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She didn’t want to remember all the lurid details: the shouts, the camera flashes going off as Dan inspected his injured hand in shock. How placid and far away she’d felt afterward as Dan’s agent rushed them offstage and shuffled them, not to New Jersey, where they actually lived, but to Dan’s Manhattan apartment, where they were instructed to hole up and keep their mouths shut.
She was still angry, but her anger had gone underground and turned into a sort of muffled restlessness. A buried, insistent refusal that made it hard for her to sit still, to do as she was told, to listen to Dan reassuring her that she was being hasty, that it wasn’t over, that everything would work out.
He’d left for a meeting with the team’s PR people, and she’d written him a note, grabbed her purse, and run.
Her plan was to get to Newark Airport, change her ticket, and fly home. But she hadn’t gotten that far, because the lobby had been full of flashbulbs and shouting, and a man dressed like a security guard had grabbed her by the arm, led her to a side entrance of the building, and—just when she was feeling relieved to have escaped—plucked her purse off her shoulder and run.
She’d been left in an alley with five bucks and a MetroCard, and the only logical thing to do was go back to the apartment.
But the before-and-after line she’d drawn had followed her into the alley. She’d sensed that if she turned around she might see it, thick and black and wet, painted across the ground directly behind her heels.
The line said You can’t go back.
She didn’t want to. She didn’t want to talk to Dan. But neither did she want to be sitting here, broke, with no purse and no friends or family within a thousand miles, and no phone to call them with.
She wanted a magical unicorn to arrive, nicker at her with gentle understanding, and fly her to her family’s cabin in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, where she could take the rest of Labor Day weekend off from reality.
Too bad there were no magical unicorns in sight. Only the bartender, whose gaze she was assiduously avoiding.
And this guy.
This guy with the book and the elbow and the face that said Don’t even fucking think about it.
The trouble was, it was difficult to know what to look at when you couldn’t look at the guy or the bartender, and you’d already been sitting at the bar for two hours. She’d had plenty of time already to take in the tiered rows of liquor bottles and the decorations—the novelty cheese-wedge Christmas lights strung along the ceiling, the pristine gold and green HOLMGREN WAY street sign, the placard that advertised the availability of Old Fashioneds made with real Door County cherries.
She’d read an article about this bar, back before she moved. Pulvermacher’s had a colorful history as a Beat-scene watering hole, but these days it made its money on New York’s Wisconsin exiles. Packers fans gathered in Greenwich Village on game days to drink beer and yell at the television in the company of dozens of other people who cared as much as they did about the fate of Titletown’s team.
May’s kind of bar, and May’s kind of people.
She hadn’t come here on purpose—she’d never even been here before. She’d just been walking aimlessly, head down, mind spinning. She’d been thinking, You have to come up with a plan. But no plan had occurred to her. She’d wandered into the Village and was thinking about sitting down in the little slice of public park she’d spotted, when she saw the awning over the basement bar’s entrance.
Pulvermacher’s.
She’d recognized the name, and her feet had stopped moving of their own accord. The line had nudged at her heels, urging her inside.
It had seemed possible two hours ago, when she slid her last five bucks across the bar, that she would meet some nice Wisconsin person—some woman named Pat who was built like a tank and knew how to make football dip with two cans of Hormel, a package of Philly’s, and some sliced Muenster. Or a Steve from Oconomowoc who hunted elk just like her dad. May and her new friends would exchange names, origins, stories. Imaginary Pat or Imaginary Steve would buy her a beer, and she would carefully glide the conversation on lubricated alcohol wheels in the direction of what had happened to her.
Here, hon, Imaginary Steve would say, use my phone to call your folks.
Imaginary Pat would clap her on the shoulder. You’ve had a run of bad luck. If you want, you can sleep in my guest bed tonight. We’ll get you squared away and off to the airport tomorrow.
It was a fantasy—she knew that. Her mom always said May couldn’t tell the difference between fantasy and reality, but of course she could. Fantasy was what had convinced her to move here and had pulled her into this bar. It was the voice in her head that told her, Dan’s the one. You’re going to love New York. Pulvermacher’s is going to rescue you from yourself.
Reality was the thing that was always letting her down.
In reality, bars sat virtually empty between the hours of two and five, even on Fridays, and the people who came in weren’t, generally, the sort whose mercy May wanted to throw herself upon.
In reality, Imaginary Pat and Imaginary Steve didn’t live in New York.
People like this guy did.
The bartender had begun cleaning the counter with a damp rag. He shuffled closer to her, sweep by sweep, and cleared his throat.
Nervous, May lifted he
r beer and drained it, realizing only with the last warm swallow what she’d done.
“Can I get you another round?” he asked.
