Chapter 22 — The Back Room, After

Sunday, 8:02 a.m. — the back room of the Counterweight Tavern, after.

The first thing is the light on the floor, and she thinks the floor is wet again, the cooler line leaking the way it always leaks, and she's halfway to the mop before she understands it isn't water, it's a phone. Face-up. Lit. Somebody's phone left on, the screen burning a little blue rectangle into the concrete, and over it the OPEN sign through the pass-through window laying its red down on the same patch, so the screen sits in a wash of red and blue both, like a thing the law has already gotten to, and Reagan stands in the doorway in her coat with the keys still hooked on her finger and does not go pick it up.

She came in to count Friday's drawer. That's the lie she told the parking lot. She tells herself things in the parking lot now, the way Connor used to talk to himself shaving, low, working a thing out he'd never say to her face — just got to make the one call, Ray, just the one, and she'd hear it through the bathroom door and pretend she hadn't. She came in to count the drawer. She has not turned on a single light. The back room doesn't need her lights; it has the sign, it has the phone, it has the gray coming up dirty in the high window over the kegs.

The chair is wrong.

She notices it the way she notices everything in this room, which is with her body before her mind — twenty years of moving through here without looking taught her hands what's level and her feet what's clear, and the chair is two feet off where a chair should be, dragged, one leg caught in the rubber floor mat and the mat pulled up with it in a long black tongue. There was a scuff. There was a scuff she'd have to get on her knees for. Connor got down on his knees once a year for the grease trap and complained the whole hour like a man being asked to dig his own grave, and she is on her knees now, in her coat, in the not-quite-dark, running her thumb along a black rubber heel-mark that someone put there going backward, fast, the way you mark a floor when your feet are doing something the rest of you didn't agree to.

She does not pick up the phone.

It rings — no. It doesn't ring. It does the thing a phone does when it's been ringing a long time and gives up: the screen brightens, all on its own, a missed-call number she half-reads upside down, an area code she knows, and then the dark, and then nothing. Lit, dark. Lit, dark. Like the OPEN sign, she thinks, guilty, innocent, except she doesn't know where she got that, she's never thought that in her life, it arrives in her like a thing carried in on someone else's coat, and she lets it go.

She should call somebody. She knows the shape of the morning that's coming the way she knows the shape of a Saturday before she's pulled the first tap — there's an order to it, a sequence, and somewhere in the sequence is a call she's supposed to make, and she stands in the middle of her own back room unable to find which one. Not Dell. Dell is who you'd call about a thing like this and Dell is — she steps around the thought the way she stepped around the chair, body first. Not Dell.

The float box is open on the prep table and it is light. She doesn't have to count it to know; she's hefted that box a thousand nights and it has a weight that means full and a weight that means short and this is neither, this is the third weight, the bad one, the gone weight, and her arms knew it before she got the lid up. Gone weight. There's banded cash still in it, a sloppy half, somebody's count interrupted mid-strap, two rubber bands snapped on the table like the little black bones of something, and the rest just not there, and Reagan sets the lid back down softly, the way you'd close a thing on a sleeping face, because the room is already telling her more than she signed up to know and she would like, very much, to stop being told.

She wipes the prep table. There's nothing on it. She wipes it anyway, the rag from her coat pocket, the rag she carries now the way other women carry a phone, and she wipes the steel down in the long flat strokes she's wiped it ten thousand times and Connor always said she wiped it too hard, said she'd wear a groove in the steel before she wore out the dirt, said it laughing, said it the way he said everything, like the work was a thing happening to her and not to him, and she wipes it too hard. She wears at a spot that has no dirt on it. Her wrist with the old fryer-shine on the inside of it, the burn from oh-nine she still cooks beside, does the work and the rest of her stands back and watches the wrist do it like it belongs to a more competent woman.

The grease is under her nails. It is always under her nails. No soap she's ever bought has reached it, it lives in the quick of her the way the bar lives in her, and she sees it now in the red sign-light, dark crescents at the ends of her fingers, and she thinks of all the times she's stood at her own sink at home digging at it with a brush and Connor in the doorway saying leave it, Ray, it's yours, it's the only ink you'll ever sign your name in that they can't take back, and he was wrong about that, he was wrong about that the way he was wrong about everything that turned out to cost her, because they could take it back, they were going to, that was the whole weekend, that was the binder, that was Gigi and the good pen and the name coming off the leases sheet by sheet — they could take her name off paper but the grease stayed and the man stayed gone and the floor had a phone on it lit up blue.

She is not crying. She wants that noted. Whatever ledger is keeping this morning, she wants it noted that she did not cry over a phone.

There's a smell under the bleach of last night's beer and the cold animal smell of the walk-in, and she follows it the way you follow a draft to a window left open, and it takes her to the back door, the steel one that lets onto the deck, and the door is unlatched. Not open. Unlatched. The bar to it thrown but the deadbolt not turned, and she stands with her hand flat on the cold steel and does not push it.

Beyond it is the deck. The casino parking deck the bar shares its rear wall with — three levels of poured concrete where the corridor's money sleeps in cars overnight, where a man can leave a vehicle for a week and no one asks, geography doing the work a vault used to do — and at this hour it'll be near empty, just the all-nighters' sedans and the gray light coming down the ramps in slabs, and there's tape. She can see it through the door's wire-glass window, a strip of it, the cheap yellow kind, strung off the low concrete lip on the second level where the wall steps down to nothing and a man could go over if a man were running, and the tape moves a little in the bay wind and there are no people on the deck at all, which is somehow worse than people, a deck that's already been worked and emptied and left, taped off and abandoned to the wind before she even woke.

She knows what's on the other side of the door. Her body knew it from the chair, from the gone-weight box, from the lit phone — her body has been telling her since the doorway and she has been wiping tables to keep from hearing it. Connor died on the other side of a steel door too, in the walk-in, four years gone, and she found him because the cooler alarm chirped low-temp and she went to fix the door she thought he'd left open and he was the thing holding it open, slumped against the kegs with his mouth still working on a sentence, his face gone the gray of the concrete out there now, his hand half-up like he'd been about to ask her for one more thing and the asking was the last muscle to quit. She has opened one steel door in her life onto a man she had to grieve. Her hand is flat on the second one. She does not turn the bolt.

She lets it stay a door.

That, she will learn later — much later, going backward through this weekend the way you'd walk a creek upstream to find where the water went bad — is the most honest thing she does all morning: she lets the door stay a door. She does not open it onto whatever the deck is keeping. She gives it the only mercy in her, which is to not look, the same mercy she gave Connor's voicemails the year he was dying that she never played, the same mercy she's about to give the lit phone on her floor, which is the mercy of the unanswered thing, the kindness of the call you let ring out because answering is a transaction with a cost.

She turns back into the room.

Now she cleans. Now she does the thing she came to do under the lie about the drawer, the thing her hands have been wanting since the doorway: she cleans the room. She gets the chair leg out of the mat and sets the chair square. She kneels and works the heel-mark with the rag and a thumb of cleaner and it lifts, mostly, leaves a gray ghost in the rubber she'll see for a year, every shift, the spot where the floor remembers. She straps the loose cash and doesn't count it, won't count it, sets it in the box and the box in the safe and turns the dial and the gone-weight goes into the dark where she keeps the things she's decided not to weigh.

She picks up the snapped rubber bands. Two of them. She holds them in her palm a second, the little black bones, and then she throws them out, and throwing out two rubber bands is the closest she comes all morning to a verdict.

The band's pay is still clipped behind the register from last night, an envelope with DENNY+3 in her own hand, and that's the call she should've remembered, that's the one in the sequence — she was up front settling the band when the room behind her did the thing it did, when the chair went backward and the door went unlatched, she was counting out a fiddle player's eighty bucks with the cover of "Wagon Wheel" still hanging in the air and she heard — she didn't hear words. She wants that noted too. She heard the room change weight the way she'd heard the float box change weight, a gone sound under the music, a chair and a quick of feet and then the steel door's particular cold sigh, and she'd thought somebody's gone out for a smoke, she'd thought Dell's stepped out to take his call where it's quiet, she'd thought a dozen small Saturday-night thoughts and gone on counting eighty dollars into a fiddle player's hand because that was the thing in front of her and the thing in front of her is the only thing she's ever been able to afford to do.

She did not go look. Last night, she did not go look. This morning she will not open the door. Reagan Half has built a whole life out of not going to look, out of letting the steel doors stay doors, and she does not yet know — she is one weekend and seven chapters of her own backward-running grief from knowing — that the not-looking is its own kind of carrying, that you can stand at the front of your own bar settling a fiddle player's pay and be, in that exact minute, the hinge a thing swings on, that she put the man on the far side of that door in this room herself, with her own want, with a binder and a good pen and a name she was trying to lift off paper out of something she'd have called protection and that was, underneath, the worst and truest thing, which she is not ready to say and the morning is not making her say it, yet.

She wipes the rail. She doesn't need to wipe the rail; she's in the back room and the rail is up front; but her feet take her up front and she wipes it, the long brass rail Connor used to lean on at the far end nursing a club soda and lying to men about money, and she wipes it too hard, the way she wipes everything, and the brass takes the red of the OPEN sign and gives it back warmer, and she stands in her own empty front room at two minutes past eight on a Sunday with the chairs still up on the tables from a close that somebody else's hands must have half-done, and she understands she is going to have to call someone, and that the someone is not Dell, and that the reason it's not Dell is the reason for the tape on the deck, and she lets that arrive in her the way the strange red thought arrived, guilty, innocent, carried in on a coat that isn't hers, and she sets it down without looking at it.

The phone on the back-room floor lights one more time.

She hears it before she sees it — not a ring, the buzz of it, the hard insect rattle of a phone vibrating against concrete — and she comes back to the doorway and there it is, lit, jumping a quarter-inch on the floor in its red-and-blue wash, a name on the glass this time and not a number, big enough to read across the room, and she reads it before she can stop herself the way you read the worst word on a page your eye lands on, and the name on Dell Maren's phone, the name lighting up the floor of her back room at eight-oh-four on a Sunday morning over a snapped rubber band and a ghost in the rubber mat and a steel door she won't open, is one word, and the word is HALSTED.

It buzzes itself still. The screen holds the name a moment in its dying light — HALSTED, missed — and then gives up, the way it gave up before, the way the man it's calling for must have given up somewhere out past the door she's decided is a wall, and the floor goes dark, and the only red left is the sign's, bleeding down through the pass-through onto the spot where the screen was, onto the concrete, onto no one's hands at all.

Reagan stands in the doorway and watches the name not come back.

Then she goes and gets the mop, because the cooler line is leaking again, it's always leaking, and there is water on the floor after all, there is always water on the floor, and a woman can spend a whole life with a mop in her hands keeping the level thing level, hanging her own weight against the morning to make the scale read even, and never once let herself feel the floor tilt — and she mops around the phone, careful, not touching it, leaving it lit and dark and lit on the wet concrete like a small red wound the room is keeping for someone who isn't coming back to claim it.

She'll let it stay there till the others come.

She doesn't know yet who the others are. But she knows they're coming, the way she knew the chair was wrong, the way her arms knew the box was light — she knows it in the body before the mind, and the body is never wrong about weight, and this morning the whole room weighs gone.

She wipes the steel door's window clear with her sleeve, so she won't have to, when they ask, say she couldn't see out. Then she stops wiping. Then she lets it fog back over with her own breath, on purpose, and turns away, and goes on mopping a floor that doesn't need it, in the red, alone, over a phone she will not answer for a man she will not name, in a room she does not yet understand she built.