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“Get back to your keys, you old coot. You’re not helping. ” Lucy reached for a bar towel and wiped up a splash of wayward beer.
Briar wondered about the glove Lucy wore on her sole remaining hand. It was brown leather and it reached up to her elbow, where it was held in place by a series of tiny buckles and straps. There was stiffness in Lucy’s fingers, and a faint clicking sound as they squeezed the towel and flapped it open.
“Go on,” Lucy insisted. “Give it a try. Won’t kill you, I promise—though it might give you a case of the sneezes for a minute. It does that to lots of people, so don’t feel funny if it happens. ”
Not encouraged, but not willing to be rude to the moon-faced woman with the fluffy, graying curls, she sniffed at the beer and steeled herself for a sip. It became apparent at a whiff that a mere sip would gag her, so she seized the handle and jerked the mug to her mouth, swallowing as much as she could in one forced gulp. She tried not to think about what the beverage might do to her stomach.
The woman behind the bar smiled approvingly and patted Briar’s shoulder. “See? There you go. Awful as can be, but it’ll make you feel better. Now, baby,” she urged, “tell ol’ Lucy how she can help. ”
Again, and without meaning to, through eyes that watered from the burn of the beer, Briar was looking at Lucy’s hand. Where her other arm ought to have hung, her dress sleeve had been stitched shut and pinned to her side.
Lucy caught her looking and said, “I don’t mind if you stare—everybody does. I’ll tell you all about it in a bit, if you want to hear it, but right now I want to hear about what you’re doing here. ”
Briar was almost too miserable to speak, and the addition of the beer had constricted her throat until she could scarcely manage a sound. “This is all my fault. And if anything horrible has happened to him, that’s all my fault too. I’ve done so many things wrong, and I don’t know how to fix any of it, and… and… are you bleeding?” She cocked her head and scrunched up her forehead as a drip of greasy red-brown fluid splattered onto the bar.
“Bleeding? Oh no, sweetheart. That’s just oil. ” She flexed her fingers, and the knuckles popped with a tinny clack. “The whole thing’s mechanical. It gives me a little leak, every so often. Didn’t mean to distract you, though. Go on. All your fault, I heard—and I’m prepared to argue, but I thought I’d let you finish. ”
“Mechanical?”
“Clear up to here,” she said, indicating a spot an inch or two down from her elbow. “It’s bolted onto my bones. But you were saying. ”
“That’s amazing. ”
“That’s not what you were saying. ”
Briar said, “Well no, it’s not. But your arm is amazing. And…” She sighed, and took another long drink of the terrible beer. Her whole body shuddered as the brew went down to sour in her stomach. “And,” she repeated, “I’d said all I meant to say. You heard the rest of it. I want to find Zeke, and I don’t even know if he’s alive. And if he’s not—”
“Then it’s all your fault, yes. You mentioned. You’re being awfully hard on yourself. Boys disobey their parents with such great regularity that it’s barely worth a comment; and if yours is talented enough to rebel in such grand fashion, then you ought to consider it a point of pride that he’s such a sharp lad. ” She leaned forward on her one elbow, laying her mechanical forearm down on the bar. “Now tell me, you don’t really think—do you—that there’s anything you could’ve done to keep him out of here?”
“I don’t know. Probably not. ”
Someone behind Briar gave her back a friendly pat. It startled her, but there was nothing salacious about the gesture so she didn’t flinch away from it. Besides, this was more friendly human contact than she’d had in years, and the pleasantness of it smoothed the keen, guilty edge of her sorrow.
“Let me ask you this, then,” Lucy tried. “What if you’d given him all the answers to every question he ever asked. Would he have liked those answers?”
“No, he wouldn’t have,” she confessed.
“Would he have accepted them?”
“I doubt it. ”
The barwoman sighed in sympathy and said, “And there you go, don’t you? One day, he’d have gotten a bee in his bonnet about the old homestead, and he’d have come poking about regardless. Boys are boys, they are. They’re useless and ornery as can be, and when they grow up they’re even worse. ”
Briar said, “But this particular boy is mine. I love him, and I owe him. And I can’t even find him. ”
“Find him? But baby, you’ve barely got looking! Swakhammer,” she turned to him and demanded, “how long have you been dragging this poor woman through the undersides?”
He swore, “I brought her here first thing, Miss Lucy. I sorted her out real quick, and—”
“You’d better have sorted her out real quick. If you’d brought Maynard’s girl anywhere else, or to anyone else,” she said with emphasis that made Briar divinely uncomfortable, “I’d have tanned your hide till it glowed in the dark. And don’t you tell me you had to figure out who she was. I knew as soon as she showed her face in here, and you did too. I remember that face. I remember this girl. It’s been… my word, it’s been… well, it’s been a long time, and a hard time, to be sure. “
The chorus behind her murmured agreement. Even Swakhammer mumbled a “Yes, ma’am. ”
“Now finish your beer, and we’ll talk turkey. ”
It was even harder to suck down the fearsome brew when she was trying so hard not to cry, and the subsequent gulps didn’t slide down any easier than the first one.
“You’re being so very kind,” she said. Between the beer and the throttling, fist-sized lump in her throat, it came out garbled. She added, “I’m sorry, please forgive me. I’m not usually so… I’m usually more… I’m not used to this. It’s like you said, it’s been a hard day. ”
