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I poured her the usual—an Old Fashioned—and shrugged. “Ask me again tomorrow night. I need two killer shifts to make it.”
“Screw this job,” Melanie said, spearing the cherry in her drink with a tiny plastic sword. “Screw both your jobs.”
I was glad another customer demanded my attention. I had been about to reply that it was easy for Melanie to say that when she had a rent-controlled apartment she shared with her stable-as-a-rock girlfriend of two years. But I knew what she was getting at, and sure enough, she reached across the bar to touch my hand.
“You know what you should be doing,” she said in a softer tone. “When was the last time you practiced?”
“Wednesday,” I said, and that was the truth. “And it cost me thirty bucks for a practice room at the Kaufman. Thirty bucks I don’t really have.”
I thought that was pretty brave of me considering the sorry state of my finances. Doubly so, since it had been a waste of time. Most of my practice sessions were a waste of time; I made the notes but felt none of the music.
“Any thoughts about an audition?”
I wiped the bar with a rag. “Maybe.”
“Char, it’s been a year.”
“Not now, Mel. I’ve had a rough week, okay?”
Melanie pursed her lips, though her eyes were soft. She started to say something, but I didn’t hear her. My heart seemed to drop to my knees as the front door of the bar opened to let in three guys and a woman. One of the men had his arm slung around the gorgeous brunette.
Melanie stopped talking and made a face. “I don’t even have to turn. It’s that fucker, Keith, isn’t it?”
I nodded and tore my gaze away as the group settled down at a corner table. “I’m fine. Totally fine.”
“Are you? Your hands are shaking.”
I glanced down at the ice scoop in my hand, a glass in the other. Both trembled. I put both down and wiped my hands on my apron. “What the hell is he doing here? There are eight billion bars in the city…”
My voice trailed away as it seemed Keith had been designated to buy the first round for his group and was now wending his way through the bar. I cursed myself for not slipping out the back for a break before he could spot me.
“Charlotte?” Keith sidled right up to the bar without so much as a glance at Melanie. “I never expected to see you at a dive like this, let alone tending the bar! How are you? It’s been a while. Last I saw you…” His face suddenly scrunched up into a look that was half sympathy, half pity, and one hundred percent fake to everyone but him. “Oh, damn, I remember. Your brother—”
“What can I get you?” I asked loudly.
Keith ignored my question and leaned forward, talking to me in a gentle, intense manner, as if I were the only woman in the room, in the whole world. It was a patented Keith Johnston move, one of many that made me fall for him, made me trust him and believe he was sincere when he told me he loved me.
“Charlotte, listen. I’m not good with grief. You know that. I mean, I feel things sohard, sodeeply, that your pain…it was just too much. So I ran. It was cowardly and I’m not proud, but I had to. Your eyes… You know it was your eyes that drew me to you—those big doe eyes of yours…”
Those “big doe eyes” of mine stung with tears at the way he talked about my grief and my pain as if they were things I’d done to him. Impositions.
“And when you came back from the funeral, those gorgeous eyes were filled with so much sadness, there was nothing left. The Charlotte I knew was gone, and in her place was someone I didn’t know. Someone I couldn’t reach. I should have told you that then, but I just wasn’t strong enough. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
Melanie stared at him with slack-jawed awe. “Are you kidding me? You think she’s going to buy that bullshit?”
Unruffled, Keith turned to her, a plastic, polite smile on his lips. “Hello, Melanie. Nice to see you again, too. If you don’t mind, I’m talking to Charlotte.”
I shook my head faintly at Melanie and she narrowed her eyes. “I’m going to the restroom.I’ll be right back.”
“She’s right, you know,” I said when Melanie had gone. “It’s all bullshit what you just said, and even if it wasn’t, you should have talked to me a year ago.A year, Keith. Instead, I come back from the funer—from Montana to find my boyfriend with another girl and my chair in the Strings gone.”
He cocked his head, a perplexed smile on his lips. “Is that what you’re upset about? The Spring Strings? Charlotte, you were going to missopening night. I had to dosomething. The show must go on, right?”
I rubbed a spot on the bar with the rag. “What about us, Keith?” I asked in a low voice, hating how pathetic I sounded. Why was I entertaining his excuses instead of just throwing a drink in his face? But some part of me needed to hear answers, even after all this time. Closure, they called it. Maybe it wouldn’t hurt as much if he had a good reason. Something I could believe. Something more than the one I had been living with—that he and I had been a lie.
But his ridiculous, perplexed smile reappeared. “Us? I don’t recall that we ever got exclusive, Char. We were ‘together’”—he actually made air-quotes—“for a few weeks, right?”
Two months, one week, and four days, I thought. I could probably count up the hours if I really thought about it.
