She paused outside Craven's Undertaking Parlor, looking upstreet at the laughing boys on their ladders, hanging paper lanterns from high poles and building eaves. These g*y lamps would be lit on the night of the Reap Fair, filling Hambry's main street with a hundred shades of soft, conflicting light.
For a moment Coral remembered the child she had been, looking at the colored paper lanterns with wonder, listening to the shouts and the rattle of fireworks, listening to the dance-music coming from Green Heart as her father held her hand . . . and, on his other side, her big brother Hart's hand. In this memory, Hart was proudly wearing his first pair of long trousers.
Nostalgia swept her, sweet at first, then bitter. The child had grown into a sallow woman who owned a saloon and whorehouse (not to mention a great deal of land along the Drop), a woman whose only sexual partner of late was her brother's Chancellor, a woman whose chief goal upon arising these days was getting to the hair of the dog that bit her as soon as possible. How, exactly, had things turned out so? This woman whose eyes she used was the last woman the child she had been would have expected to become.
"Where did I go wrong?" she asked herself, and laughed. "Oh dear Man Jesus, where did this straying sinner-child go wrong? Can you say hallelujah." She sounded so much like the wandering preacher-woman that had come through town the year before - Pittston, her name had been, Sylvia Pittston - that she laughed again, this time almost naturally. She walked on toward the Rest with a better will.
Sheemie was outside, tending to the remains of his silkflowers. He waved to her and called a greeting. She waved back and called something in return. A good enough lad, Sheemie, and although she could have found another easily enough, she supposed she was glad Depape hadn't killed him.
The bar was almost empty but brilliantly lit, all the gas-jets flaring. It was clean, as well. Sheemie would have emptied the spittoons, but Coral guessed it was the plump woman behind the bar who had done all the rest. The makeup couldn't hide the sallowness of that woman's cheeks, the hollow-ness of her eyes, or the way her neck had started to go all crepey (seeing that sort of lizardy skin on a woman's neck always made Coral shiver inside).
It was Pettie the Trotter tending bar beneath The Romp's stem glass gaze, and if allowed to do so, she would continue until Stanley appeared and banished her. Pettie had said nothing out loud to Coral - she knew better - but had made her wants clear enough just the same. Her whoring days were almost at an end. She desperately desired to go to work tending bar. There was precedent for it, Coral knew - a female bartender at Forest Trees in Pass o' the River, and there had been another at Glencove, up the coast in Tavares, until she had died of the pox. What Pettie refused to see was that Stanley Ruiz was younger by fifteen years and in far better health. He would be pouring drinks under The Romp long after Pettie was rotting (instead of Trotting) in a pauper's grave.
"Good even, sai Thorin," Pettie said. And before Coral could so much as open her mouth, the whore had put a shot glass on the bar and filled it full of whiskey. Coral looked at it with dismay. Did they all know, then?
"I don't want that," she snapped. "Why in Eld's name would I? Sun isn't even down! Pour it back into the bottle, for yer father's sake, and then get the hell out of here. Who d'ye think yer serving at five o' the clock, anyway? Ghosts?"
Pettie's face fell a foot; the heavy coat other makeup actually seemed to crack apart. She took the funnel from under the bar, stuck it in the neck of the bottle, and poured the shot of whiskey back in. Some went onto the bar in spite of the funnel; her plump hands (now ringless; her rings had been traded for food at the mercantile across the street long since) were shaking. "I'm sorry, sai. So I am. I was only - "
"I don't care what ye was only," Coral said, then turned a bloodshot eye on Sheb, who had been sitting on his piano-bench and leafing through old sheet-music. Now he was staring toward the bar with his mouth hung open. "And what are you looking at, ye frog?"
"Nothing, sai Thorin. I - "
"Then go look at it somewhere else. Take this pig with'ee. Give her a bounce, why don't ye? It'll be good for her skin. It might even be good for yer own."
"I-"
"Get out! Are ye deaf? Both of ye!"
Pettie and Sheb went away toward the kitchen instead of the cribs upstairs, but it was all the same to Coral. They could go to hell as far as she was concerned. Anywhere, as long as they were out of her aching face.