I have three weeks before I report to Station 24.
Captain Donnelly doesn’t know my name. She has no reason to take a meeting with a recruit she didn’t request. There’s no process for this, no form to fill out, no box to check that saysI know this sounds crazy but I belong at your station if you’d just let me explain.
But I’m going to explain. I’m going to walk up to Station 11 and knock on the door and tell Captain Donnelly that I’m supposed to be there and I’ll do whatever it takes to prove it.
I reach over and turn off the lamp. The glow-in-the-dark stars come alive on the ceiling, pale green and slightly crooked, and the siren is gone now, off somewhere in the city doing the job I trained for, and I lie in the dark and make a plan.
Chapter Two
Teague
Last call is a negotiation.
The couple at the end of the bar wants one more round. They always want one more round. They’ve been here since nine, drinking gin and tonics and arguing about whether to get a dog, and they’re at the stage of drunk where every sentence starts with “but listen” and ends with somebody touching the other person’s face. I like them. They tip well and they don’t break things and their arguments are entertaining in the way that other people’s problems always are when you’re sober and behind a bar.
“One more,” the woman says. She’s got short red hair and a nose ring and she’s been winning the dog argument for the last forty minutes.
“Kitchen’s closed.”
“We don’t want food. Just one more gin and tonic.”
“It’s 1:45.”
“Is that a no?”
“That’s a you-have-fifteen-minutes-and-then-I’m-closing.”
She grins. Her girlfriend is already pulling out her card. I pour two more gin and tonics, light on the gin because they don’t need it and they won’t notice, and set them down and move on to closing.
Closing is the best part. Not because the people leave, although that’s fine too, but because the bar becomes mine in a different way when it’s empty. During hours, Anthem is a job. After hours, it’s a room I know better than any room I’ve ever lived in, and I’ve lived in a lot of rooms.
I start with the glasses. Wash, rack, wipe down the bar top. The wood is old and scarred and holds the smell of whiskey no matter how much I clean it, which I consider a feature. The stools get pushed in. The bottles get faced, labels out, because Carl never faces them and it drives me up the wall. Carl owns this bar. Carl is also in Tampa visiting his sister for the third time this year and hasn’t poured a drink here since February, and every month he’s gone is another month this place runs on my schedule, my playlist, my rules.
The contract is in the office. Top drawer, under the deposit slips. Carl’s lawyer drew it up two years ago when Carl first floated the idea of selling, and we’ve been adjusting the number ever since as Carl’s urgency fluctuates with his blood pressure medication and how much his sister’s husband annoys him. Right now the number is one I can almost reach. Eight more months of tips and the savings I’ve been building since I was nineteen, and Anthem stops being a place I work and starts being a place I own.
I don’t think about it every night. Most nights I just close and count and lock up and walk home. But some nights, when the bar is empty and the neon is buzzing and the playlist has cycled down to the slower stuff, I stand behind the counter and look at this room and think: mine. Not yet. But mine.
The couple finishes their drinks. The red-haired woman leaves a twenty on the bar and a note on a napkin that says GET THE DOG, and I fold it and put it in the tip jar because it made me laugh. I watch them walk out, arms around each other, still arguing on the sidewalk. The door swings shut behind them and the bar goes quiet.
I turn off the overheads. The neon stays on for another ten minutes while I finish the floors. Pink and blue and the yellow of the Anthem sign over the bar, the one Carl’s dad had made in 1987 that’s been repaired twice and still flickers on the A. The light makes the room look like the inside of a jukebox. I’ve always liked that.
Mop. Bucket. The floor is sticky near the pool table because someone always spills near the pool table. I don’t have a pool table because I want one. I have a pool table because Carl had one and moving it would cost more than keeping it, and his regulars would riot. Carl’s regulars are mostly gone now, replaced by mine, but the pool table stays because some things you inherit and don’t question.
My phone buzzes on the bar. I check it with wet hands, leaving a smear on the screen.
Vanessa:still on for thursday?
Me:yeah. how long
Vanessa:couple hours. finishing the sleeve
Me:cool
Vanessa has been doing my ink for three years. She works at Iron Lily. She’s meticulous in a way that borders on annoying and talented in a way that justifies it. The sleeve on my left arm is hers. The geometric piece on my ribs is hers. The moth on my shoulder blade, the one that took four sessions because I kept moving, is hers. I don’t let other people work on me. Skin is permanent and trust is earned and Vanessa earned it line by line.
I finish the floors. Lock the register. Pull the deposit and rubber-band it and put it in the safe. The safe is behind a framed poster of the Clash at the Palladium, 1979, which is either a security risk or a personality test depending on how you look at it.
My jacket is on the hook by the back door. I pull it on without thinking, the weight of it settling across my shoulders, familiar. The leather is soft from years of wear. The patches are layered three deep in some places, older ones underneath newer ones, a geological record of every rally and show and protest I’ve been to since I was sixteen and stole my first patch off a table at a punk show in somebody’s basement. Black Lives Matter, bottom right, fraying at the edge. Trans rights, center back, bright pink thread because that’s what the organizer was selling. Kids over guns from a march in 2022 that I went to alone and stood in a crowd of ten thousand people and screamed until my throat closed. Eat the rich, top left, because I was nineteen and angry and I’m twenty-five and still angry and the patch stays.
