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And if I didn’t, I would find something to do.
•••
“Has it ever occurred to you to simply be nice to people?”
I stared at my cousin across the bar. “Has it ever occurred to you to mind your own business?”
“Absolutely not,” Penny said. “Why would I do something as silly as not stick my nose in your entire life?”
“Because you have better things to do than that? Like, oh, I don’t know. Serve Harry down there?”
She shot me a look. “What’s up, Harry?”
The older man leant against the bar and pushed his empty glass towards her. “’Nother one, please, Pen, love.” His words were thick and slurred, and he was almost hanging onto the edge of the old wooden bar for dear life.
Penny pressed her lips together. “Sorry, Harry. No can do.”
He looked up at her, glassy-eyed. “’Nother whiskey, love.”
“Nope.” She took his glass and put it in the sink beneath the bar. “I’m cutting you off and calling—”
“Harry! There you are!”
I turned at the sound of Darlene Brown’s voice. She shuffled through the bar and grabbed her brother’s arm, then glared at Penny.
“You’re not supposed to let him get like this!”
Her high-pitched outbreak split the pub in two; the locals, who were used to it, continued on their conversations, albeit a little quieter so they could still listen in, and the tourists who all stilled and stared unabashedly.
“Hey.” Penny cocked her hip and put her hand on it. “I’ve served him two drinks, and I made sure they were small ones. It wouldn’t surprise me if he had something in his pocket given the state he’s in.”
Darlene’s jaw clenched. “You shouldn’t have served him at all.”
“He wasn’t like this when he came in or I’d have called you.”
“You shouldn’t have served him!” the older woman repeated.
Penny’s mask of tolerance dropped. “Youshould be getting him help instead of leaving him so you can shag your married toyboy at three o’clock in the afternoon, don’t you think?”
Darlene gasped. “How dare you?”
“Quite easily. Now, you listen to me, Darlene Brown.” Penny flattened her hands on the bar, glaring at her. “I don’t care if you’re thirty years my senior, and you should thank your lucky bloody stars I haven’t banned him yet. The only reason I haven’t is because this pub is the only place he gets any kind of human interaction, and I’m not going to take that away from him. But if you’re going to come in here and mouth off like I’m the one responsible for him, I’ll ban youboth.”
Darlene stared at her for a moment before she turned to Harry. “Come on, Harry. Let’s go.”
I grimaced as Darlene helped a very drunken Harry through the pub. The chatter gently rose back to where it was before she’d arrived as the two of them left, but the uncomfortable air didn’t fully disappear.
“Well,” I said to Penny when she walked back over. “That wasn’t awkward at all.”
She smiled wryly. “It happens every day, but Darlene is usually smarter than to run her mouth at me.”
“I thought Harry had kicked the habit.”
“Same story as usual. He sees the doctor, he does group therapy, he kicks it for three weeks, then something happens that makes him pick the bottle back up again. Last time, it was witnessing a bird get caught by a cat. This time, it was his goldfish dying.”
“Forgive me, but neither of those seem like they’re devastating enough make one spiral into the depths of alcoholism again.”
Pen leant forwards. “He doesn’t have a goldfish.”
