“I don’t think that’s true.”
Kyle was probably a terrible bartender. She shrugged. “I like things bitter anyway. Like me.”
He gave her a look like he wasn’t sure how to take that.
A warning, she ought to tell him. Take it as a warning that I am in a very bad mood and happy to have an excuse to take it out on you.
Charlie wanted everyone to think of her as hardheaded and hard-hearted. Hard as old petrified wood, as rocks, as candy that cracks your teeth. But she wasn’t.
“There you are.” Doreen sat down next to her at the bar, clearly seething. “The great Charlie Hall.” She was wearing work clothes—white jeans and a collared blue shirt with the name of the dental place where she was a receptionist embroidered over her heart. She must have dashed out of work when she’d gotten the texts about Adam’s whereabouts.
Charlie rolled her eyes. “What? I got your guy and your ring.”
“Please tell me you didn’t rob a pawnshop.” Doreen’s voice was loud enough to make the few other grizzled-looking patrons wasting their day look over at her.
Charlie shrugged.
“Adam was just borrowing the ring. He told me he was using the money to make a deal that was going to change our lives.” Doreen obviously wanted to believe that. “He wasn’t rolling bliss.”
“Maybe he told you about the stone in the ring not being original too,” Charlie said. “Because he sold it years ago.”
Doreen flushed. “You really are like the devil, you know that? Knowing all our sins.”
Charlie felt as though she was observing the conversation from very far away. “That’s ridiculous. I’m a fuck-up, Doreen. But I found your guy and even got your ring, so if you learned something you didn’t want to know about Adam, too bad.”
They stared at one another for a long moment.
Charlie took off the ring and put it down on the bar top. When Doreen reached for it, though, Charlie covered it with her hand. “You made some threats about what your brother could do to Posey’s account at UMass. I want a confirmation that the deadline for paying has been pushed back. Three months at least. I need to see the notice on my phone when I sign in to my account.”
“You can’t expect him to risk—”
“I one thousand percent do.” One of the more frustrating things about trading her work for other work was that people put a high value on her trade until a thing was done, then became convinced it must have been easy. Renegotiation was never in her favor.
Doreen looked at the ring under the cage of her hand. “That’s mine.”
“It will be,” Charlie said. “As soon as you call your brother and I get that email.”
Doreen made a show of taking her phone out of her pocket as she walked to the door. A few minutes later she came back in, mouth pinched.
“You know, Adam said he was going to get my ring back. He used it as collateral for a loan.”
“That’s interesting,” Charlie said, in a way that let Doreen know how uninteresting she found it.
Doreen sighed. “I talked to my brother. He says he can’t access your bill. It’s not working.”
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Charlie said. “What does that mean?”
“He doesn’t know.” Doreen looked worried, which was the only reason that Charlie didn’t accuse her of making this whole thing up. “It could come from a different department that doesn’t run their billing through his office. Or your account could have been flagged. But he tried.”
For a moment, Charlie felt a white-hot flush of anger, most of it at herself.
She took her hand away from the ring. It occurred to her, not for the first time, that if she had been half as interested in making money from her schemes as she was in the schemes themselves, she’d be better off.
Doreen hesitated. “Now what?”
“Go on,” Charlie said. “Take it. Fuck it. Fuck you. Fuck me. Fuck everything.”
“What is wrong with you anyway?” Doreen gestured around, as though to indicate that Blue Ruin wasn’t a very nice place, it was late afternoon, and Charlie was well on her way to wasted.
“I’m celebrating,” Charlie said. “Being single.”
Doreen gave a bitter little laugh. “Well, look at you. Brought down by love. Suffering just like everybody else.”
“Have a drink with me,” Charlie said, raising her plastic cup. “To suffering.”
“I’ve got to get back to work,” Doreen said, disgusted. “I have responsibilities. And I guess you do too, so don’t suck down so much whiskey that you forget yours. Oh, and if you did knock over a pawnshop, don’t implicate me when the police come after you.”
“If I’m lucky, I’ll suck down so much whiskey I forget we had this conversation.” Charlie threw back the Maker’s in a single gluttonous gulp. “Bring me the bottle, Kyle.”
“You know,” said Doreen, halfway to the door, “I saw your guy once, and the minute I saw him I knew he was going to cheat on you. Guys who look like that—”
“Nobody knew him,” Charlie told her.
“Except for you?” Doreen snorted.
Charlie shook her head. “Nobody. He didn’t exist. Never did.”
Making a noise of frustration at the incomprehensibility of drunks, Doreen left.
“You didn’t really knock over a store, right?” Kyle asked her as he brought over the bottle of Maker’s.
She gave him her toothiest smile. “Definitely didn’t.”
“You actually want to buy this?” He set it down next to her.
“Definitely do.” She poured her own drink out of her own bottle. It was like being in one of those fancy places with bottle service, except for the fancy part.
It didn’t matter if she couldn’t afford it. Her future was clear. She was going back to work for the gloamists. Paying for Posey’s school the way she should have from the start. Making a clean break from her friends. If she was going to blow up everything around her, then she needed to keep everyone she cared about far away.
Fuck everything.
Charlie stayed at Blue Ruin into the evening, messing with the jukebox in the corner, going in with two elderly alcoholics on a pizza they got delivered, and dancing around with one of them to an old song from the eighties. Things started to blur together. The room began filling up. She remembered sitting on the toilet in the bathroom, sticking the back of a pin she found in her bag into her skin over and over. She remembered falling down on and lying on the floor and Kyle saying something about how he wasn’t supposed to serve her if she couldn’t stand, which made her laugh and laugh.
She didn’t need him. She had her own bottle.
As she climbed back up on her stool, holding on to the edge of the bar to steady herself, her former boss from Top Hat walked into Blue Ruin with three of his friends.
“Well, well,” he said, giving her a once-over. “Look at what the cat dragged in.”
“Richie, never met a cliché you didn’t like,” she said, trying to disguise the slur in her voice. He was in his early fifties, with hair that was thinning on top and eyes like a raptor. He owned property all over the Valley, including two bars and three restaurants. When he’d fired her, it was with the expectation that it meant she wouldn’t be able to work anywhere else, and he took it as a personal affront that she had.
“Over at Rapture, I hear.”
“Yeah…” The Valley was small, but she didn’t like the idea of it being that small.
He mimed the lashing of a whip and waggled his eyebrows. “You tying people up now? I bet you like that.” His friends chuckled.
“Rot in hell,” she said, without any heat.
“Oooh, don’t get out the thumbscrews.”
Charlie threw the mostly empty bottle of Maker’s at him. He dodged in time so that it smashed against the wall behind him. Liquor ran down the dingy paint.
“Crazy bitch!” But he was no longer smug, no longer sure that he could say whatever he wanted and the people around him were going to take it. He even looked a little bit scared. She liked scared.
A smile pulled at the corners of Charlie’s mouth.