Laverna woke with a hangover, and her shoulder hurt. She blamed both on her daughter. She lay in bed, kicked at an empty can of beer caught in the folds of the quilt. It flew from the bed and rolled across the floor, came to a rest as it wedged between her high heels. She planned to never wear those heels again. They were impractical, and she fell several times at the Fireman’s Ball.
Today was her birthday. There was a hair in her mouth, and it tasted like home perm.
In the kitchen, Laverna made a pot of coffee, toilet paper stuffed where the filter should be. She smoked her first cigarette of the day—her first cigarette at age forty-seven—and grimaced. It wasn’t that she thought forty-seven was old, just inconsiderate, a bad thing that happened to good people, like home perms.
As the coffee brewed, Laverna dressed for her shift at the bar. It was nearly three o’clock in the afternoon. She dug out a pearl-colored blouse, a black pantsuit, a gauzy black scarf. She pulled on thin nylon socks, slid a black velvet headband across the pelt of her hair, and stepped into black loafers with no heel whatsoever. Laverna always dressed in layers, even in the thick of August. Red Mabel accused her of dressing like she lived in constant fear of strip poker. Laverna cursed when she realized she had forgotten her control-top panty hose, removed her pants and started over again. This was forty-seven. Nine more hours and it wasn’t her birthday anymore, not that anyone would dare mention it. In the bathroom, she penciled her eyebrows, added more arc than usual. She considered curling her eyelashes, but her hands were shaking, and besides, it seemed excessive, and she was supposed to be in mourning.
She returned to the kitchen, sipped at her coffee and smoked another cigarette. Laverna stared out the window into the front yard. It all looked the same to her in the winter, a rerun. She hated the winters here. The only thing moving outside was smoke from wood stoves. Winter in this town trapped people in their homes, in their lives. It was no wonder trains didn’t stop in Quinn anymore. Only derailed.
Laverna drove to work past the softball field, covered in snow. She slowed the Cadillac, as she did every day in the winter, making sure that everything was in its right place. She was very protective of the softball field; it was the only place that made her happy, although last season had been a catastrophe. They had won only three games, and one was by default—the entire opposing team of silver miners had gone to a Heart concert in Spokane.
The Dirty Shame was converted out of a row of railroad apartments. It was sided with oily wooden shingles that Laverna’s father acquired at an outrageously low price. She took after her father; Gene Flood could talk a dog out of having rabies. He grew enormously fat after they opened the kitchen and started serving food at the bar. He died of a heart attack at one of Quinn’s softball games, which was embarrassing enough, but the fact that it took six volunteer firemen to haul him away from the bleachers was mortifying. A week after the funeral, Laverna’s mother answered the door and made the mistake of inviting Jehovah’s Witnesses into her home, confusing them with mourners. Before a month passed, she sold all the video poker machines and fled to eastern Montana with the money and her new congregation. At twenty-two, Laverna became the owner of the bar, and twenty-five years passed, changing out kegs and breaking up fights.
Tabby threw her apron at Laverna the minute she walked through the door.
“It’s all yours,” she said. And it was. Of the two bars in town—Laverna proudly owned the one that served food and encouraged fighting. The other bar was the Bowling Alley, an unoriginal name but frequented by most of the volunteer firemen and folks from town who had tired of fist-fighting over the conservation of the spotted owl. The Dirty Shame was always packed with loggers, men from the highway department, and the female silver miners. The miners were her most devoted customers, so Laverna tolerated the constant cloud from their boots and their pants, piles of powder in the dustpan. The silver mine seemed to only employ dwarf-size men and giantess lesbians. The lesbians were tougher than anybody else in town, so people held their tongues.
At six o’clock, Red Mabel installed herself at her usual stool as Laverna wiped down the taps and made a fresh pot of coffee. A silver miner, already quite drunk, stood at the end of the bar waving a twenty-dollar bill. The woman looked like Fred Flintstone.
Laverna sighed. “What?”
“Can I get a White Russian?”