“I’m not supposed to be around booze,” said Rachel.
“Tough shit. You’re gonna take the opening shift and swap with Tabby. It’s already been decided. You ain’t supposed to be drinking on the job anyway.”
“I’m not comfortable with this,” said Rachel.
“Word around town is that you need a job,” said Red Mabel. “And your mama needs your help. The bar opens at eight in the morning. That’s too early for you to act like a whore.”
“Jesus,” said Rachel. “I just don’t want to be tempted. That’s all.”
“I worked in a silver mine,” said Red Mabel. “Doesn’t mean I had to own every piece of jewelry.”
“You stole dynamite,” Rachel pointed out.
“I’ve got a lot of enemies,” said Red Mabel. Her face snapped out of the softness, and she snarled. “And you don’t have any right to talk about stealing!”
“How long?” Rachel watched as Red Mabel stepped on her cigarette, ground it into the asphalt. “How long do I have fill in for my mom?” Sometimes the chance to make amends came out of nowhere, with the speed of bird shot.
“Until she tells you to stop,” said Red Mabel. She dug into her pockets and threw a set of keys at Rachel. “You’d better be on your way,” she said. “The bar opens in three hours.”
* * *
The Dirty Shame had not changed one bit, except for the mess from the gunfire. Tabby waited for Rachel, threw an apron and the opening checklist in her direction. Both landed on the floor and began to soak through with spilled liquor. Tabby didn’t say a word, just glared as she stomped out, only stopping to pull the chain on the neon sign. The bar was open for business.
Splintered holes embedded in the soft pine of the bar, bird shot wedged in its unpredictable trajectory. Bottles remained erect, although some were just spiky shards. When Rachel saw the shattered pieces of the mirror, she stopped. She thought of a dark night, nine years earlier.
The countertops and the floors were still slick and sticky with spilled booze. The smells of all the different flavors of Schnapps that had exploded combined into a pungent mix of minty and fruity. Her sneaker stuck where the aftermath had soaked into the floorboards.
She tied on her apron and lost herself in cleaning, until she began to relish it. She was cleaning up one of her mother’s messes for once, and not her own. She righted the barstools, attempted to pry some of the bird shot from the bar with a butter knife. She finished sweeping up the glass and filled up a mop bucket, letting the soapy water sink into the floorboards. She sprayed the bar and the shelves behind it with Lysol, and scrubbed until the surfaces were shining. She wiped down the small tables, cleaned the bathrooms, refilled the ketchups and mustards, topped off the salt and pepper shakers, and cut lemons and limes into small triangles and stocked them in the well.
Ronda, the short-order cook, came through the door at exactly eleven o’clock, silent as always. Ronda was an older Native American woman, a giantess, over six feet tall; her neck was draped with long cords and pouches. Her hair was raven colored, but striated through with bright white pieces. When Rachel was growing up, the rumor in town had been that Ronda was a witch, but Rachel doubted it. There was only one real witch at the Dirty Shame, and she had been taken out by gunfire.
Rachel emptied the mop bucket as the first customers finally arrived, the lunch drunks. They tracked snow all over her freshly cleaned floor. All were schoolteachers, eleven in total, ten beer drinkers and her former English teacher, who ordered a White Russian. Rachel filled their lunch orders, which was easy enough. Everything was served in greasy plastic baskets lined with wax paper.
When she returned home after her first shift, the smell of Black Mabel lingered, even though the woman herself was long gone. Rachel was nervous to call Athena. She turned up the space heaters and reached for the phone. She had a job, but it was in a bar, and Rachel was still relatively new to sobriety.
“I get to make amends,” Rachel said. “Living amends. I just show up and do my job and keep my mouth shut.”
“That doesn’t sound like amends,” said Athena. “That sounds like penance. Living amends means that you decide to change your ways and don’t expect appreciation for it. It’s a quiet thing.”
After she hung up the phone, Rachel was determined to prove Athena wrong. She grabbed her journal and began to work on a gratitude list, and the effort behind finding things to be grateful for and her close proximity to the space heaters made her sweat. It had become bitterly cold again, just like that, predictable for the last days of February.