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When all was said and done, through a lot of expensive legal busywork, Petra found herself the owner of The First Down, a neighborhood-corner sports bar that had been her uncle’s pride and joy as well as his livelihood.
It had also been closed up for most of a year by that time.
Petra’s first impulse, her firstintention, was to sell the place. She wasn’t a sports fan, she had no idea how to run a bar, and back then she’d still held a few threads of the dream she’d had since fourth grade: to be a performer on Broadway. She’d gotten as far as interviewing a few commercial real estate agents, all of whom gave her long lists of things she’d need to do to improve the place and get ‘top dollar.’
It was Dre, her romantic partner at the time, who’d convinced her to think about keeping it. Petra thought that was a very dumb idea at first, while she was trying to keep her father whole enough to keep going, and cobbling together dance-class gigs at basically every studio and fitness center in Tulsa to keep her rent paid. Also, her father was an alcoholic. Seemed pretty ridiculous to run a bar while she was trying to pull him out of a bottle.
But Dre had pushed, arguing that her father mostly drank alone at home, so that had nothing to do with owning a bar. When Petra had scoffed at that convenient reasoning, Dre had brought in a ‘hospitality management consultant’ they knew, who sketched out plans for various possible reimaginings of the business.
Dre was a sneaky one, feeding the consultant enough details about Petra so the plans pinged her interests. Not a sports bar among the proposals, but one was basically cut from the cloth of Petra’s fantasies.
So now she was the owner of Gertrude’s, a book bar styled like the Paris salon of its namesake, Gertrude Stein.
The first few months they’d been open had been a daily guessing game: would this be the last day they could open the door? Would this be it? How about this day? But, with a lot of willpower and sacrifice, and a little magic, they’d been able to stay open every day, and they’d about broken even at the end of the first year. Each subsequent year had been better. Last year, and so far this one, were truly successful. She no longer had to worry about whether she could keep her rent—mortgage, now—paid.
And she loved it.
As she parked now in her spot in the back, she smiled at Dre’s ginormous BMW motorcycle. They weren’t a couple any longer, that element of their love hadn’t survived the pressures of opening Gertrude’s, but they were still best friends, and Dre was the head bartender.
She grabbed her bag and the bottle of Maker’s Mark from the passenger seat, got out and collected the bags from the back of her Cross Country, and went in the back door of Gertrude’s, her lesbian book bar.
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~oOo~
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She hadn’t set outto own a lesbian bar, though she probably should have expected it to happen. She herself was bisexual, and most of her friends claimed some stripe of the rainbow. They’d all flocked to Gertrude’s to support her. Those friends were the whole reason they’d made it through the first year. After that, word of mouth had traveled far and wide enough for the place to become a real draw in the community.
Also, she’d named it after Gertrude freaking Stein.
She’d been thinking of thesalon—all the books and art, of Picasso and Hemingway and Gauguin and Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald all sitting around, smoking and drinking and arguing about art and politics and love. Sheshouldhave been thinking of Gertrude and her lover, Alice B. Toklas, cleaning up after all that drinking and smoking and arguing and then going up to cuddle together in bed.
When she’d expressed surprise at the turn the bar had taken, Dre had looked at her like she was nuts.
Seriously?Dre had said.I thought the brainy dyke vibe was what you liked about Stein. It’s so obvious!
Well, yes, it was obvious. Now. Yes, she felt silly not to have seen it. At any rate, Petra liked it better that she hadn’t planned things the way they’d fallen out. It had the glint of destiny about it.
And she was surrounded by friends every night at work.
After she put her bag in her office and put the cold stuff in the employee fridge, Petra went through the kitchen and checked on how the prep was going. They didn’t do an extensive menu, or a particularly hoity-toity one, but Max, their chef, had done a year at a Paris cooking school, and there was a casual French sparkle to their offerings. In keeping with the Lost Generation theme, of course.
“Get out of my kitchen, Snow White,” Max growled as Petra wandered through, peeking in pots and looking over the assistants’ shoulders.
“Just checking. You know, I pay for all this food.”
“Hmpf. You pay for the ingredients. I make them food.”
“And I pay you, ergo . . .”
Max flipped her off.
This was schtick, not conflict. Petra smirked and gave Max’s ample ass a hip check as she went by.
She pushed through the swinging doors and into Gertrude’s—and took her usual beat to marvel. God, she really did love this place.
Though it was a bar, andhada bar, with stools and taps and shelves of bottles on a mirrored wall—to which she added the Maker’s Mark—and something like a dance floor, and a small stage, it didn’t really look like a bar. Though it was a bookstore, with books for sale, arrayed on shelves around the walls, and displayed on tables at various points, it didn’t look like a bookstore.
