AllFreeNovel
Share Us
1
Katy
“Katydid, stop playing with that. Do you want the chain to break again? God, you’re so fucking careless,” my sister snips at me and I jerk from where I’m leaning against the side of the bar.
My guilty fingers stop twisting the chain, abandon it to let it lay against my chest, and I huff under my breath. I swear Emily has eyes in the back of her head, if she could see me playing with it while she’s turned away, counting cash from the lunch rush at the pub. It’s nearly 3PM, and most people have staggered away to get on with their day, pick up their kids from school, or start their shift at any of the big factories that ring around the center of the downtown core.
Emily doesn’t look at me as she shoves the drawer into the register and spins it to lock it. She pulls off her apron, shakes out her hair and walks around the counter toward the back room.
“I’ll be right back,” she snaps at me, her irritation setting my heart to thumping nervously. “Stay at the bar. If anyone comes in, try to make sure they pay their bill before they leave.”
With her gone, I feel safe to take a deep breath. After lunch hour, she always takes a break, and it’s up to me to clean up the bar we both work in. My eyes sweep along the length of it. It’s not a big place, the scent of old beer basically baked into the tile floor. The booths are old and worn, the tables chipped and scarred, but the pub gets good business for its low prices and its location. The bar is a regular meeting place for a lot of the people who work at the nearby factories, and when it’s busy, we can serve almost a hundred people in a night.
It’s not exactly the sort of job I want to have in my twenties, and I wish I could be anywhere but here. But there aren’t a lot of options for a girl with no connections to the big city that sleeps on the horizon, and I desperately need the money if I ever have a hope in hell of making a new start. I need a place to stay and the funds to keep myself alive until I can figure out a better way to earn a living in the city, instead of the dusty outskirts. Here the roof over my head is provided, in a trailer out back that I share with Emily and our dad, but it’s four walls and a ceiling and not much else.
Drip. Drip.
The wet rag in my hand, which I’d been using to wipe the counters down, spatters drops over my shoes. I better get to cleaning before Emily comes back in—
The back door opens up, and my sister returns, a scowl on her face, a basket of fries in her hand as she goes back to the register.
“Aren’t you done yet?” She curls her upper lip and I swallow hard, shaking my head.
“Sorry, Em,” I mumble. I move toward the tables and start wiping them down. The register pings as Emily starts riflingthrough it, doing her afternoon count. Anything extra will go in the safe out back, to pay bills, our wages, supplies, that sort of thing.
As I’m coming around one of the tables, I reach down to pick up a few pieces of garbage, and in the process, hook my ankle around the leg of a chair. It falls to the floor with a loud clatter that has me wincing, lifting my head to look up at where my sister is counting out the night’s float.
Emily’s back straightens, and my older sister turns to me with an ugly glare on her face.
“Jesus fucking Christ, Katydid, can’t you do anything without making a goddamn mess? You made me lose count,” she said, her fist full of twenties. She brushes the hair back behind her ears, the blond strands limp after sweating it out behind the bar while I ran from table to table. I don’t know why she bothers to do her hair. I can’t be assed to fuss with mine, although maybe if mine was princess-blonde like hers, I’d bother.
Her locks, her looks, and the way she pulls her shirt neckline down right at 11AM every day — it all adds up to her ending the day with more tips than me.
Emily turns and counts the bills, her mouth moving, her lips pursing with each number. I know how much we’re going to end up with, because it’s not a lot, and the look on her face when she finishes tells me everything I need to know.
“Not even a hundred and fifty today, and we’re gonna have to buy more mix and beer,” she says, her voice heavy with annoyance. Her eyes flick to me, and I feel the sting of it, even though I’m trying not to. Even if there’s nothing I can do to make more people walk through the front door, she’ll still blame me.And when Dad gets back? I’ll be subjected to a long speech about all of my failings. Nevermind that the both of them could do so much to help us and never seem to make the time, or effort, to improve our lot. The only thing that Emi does is take all the attention, and tips, from our customers.
I’m okay with it. Attracting male attention has never really worked out for me. I’d rather slip in her shadow, our patrons’ eyes glossing and gliding right over me to focus on her instead. I’m sure Emi’s half the reason we have people, men, coming in here at all during the day. It’s certainly not the beer selection. I eye the whole two brew choices on tap with a wrinkle of my nose.
“Katydid, did you hear what I just said? We’re gonna need more booze and mix,” she says, her fingers flicking the bills together and shoving them into the cashbox.
“Mmm,” I reply, going back to my tables. Yeah, the beer, and her sparkling personality aren’t bringing in the customers. Nor is it the decor. This place was an auto mechanics’ garage at one point until the old man who ran it died and my dad bought it for nothing and turned it into this... locale. It’s still got a grease stain on the other side of the bar that I can’t get out no matter how much I scrub at it, or what I scrub at it with. There’s another stain in the men’s room I really don’t wanna know anymore details about than I already…
Emily scoffs under her breath, and I snap my head up.
“Dreaming, again… idiot,” she mutters, whipping back to the cash register and starting her count over again. She’s six years my senior and has always made it clear to me that her life was completely perfect with Mom and Dad before I came along and ruined it all. After me, well, yeah. Mom’s not around anymore, Dad’s always drunk on his own supply, and I have an older sisterwho thinks she really could have Been Something if she hadn’t been stuck taking care of her awkward little sister as soon as she turned eighteen.
It was probably a real bummer when I started talking. And walking. I wonder sometimes if Emi would have just ignored me until I disappeared into the ether.
There’s an edge to her voice that makes me cringe, and I hurry away from her, wiping the tables down, straightening chairs, my eyes glancing up now and then to check on her.
The bar’s not so bad, I guess. It could be worse for me if I had to be one of those girls selling flowers at the crossroads where our industrial area meets the freeway into the city. They always have desperate, pinched looks on their faces, even though whenever we see them, Emi scoffs and calls them trash. I could be like those girls, with no hope, and no future. At least my meager savings stash under my mattress is something. I’m more than a few months away from having enough to get a small apartment in the city, nothing more than a room to call my own, but at least I’m close to that.
And working in the bar isn’t horrible. At least it’s cool, air conditioning working well enough to make the hot and dusty nights not entirely uncomfortable. Sure, the windows are covered up to prevent break-ins, and even if they weren’t, the outside view’s a dull grey with graffiti that never seems to wash away, no matter how many times we clean it. But in here, there’s a few strings of fairy lights that I hung last year to make it more cheerful, and their rainbow sparkling lifts my spirits whenever I look at them.
There’s a couple of TVs on the wall, one behind the bar, the other up on the far wall by the restrooms, and even though neither ofthem work well, I’ll turn on the art channel when Emily’s out back taking stock so that I can get a little culture into my life.
Sometimes, if it’s slow enough, I can pretend I’m a barkeep in a fantasy world like in one of my books, where demons and angels walk into the bar and whirl a simple girl like me out of here and onto some crazy adventure. It’s a nice daydream, even though the customers are all rough, gruff types. Most of our drinkers are the occasional lonely trucker passing through, or local farmers, the ones who live out in the middle of nowhere, in tiny shacks or trailers not much bigger than our own.
