Emma, his best bartender, was the one who told Malcolm. It was eleven in the morning, and they had a hundred balloons to inflate for a private party. She took him by the arm and pulled him into the women’s bathroom. For a second, when she put her warm hand on his tricep and locked the door, all his synapses fired. He didn’t want to think about what his expression told her when she stood close to him, because whatever she saw there prompted her to raise her hands as if to tell him to relax, as if to tell him in his dreams, maybe, to get over himself, that she would shelve that conversation for another time, that first she needed to tell him something. She held a finger to her lips and listened, to make sure no one was passing in the hall, but the servers were busy with the helium tank, André was cutting long strands of ribbon, and the chairs were still upturned on the tables like a forest of mahogany legs.
She told Malcolm that she didn’t want to be a narc, but she started watching John because he wasn’t putting his tips in the jar, and look at André working two jobs, and Scotty with a whole slew of kids, she could never remember how many. She certainly wasn’t giving up every weekend of her youth just so this joker could take money out of her pocket. She told Malcolm that when she called John out, he offered her three hundred dollars on the spot.
“Was he pulling this when Hugh was here?” Malcolm asked.
“I doubt it!” Emma said. No one would have messed with Hugh Lydon. With Malcolm, however, the bad seeds saw an opening.
John left without a fight, a sign of guilt, and Malcolm needed to fill his shifts. Roddy’s uncle was a regular, a union boss, Cement and Concrete Workers. Huge guy, with a face the color of a raw porterhouse. Jess used to cross paths with him once in a while when she was newly out of law school and working for Laborers’ International. Every time he saw her, he pointed finger guns and shouted, “Malcolm’s girl!” Jess forgave him for never bothering to learn her name because she so enjoyed when the other attorneys looked at her as if to say, We can’t believe you actually know this guy. Roddy was a good boy, the uncle told Malcolm, very smart when he applied himself, but he’d dropped out of college after two semesters. He wasn’t a drinker, the uncle said. He wasn’t into drugs as far as the uncle knew. Get him away from the computer and he was fine! His dad had split years ago and he needed more male role models in his life. Would Malcolm do him a favor?
“Malcolm!” Roddy called again. What Roddy’s uncle failed to mention when he was talking the kid up was that Roddy was annoying. His whole vibe was nervous, and that feeling was contagious, coming from a bartender. It could infect the entire place. Malcolm thought he’d lose that nervous energy once he learned his way around, but he hadn’t, and lately it was worse than ever. That night, he was behind the stick wearing a ratty T-shirt that said “Byte Me” and had a picture of an old 1980s floppy disk underneath. There was a dress code, Malcolm told him when he hired him. Wear dark colors. Shave. Comb your hair. Jesus.
Malcolm wasn’t ready to deal with Roddy yet, though he wondered for a moment if whatever Roddy wanted had to do with Jess. Maybe she’d called the landline. Maybe she was still on the phone, holding until he showed up. But who called the landline anymore except Malcolm’s mother, who had the number memorized since he started working there twenty-six years ago, or around the Super Bowl, the old-timers who were laid up after hip surgery but wanted to buy a box. Would Malcolm cover them? Of course he would. Of course. But try getting money out of them after they lost.
Maybe she was there somewhere. He glanced around.
No Jess at the bar. No Jess at the high-top she liked best. No Jess bullying people by the jukebox. She’d memorized the codes for the songs she hated, and in the old days, before the updated system, she would sit there and make sure no one pressed the combination of numbers that would serve up “Piano Man.”
But one look at Roddy’s face and Malcolm could see it was a problem with a customer. He took a quick glance around at the various clusters of people. Most were laughing. There was a group playing darts. “Gephardt!” someone called over, and he turned to find two of his buddies from the gym. He saw an old neighbor from his mother’s block. A guy from the barbershop. He saw his friend from the deli with a new girlfriend. Cute. Everything seemed fine. Seemed better than fine, actually. He clapped a few backs on his way through the room, and felt his own back clapped in return. There was joy in the air. People making themselves at home. Did the group by the window seem too rowdy? He watched for a moment. They’d hold for a few minutes while he collected himself.
And then he saw Hugh’s guy, Billy, sitting alone at a two-top, sipping a whiskey. They made eye contact, and Billy raised his glass as if to say cheers. Cheers to the crowd. To the money the night would no doubt bring in. Malcolm’s stomach heaved. Ignore him, he told himself. Just keep going.
He nodded hello to Emma as he tossed his keys in the usual drawer. Her hair was up in a high ponytail, and he really tried not to keep track of these things, but she had a beautiful neck, and in the one second he allowed himself to look, he followed a tendril of hair that had slipped loose.
“How long has—?” Malcolm lifted his chin toward Billy’s table.
“A while,” Emma said. “Waiting for you to show up, I think.”
He pulled on his tight shoulder to stretch it and then remembered Jess saying that was what he always did when he was worried. He hated getting to the bar so late, but his mother had come by with a meat loaf. She’d looked in his fridge like he was twenty-two again, living in his first apartment. After they ate, as she wrapped the leftovers for him, Malcolm had a vision of Jess rolling her eyes. “I gotta go, Ma,” he said eventually. “You okay to get home?”
“What the heck are you talking about am I okay to get home?” she asked.
In the old days, on Fridays, the construction workers would have started arriving by four. By six they’d have moved on and the commuters getting off the train would take their places. Around seven he used to start looking for Jess, in case she wanted to have a beer and a sandwich at the bar before she kissed him good night and said she’d see him later. Jess had warned him about making changes, but how could he have guessed the depth of love people had for broken-down, sticky barstools? Who would have believed they’d want to keep listening to the same songs on the jukebox over and over and over, as if music stopped being made in 1996? And he didn’t do even a fraction of what he dreamed of doing. He stuck to things that were relatively cheap and quick. But it turned out people didn’t want things to be nice, they wanted them to be familiar.
The only demographic that got stronger once Malcolm took ownership was the underage crowd. The moment he took over, they started trying to get in after ten o’clock with their New York State dupes and their good friends from Ohio and Florida. But a bar full of kids didn’t help the bottom line because they ordered straight sodas for a dollar and then brought their drinks to the bathroom, where they pulled nips out of their pockets and mixed their own. They worked on animal instinct, these kids. It was like a call went out the very hour the bar changed hands, and next thing they started showing up with little bottles clanking in their purses.
“I’m sure every generation thinks they invented that move,” Jess said, when he brought that detail home.
Where is she right this second? Every time he thought about it and realized he didn’t have the answer, he felt as if he’d taken a flying leap off a ledge without having a clue where he’d land. Up until that week she’d been staying with her friend Cobie, who lived on West Twenty-Third Street with her wife and their two sons. Cobie made sense as a person to go to: a college friend, one of the few close friends who was entirely Jess’s, without any connection to their hometown. But a few days earlier, he called Cobie because Jess wasn’t answering his calls or responding to his texts, and Cobie told him that Jess was, in fact, back in Gillam.