The Familiar Dark(15)

“Junie,” I said.

“Yeah, yeah,” Sam said, snapping his fingers. “That’s right. Junie.” He glanced down at his beer. “Sure am sorry.”

“Thanks,” I said, watching the red flush work its way up his neck, visible even in the semidark.

“What can I get you?” the bartender asked. He stared at me without smiling.

“I’m good,” I told him.

He shook his head. “Don’t take up a seat at my bar unless you’re gonna order something.” I vaguely recognized him from my time with Jimmy Ray. Mark, Mike, some M name. Back then, he’d worn his brown hair in a buzz cut but it was longer now, gathered in a stubby ponytail at the nape of his neck. A single gold hoop glinted in his ear. I imagined a certain type of woman would find him attractive, one who took a quick look instead of paying attention to the details. Because he was the kind of good-looking that didn’t hold up to close inspection—dark stubble failing to disguise a weak chin, small eyes set too close together, and a thin-lipped leer masquerading as a smile. He’d always been an asshole and apparently hadn’t changed with the passing years. The kind of guy who took a tiny bit of power and inflated it into something he used to hammer everyone around him.

I peered at him. “Are you for real? Is there a line outside I missed somehow?”

Sam put his hand on my knee, squeezed gently. “She’ll have a beer,” he said. When the bartender turned his back on us, Sam rolled his eyes. “Matt takes his job serious.”

“Does he own this place now?”

Sam shook his head. “No, Jimmy Ray’s got this place.”

My heart thumped hard in my chest, and I took a sip of the beer Matt had placed in front of me. The foam tickled my lip, and I almost coughed at the bitter sting of it. I hadn’t had a drink since Junie was born, not a single sip. It was on my unwritten list of rules. Turned out I’d lost the taste for it over the years and I pushed the bottle away.

“What are you doing here?” Sam asked. “Seems like an odd choice. You know . . . with everything.”

I shrugged. “I needed to talk to Jimmy Ray about something. Heard this might be a good place to catch him.”

Sam gave me a sideways glance. “You may not be his favorite person right now.”

“What?” I said, startled. “Why?” I couldn’t imagine why I was even on Jimmy Ray’s radar anymore. We’d given each other a wide berth in the years since we’d split, the occasional mocking wink from across the grocery store parking lot as close as he’d come to acknowledging my existence.

Sam opened his mouth to answer, but one of the strippers sidled up behind him, slung a skinny arm around his neck. “Hey, baby,” she said. “Buy me a drink?” She pressed her body into Sam’s back, and his face heated red again. Maybe that was why he had a beard, an attempt to hide his tendency to blush, a reaction that probably earned him plenty of shit from Jimmy Ray’s crowd.

“I’m in the middle of something,” he said, shrugging her off.

She pouted at him, even though she was a couple of decades past the stage where pouting was even moderately endearing. “Awww . . . come on,” she said. “One drink.” She glanced at me and smiled with blank eyes. I couldn’t bring myself to smile back, my gaze falling to the ring of bruises around the crook of her elbow, the scabby track marks on her skin.

“Hey, Maggie,” Matt said, rapped twice on the bar with his knuckles to get her attention. “No one’s interested in buying you a drink.” He paused, smirked. “Or sampling your dried-up old cunt.”

“Now, come on,” Sam said, but quiet, like he knew better than to contradict Matt. Had learned that lesson the hard way.

Maggie squared her jaw, pushed back her shoulders. But I could see her hands shaking where they rested on her hips. “You can’t talk to me like that,” she said. “I’m gonna tell Jimmy Ray. That’s sexual harassment. You can’t do that no more.”

Matt laughed. “Oh, shit.” He pretended to wipe tears of mirth from his eyes. “Are you serious? You gonna run out and get Me Too tattooed on those saggy tits? Goddamn, Maggie, you crack me up.” He flapped his bar rag at her. “Get the fuck out of here.”

Maggie glanced at me, something timeless and weary passing between us. The world might be changing in some places, but not here. Here it was still the same old merry-go-round of drugs and poverty and women being chewed up and spit out by men. People in other worlds could wear black evening gowns and give speeches about equality and not backing down, but out here in the trenches, we fought our war alone and we lost the battles every day.

I watched as Maggie shuffled off, limping a little in her cheap stilettos. If not for Cal, that could have been my fate, and I had a sudden urge to hug my brother, thank him for the hovering that usually drove me nuts.

“What the fuck are you doing here?” a voice said from behind me. I heard anger in the words, but curiosity, maybe even amusement, in the tone. A shiver worked its way up my spine. Jimmy Ray.

I turned on my bar stool and came face-to-face with my biggest mistake. A lot of people would have fingered Junie for that honor. Getting knocked up the summer before your senior year in high school wasn’t exactly genius-level thinking. But I’d never considered Junie a mistake, not even when I had no idea how I was going to afford her or where my next meal was coming from. Because, let’s face it, my future wasn’t exactly gold-plated before she started growing in my belly. So having her didn’t change much, other than the fact that I had an extra mouth to feed. It wasn’t like I was giving up college scholarships or trips to distant lands by having a daughter at eighteen. I’d never given much thought to what came after high school, had spent most of my time and energy just trying to survive my childhood. And truth was, Junie had saved me from the inevitable slide into my mother’s type of life. I hadn’t cared about myself enough to try and be different. But from the moment she was born, I’d cared about Junie. Loved her enough to slam on the brakes and do a one-eighty.