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Johnny held up the card for Lola, ripped it and dropped it in the trash behind the bar. “Are you kidding me? A rooftop bar?”
Lola shook her head. “Can you imagine if Quartz and the guys heard that?”
“Hey Joe’s got history, man,” Johnny said. His eyes narrowed on Hank as he made his slow way to the exit. “Seriously. You can’t just flush that down the toilet.”
Vero shrugged. “Something needs to change. Maybe it’s time, Boss.”
“And maybe you go snort some lines,” he said.
“Johnny,” Lola scolded. “What is with you?”
He muttered an apology, grabbed a Coors from the mini-fridge and keyed off the top. Vero muttered about checking on her tables. Lola kept her mouth shut and didn’t mention Johnny’s no-drinking-during-work-hours rule.
Vero hadn’t put anything away. Lola picked up the jar of olives, but it slipped out of her hands and broke. “Damn it,” she cried, jumping back. “Why don’t you guys ever clean up your own shit?”
“You guys?” Johnny asked.
Lola glanced up at him. She saw an opening for her frustration and took it. “Yes, you guys. Did you not see the basket of clean laundry that’s been sitting out since Saturday?”
Johnny’s lips pinched. “I thought you were waiting to put it away.”
“Waiting for what?” Lola asked. “There’s no law that says you can’t do it.”
He held up a palm and the beer in his hand. “Sorry. I didn’t realize it was a test.”
“It wasn’t,” Lola said under her breath, squatting to clean up the glass. “It would just be nice if someone else did something once in a while.” She’d overreacted. It was second nature to clean up after Johnny and that transferred over to work. But the constantly taking things out and leaving them there annoyed her sometimes.
She dropped the big pieces of glass in the trash, right on top of the two halves of Hank’s card. “Johnny?”
“What?” he asked. “I said I was sorry.”
“No, not that.” She paused. “Where’s Beau’s card?”
Johnny stopped staring into space and turned abruptly to her. “Why?”
“I remember him setting it on the bar, but I never threw it out. Just wondering what happened to it…”
Johnny took a long swig of his drink. He inspected the bottle. “I tossed it.”
“That night?”
“Yeah.”
“When?”
“Like I said, that fucking night, right after he left. Ripped it in half too. Should I have burned it?”
Lola looked at him as hard as he avoided looking at her. After finding Beau’s card in Johnny’s pocket, she’d hidden it in her birth control box under the sink—and it was in one piece. “Are you sure?”
“Yeah, I’m goddamn sure, Lola,” he said. “What’re you nagging me for?”
Vero walked up and set a ticket on the bar. Johnny snatched it to fill the order. Lola tried to convince herself she owed her boyfriend the benefit of the doubt, but that he’d kept the card meant only one thing to her. However small it was, there was a part of Johnny considering Beau’s offer.
* * *
Mitch returned to work that Friday. It’d been a long, draining week of mood swings and clipped words—offenses both Lola and Johnny were guilty of.
While Johnny was distracted up front, Lola went back to Mitch’s office and leaned in the doorway.
“What is it?” he asked without removing his eyes from his computer.
“How was your trip?”
“Productive. Barb found a house she likes.”
“I bet her family is happy you guys are moving there.”
“They are.” Mitch looked up. “Barb is too. She’s wanted this for some time.”
“What about you?” Lola asked.
“You know how it is. This place is a grind. Barb always said if it got to be too much, she wanted me out.”
“But do you have to leave L.A.?”
He held his arms out. “This is L.A. Things were great when I was out there screwing around with customers all day, but now I’m back here most of the time, trying to dig myself out of this hole. Barb knows my dad’s place is the only thing keeping me in California.”
“Yeah.” Lola picked at some peeling paint. “Have you had any offers?”
“Nothing official yet, but it won’t be long.”
“Oh.”
“What is it, Lola? I’m kind of busy here.”
“I don’t know. I just…Mitch, what do you think this place needs? Why’s business slow?”
He sighed. “In the eighties, when my dad handed over the reins, we were already struggling. But then grunge came on the scene and I wasn’t letting that anywhere near here. Not after the rock legends we’d seen.”
“So you lost the young music crowd.”
“Young and some old. You know all this, Lola.”
“I’m trying to see it from a business perspective.”
“All right, then you want to know my first mistake? Pay for play. I let my head get too big asking new bands to cough up cash for a spot on our stage. They walked instead. I could’ve made up for it in the nineties, but like I said, I fucking hate grunge. Turns out a lot of people don’t, though. When Fred’s went belly up, the block became a carousel of crap. Except us, the only place still standing, but our knees are buckling. Barb says I either sell out or get out, so I’m washing my hands of it. I can’t stick around to see what happens.”
Mitch’s words were hard, but she heard the regret in his voice. “That Hank guy said something about a lounge. I think he wants to turn this place high end.”
“We’re meeting later today, so I’ll know more then, but it sounds like he wants to keep the name and image, just make it into something classier. A real scene.”
“But that’s not what Hey Joe is.” That wasn’t what Johnny was.
He shrugged. “Not really, kid. Sorry.”
“Would you say this place is a good investment?”
“There’ll never not be foot traffic. Just about getting back on the map.”
Lola felt her heartbeat everywhere. In the last week, she’d struggled more than ever with the pressure to take care of Johnny in a bigger way than she had been. Now it was more than that. Lola could bring herself to walk away from Hey Joe, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t worth saving for Johnny, for all the other people who loved it and for its history. She might be the only one who could do it. “So if someone had the opportunity to buy it, they should take it?”
