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tick,
tick.
“Staring at the clock won’t make it move faster,” Jimmie grumbles with his deep, gravelly voice as he passes the bar. “Get off.” He hits out at Billie with a rolled-up newspaper.
She only turns her dead, bloodshot eyes on her boss. Owner of Jim’s Joint can kiss her drunk ass. She stays planted on the bartop, lying on her back with her hands tucked under her head as a makeshift pillow.
“Don’t know why you put up with her,” Tonya laughs, but it’s a bitter, insincere sound. A mask she’s clutching onto in the face of what she’ll hear today. She tops off the half-empty vodka bottles with water.
Jimmie narrows his eyes on Billie’s freckled cheek that she turns to him. She knows the answer.Family. He puts up with her because they’re family. Her mom’s cousin.
Growing up, Billie saw him more as an uncle than a second cousin.
Besides, “I work…” Billie says with a sigh, “when there’s customers.”
Jimmie must have walked off, since the swing door to the backroom and kitchen swings with a godawful screech.
“You work fortips,” Tonya corrects, and the smirk she wears can be heard in her sly tone. “That’s why you’re dressed like that.”
Billie’s face contorts into a scowl aimed at the slowest clock in the world. Still stuck on 11AM. Just a few minutes past. And just another thirty odd minutes before that door swings open with an inpour of gossip.
She pushes up, propped on her elbows digging into the bar. “What’s wrong with what I’m wearing?”
Tonya glances up from her work on watering down the vodka. “It’s not the uniform, is it?”
“Fuck the uniform.” She falls back down on the bar-bench. More tips do come in when she wears a little dress, rather than the black t-shirt and jeans Tonya wears every time.
Billie thinks of it as smart business.
“What’s it matter to you anyway?” Billie adds, annoyed. “I split my tips with you when you’re stuck behind the bar.”
Tonya’s silene is the answer Billie expects. When T’s wrong, she’s quiet. Can never admit she’s wrong, just suddenly loses the ability to speak.
Billie smirks up at the wooden panels with a hint of triumph. She has the fleeting idea to call Kate and let her know about her little victory.
Instead—
Swinging her legs off the side of the bar, Billie throws herself off. Her boots land with a thud. “Be back in a sec.”
“Where you goin’?” Tonya sighs the words with blatant exasperation.
Billie looks back over her shoulder. “Forgot my water bottle.”
Tonya arches a brow above her eye, her auburn hair pulled back into a tight bun. Fleetingly, the red hues of her hair flickers a memory behind Billie’s eyes.
Billie threaded her fingers through her hair, streaking blood all over her. Once bleached blonde, now streaked red—the rubies of a murder.
Tonya’s impatient tone snaps Billie back to now. She gestures around at the bottles behind the bar. “You know where you are, right?”
In other words, ‘Why d’you need your booze bottle when we’re in a damn bar?’
“Duh.” Billie leans her back against the door to the parking lot. “Where else do you think I’m gonna fill up my bottle with the good shit?”
Tonya hides her smirk with a shake of the head.
And she’s out of sight once Billie steps back onto the gravel of the lot, the door swinging shut behind her. She throws her gaze around as she turns to the opposite end where her peeling blue truck is parked. She left it unlocked, of course. Nothing worth stealing in there, and Southsiders don’t usually mess with other Southsiders with things like grand theft of petty shit.
But just as she thinks of how damn safe it is in the Jim’s Joint lot, her gaze lands on the truck—
