intersection where there’s a bar on each corner. One is closed, the metal window gates shuttered for the night. Two others appear to be topless bars. The fourth, MacLarens, has a long green sign above the entrance with faded shamrocks that anchor each end like quotation marks. FINE IRISH PUB, the sign says, although the cracked front window appears to be held together by nothing more than duct tape and hope. When he opens the door, he’s relieved to find it nearly deserted. The only other customers are two old men playing keno beside the jukebox, staring at numbers as they tumble across a screen. Their table is full of empty beer glasses and scraps of crumpled paper—litter from their previous games. Kyung sits down at the far end of the bar, keeping his head down as he orders a whiskey on the rocks.

“Kind?” a woman asks.

“Kind, what?”

“What kind of whiskey?”

Her tone is impatient; her accent, crude and South Boston. Kyung looks up, momentarily stunned silent by the woman’s wrinkled appearance, badly camouflaged under layers of girlish frost. Frosted hair, frosted eyes, frosted lips.

“Cheapest you have.” He tries to unfold the embarrassing origami of his money before she has a chance to see. “How much is that, by the way?”

“Four-fifty.” She pours him the equivalent of a double from a plastic bottle of Black Velvet, forgetting the ice—a mistake he doesn’t bother to correct.

“You all right?”

Kyung drinks slowly, not certain why a stranger would ask. What about him makes her think he’s not?

“I’m just tired.” He rubs his eyes as proof.

“That oughta help,” she says, motioning toward the whiskey.

She looks at him as if she expects their conversation to continue, but Kyung can’t think of anything else to say. The standard questions—How’s business? How are you doing?—seem useless. The bar is nearly empty and she works there for a living, so he already knows the answers. Besides, he doesn’t have the energy for a stranger right now. He spent his entire day preparing for Jin’s arrival, hoping that his efforts might be appreciated, or even just acknowledged. Instead, his father talked down to him in his own house, in front of his own child, when all he was trying to do was be kind. Kyung knows he was pushing too hard, asking one question after the next when Jin clearly wanted to be left alone. But the role of doting Korean son doesn’t come naturally to him. He’s still figuring out how to try. They’ll never get through this if Jin doesn’t try too.

The woman walks away, scattering coasters across the length of the scratched wood bar, occasionally shuffling them like a deck of cards. When she reaches the opposite side of the room, she stops in front of the television set. The Red Sox are on again. The Red Sox are always on in this town.

“Jesus. He’s put on weight,” she says, staring at the dreadlocked Puerto Rican at bat. “For nine million a year, you’d think he’d go on a diet.” She turns around, seemingly eager for someone, anyone, to agree with her. Kyung looks down at his drink.

According to the coasters she left, MacLarens is Marlboro’s favorite bar, an unlikely claim trapped in the speech balloon of a grinning leprechaun. It seems more like Marlboro’s oldest bar. The place shows all the telltale signs of age: A wood floor that pitches and slopes as if the ground beneath it is sinking. A pair of rickety pool tables lined with threadbare green felt. On the wall nearest him, a dozen autographed photos of celebrities hang from a rail, but when Kyung scans their faces, he doesn’t know who they are, or who they were supposed to be when their pictures were snapped. He takes another drink, a longer one this time, closing his eyes as the whiskey warms his throat.

It’s been years since he went out to a bar like this. Although he likes alcohol, he’s never really enjoyed bars, not even in grad school when his roommates made the rounds every weekend. Occasionally, they dragged him along, but Kyung hated all the noise and shouting, the absence of anything resembling personal space. It’s strange that he and Gillian met at a bar, a detail about their past that still embarrasses him. She was working at a sports lounge back then, where her uniform was a tank top, jean shorts, and a push-up bra that squeezed everything north. Tits up to her neck, his roommates said, daring him to ask her out.