Don’t say too much and people will fill in the gaps, usually to your advantage. Polly has shown up out of nowhere, lives in a motel that rents by the week. She has a fading bruise on her jaw. That was actually from Jani’s head jerking up, head-butting her by accident, but all anyone knows is that there is a purple-green shadow on the right side of her face. She touches it now, absentmindedly, then snatches her hand away as if she doesn’t want to draw attention to it. Funny, touching the bruise is almost like touching Jani, smelling all those toddler smells. This is for the best, she reminds herself. Jani’s going to be better off in the long run.
“Let me talk to the boss. His name is Cosimo, but we call him Casper behind his back, Mr. C to his face.”
“Casper?”
“He’s white as a ghost. I’m Cath, by the way.”
“Nice to meet you, Cath.”
Cath goes into the kitchen, doesn’t come back. Time passes. Five minutes, ten. Two men come in, older guys. Polly’s seen them here before, drinking the cheapest draft beers. She walks behind the counter, pulls their drafts, writes down the transaction on a napkin. These guys always run a tab, she’s pretty sure.
When the barmaid returns with the boss, they find Polly still behind the bar. They don’t like her presumption, but they don’t mind it as much as they might. She has shown initiative.
“So you’re ready to start?” Cosimo/Casper asks. Mr. C. He is really white, blue white; his skin almost glows, although he’s not an albino. Maybe the closest thing you can be to one without being one. “Like right now?”
“I was just trying to help out. I know these guys don’t like to wait.”
“Yeah? What else you know about them?” That’s Cath.
“He’s Max and he’s Ernest.” Polly indicates which is which with her chin. “On weekends, they came in about five, but on weekdays they like to get started before the five o’clock news. They drink Natty Boh. They talk a lot about politics. And Agent Orange and DDT. They say food tasted better when they were allowed to use DDT, so I think one of them might be a retired crop duster, although maybe he just worked at DuPont. They also warned me that there’s a gun in your desk drawer, so I better not think of lifting so much as a dollar out of the till, Mr. C.”
The barflies cackle, nod, and Mr. C seems charmed by the use of his nickname. Men always like her, when she can be bothered to try. Cath seems less friendly now. Polly will need to watch for that. She has no use for women, which is why she has to make sure to befriend them. Women never like her. They feel threatened by her, which is silly. She’d never take another woman’s man, doesn’t even want that much attention from men. The problem is, when a man wants her, he usually won’t stop trying to get her. They wear her down, men. She starts off by taking pity on them, ends up feeling sorry for herself.
“When can you start?” Mr. C asks.
“When do you need me?”
“Let’s try you out now, see how it goes.”
When Mr. #3 comes in, there’s now more space between them than before, the breadth of the bar instead of a couple of stools. He wasn’t counting on that, she can tell. But now she has to talk to him, indulge his quiet, not-quite flirtation, because it’s going to make the difference in where she sleeps, what she eats. Tips. You have to swallow a lot to make good tips. She’s already started reading the PennySaver, looking for a cheap place to live. Today, she checked out a big apartment over the empty Ben Franklin store on Main. Walking distance from here, although it’s not a great walk, a lot of highway with narrow shoulders, few sidewalks. The apartment’s not anything special, but it’s huge, and only $300 a month. She likes the idea of those two big empty rooms, only for her. She wouldn’t fill it with furniture even if she could.
She leans over the bar. Max and Ernest have already made the inevitable top shelf jokes, snicker, snicker. It was strange, how she got skinny but her breasts stayed the same size. But just because her breasts don’t look as if they belong on her body, it doesn’t mean they belong to the world, either. Every time she waitresses, she swears it’s the last time. But she’s good at it, and she loves taking home cash at night’s end. There’s nothing like cash.
“So you’re sticking around?” Mr. #3 asks. Adam, the first man, only this one is into pears, not apples.
“For now.”
“You going to keep living at the motel?”
“Probably not.”
“We’ll miss you.”
“I’ll come back to visit. If I’m invited.”
She waits for him to pick up on the suggestion, the hint of a question mark. She tells herself that she’s bored enough that she might as well take him up on the inevitable pass. She’s going to end up with someone in town, why not this Adam. It’s a hard habit to break, gravitating to a protector, even if she’s never quite found the right one. She’s like Goldilocks—the first one was too rough, the second too weak. But isn’t it the third one that’s always just right? Unless, of course, you break it, like Little Bear’s chair.
In her mind, she’s already sitting on the edge of Adam’s bed, drinking bourbon and Coke out of a plastic cup, stretching, arching her back, touching the back of his hand. Men are so easy.
He doesn’t ask her back.
Screw him.
Maybe she will do just that, after all.
5
When Polly-the-Pink-Lady hints that she might be interested in being invited back to his place, Adam overreacts by not reacting. He plays dim, not a play he can carry. Maybe he should have let her come over. You don’t have to sleep with a good-looking woman just because she comes to your motel room and has a drink after work. It’s not a law or anything.
Not that this one respects laws or rules. That’s why he’s here. And he was warned. She’ll have sex with you if you get close to her. It’s what she does.
He has decided not to ask how the client could be so sure of this.
Then again, this Polly doesn’t always do what she’s expected to do. Who could have predicted she would decamp in the middle of a beach vacation, just up and leave her family? The plan had been to make contact with the husband during the Fenwick trip, get to know him, do some man-on-man bonding. Oh, you live in Baltimore? Whereabouts? I’m on the northeast side, too. The plan was to find out what the husband knew. Go figure, he knew less than nothing. Adam was thrown when she left the beach Sunday morning, went up to the house, and packed her bags.
Except—he must have had an inkling something was up, because he left the beach, too, kept watch on the house, saw her come out and start dragging the duffel down the highway, then jump in that guy’s car as he followed at a discreet distance.
Luckily, there are only two ways west from the beach, Route 50 and 404, and almost everyone leaving the Delaware beaches takes 404. When she got out in Belleville, he did, too. Good thing he always has an overnight bag in his truck, packed and ready to go. Sure, he had to drive back to Fenwick the next day and check out of his motel there, pick up the rest of his things, risking that she would move on in the interim. But she was there when he got back, hanging out at the High-Ho.
Now she has a job at the bar and she has all but invited herself into his bed and he made the wrong move. She’s pissed at him now.
What can he do? He continues to go to the bar, continues to make it sound as if his truck is like some goddamn Maserati that can’t be easily serviced even in big-town Salisbury. She pulls his drafts with as little commentary as possible. The two old guys get more attention and they barely tip. Her cold shoulder isn’t obvious; she’s too much of a pro to frost a regular. She neutralizes him. That’s the perfect word. He’s invisible, an outline of his former self, drinking beer, leaving a respectable tip at night’s end. Overtipping would be a mistake, even if it’s not his money. She’s ignoring him, he’s ignoring her ignoring him. It’s exhausting and much less fun than their slow dance toward each other when they were on the same side of the bar. It makes him think of a Japanese horror film he saw as a kid, one that no one else seems to remember. He describes it all the time to people and never gets a flash of recognition. The setup was like The Blob, only it was a stream of hot atomic liquid that flowed through the streets of Tokyo and if it touched you, that was it, you were a goner, you were vaporized in a flash.
How much longer can he linger here in Belleville?