She nods. Then she turns and walks back into the station, coffee in hand, and I’m standing in the bay with Torres and the engine and the sound of my speech dissolving into nothing.
Torres is leaning against the rig, arms crossed. She’s looking at me with an expression I can’t quite read. Not pity. Not dismissal. Warmer than either of those.
“For what it’s worth,” she says, “most people who want to be here never walk through that door and ask.”
“But she said no.”
“She said no today.” Torres pushes off the engine, picks up her clipboard. “You want some advice?”
“Yes.”
“Don’t come back tomorrow.”
I blink. “What?”
“Give it a couple days. Let her forget your face. Then come back.” She glances toward the hallway where Cap disappeared. “She respects persistence, but she hates being crowded. There’s a difference.”
“What’s the difference?”
Torres thinks about it. “Persistence is showing up again. Crowding is showing up again too soon.” She taps her clipboard against her thigh. “Come back soon, but not too soon, and bring food. The crew is always hungry.”
She walks back to the engine, crouches by the wheel, and goes back to whatever she was doing before I showed up. Conversation over. I’ve been dismissed, but gently, by someone who gave me more than she had to.
I walk out of the bay and down the sidewalk and make it three blocks before my eyes start burning. I don’t cry. I refuse to cry on Haverford Avenue at ten-thirty in the morning because a woman I’ve never met told me no. But my eyes burn and my throat is tight and the speech is still sitting in my chest, all ninety seconds of it, perfectly rehearsed and completely useless.
Come back soon. Bring food.
I pass the corner store where I used to buy popsicles after school. I pass the laundromat with the blue sign. I pass the little park where Jaylen fell off the monkey bars and needed four stitches and my uncle had to leave work early because Aunt Denise was at a conference and my mom drove because my dad was on shift at the post office and the whole family showed up at the ER like Jaylen had been airlifted when really he just needed a butterfly bandage and was fine.
This is my neighborhood. These are my streets. Station 11 runs these streets. And Captain Donnelly told me no and Torres told me soon and I’m going to show up with food and I’m going to keep showing up until Captain Donnelly runs out of ways to say no or I run out of days before the first of the month.
Whichever comes first.
I pull out my phone and look up cookie recipes.
Chapter Four
Teague
She walks in at nine on a Tuesday, which tells me everything.
Nine on a Tuesday is not a social hour. Nine on a Tuesday is when people come in alone because they don’t want to be at home and they don’t have anywhere else to go. I’ve been bartending long enough to recognize the type. They sit down, they order something strong, they stare at the bar top for a while, and then they either talk or they don’t. Either way, I pour and I listen and I don’t push because it’s not my job to fix people. It’s my job to make sure they don’t break anything on their way through whatever they’re going through.
This one is young. That’s the first thing I notice. Not underage young, but young enough that the fake confidence she’s wearing doesn’t fit right, like a jacket she borrowed from someone bigger. She’s pretty. Brown skin, hair pulled back, clean sneakers. She sits down at the bar instead of a table, which means she wants company or doesn’t know better, and she putsher hands flat on the bar top and looks at the bottles behind me like she’s never seen most of them before.
She probably hasn’t.
“What can I get you?”
She looks at me. Full eye contact, no hesitation, which is unusual for someone who walked in looking that lost. Her eyes are dark and a little red at the edges, like she’s been fighting with herself about something all day and losing.
“Just get me too drunk to care.”
I lean on the bar. “No.”
“No?”
“I’m not getting you too drunk to care. You’re, what, barely old enough to be in here? You walked in here alone on a Tuesday night looking like someone cancelled your birthday, and you want me to pour shots until you stop feeling things?” I shake my head. “That’s not how this works. Not at my bar.”
