Adam Johnson - Emporium

Nothing seems to involve you. You sit at the bar wanting ice water while the bartender watches the Tonight Show on a soundless set. The music and laughing seem to sweep past, and it is as still on this stool as afternoons when you pull one of your father’s pine Louis XIV chairs into your mother’s cactus garden and contemplate in the half-light where she might’ve dug her holes. Lately, though, this is a riskier proposition because after only a year, you’re no longer so sure of what she hoped for and feared. If you wrote it, this is what your college essay would be about: Feeling for divots in a dark lawn with your toes. Renting movies like The Fighting Seabees with your father. Living in a house filled with cactus all winter, sleeping in a room made small by jade-green ribs and spines while the smell of hot saw blades from the garage blows in through the heat vent.

Sue takes the stool next to you, and she also is ignored by the bartender. You ignore her too. In front of you is a wall-length mirror littered with business cards, snapshots in cheap plastic frames, and several yards of dollar bills signed with red marker. There is a crisp five-dollar bill that says Work-Battle-Battle-Win in beautiful script; it was the motto of your I-High baseball team, a stupid ritual you chanted before every game.

At the end of the bar, like sisters, Judge Helen smokes and chats with a woman who has rad-therapy lines tattooed on her neck. If you catch her from the other side, where they took the lung, Judge Helen’s smoking can be spooky. But from here, her ribs expand as she drags and exhales, her laugh comes with a rise in her chest.

If you were sick, you and Sue would be laughing like this. You’re pretty sure you might even have her in the back of the bus right now. But if you were sick, there’d be a hell of an essay in it, and you’d probably be at Harvard. As your mind hovers over cancer and college and Sue on hot vinyl, your eyes wander the mirror, and there, framed by shoulder-length black hair, are the brown eyes of your mother.

This snapshot — taken by who, the bartender? — depicts your mother about to limbo under a pool cue held by her best friend, Mrs. Cassini, and another woman who’s no longer in the club. The colors are washed out, the eyes red, and Mom’s just starting to descend, her eyes reckoning the height of that bar. There is confetti in her hair and for now her breasts are whole, so you know this must be her thirty-eighth birthday, and that despite the sheer dresses, the snow outside the Cove is deep. Her friends have set the bar at a ridiculous height, a point from which no one could be expected to rise, and you’re wondering where you were when this picture was taken. Everyone smiles. She is about to fall, yet there is a thrill in this, too. They all lean forward, breath held, and for this moment, it looks like she is going to make it.

You turn to Sue. “What do you want for your birthday?”

She doesn’t miss a beat. “A fishing pole. Maybe a pass to the zoo.”

“That’s my mom,” you say, nodding at the bank of pictures.

“Where?”

“Doing the limbo.”

Sue doesn’t know what to say. “She’s pretty.”

“You think so?”

“She was in the club?”

“She started it. That shot’s from later, though, from her birthday. I was trying to remember if I got her anything that year. I might have forgot.”

“And you’re thinking, what are you supposed to get for the woman who’ll lose everything?”

You shrug. “Judge Helen was telling a story one time on the bus, about how when it didn’t look like she was going to make it, her sister sent away to one of those mail-order companies that specializes in this. It names stars after people. God, they were howling over that one, I mean, laughing up their drinks. An eternal dot in the sky named Helen. Actually, it was Helen B-63, that’s how good business was.”

Sue pauses. “Your mother, is she?”

“No.”

“Good. That makes me feel a little better.”

“I’m sorry, I meant she died last year.”

“You mean, less than a year after that picture?”

“Ten months.”

“Fuck,” she says. “What am I doing around you people?”

Sue stares at the dull brass of the bar rail, and you feel for her, but can’t get past that picture. The bartender is shaking glasses in soapy water. You tell him you want to take a look at something on his wall, and he looks at you like you’ve just asked for a key to the Ladies’.

“Give him the damn picture, Bill,” Mrs. Cassini says and she’s right behind you once again this evening. “In fact, give him anything he wants. We’ll start with the picture, six shots, and an order for five taxis at midnight.”

“Mrs. Cassini, I got to drive that bus.”

“Oh, be quiet, Ben. Listen to your Auntie Cassini for once,” she says and slides onto the barstool next to you. It feels like being between the posts of a marine battery, as if you touched both these women at the same time, you’d see that blue light again.

You’re handed a framed photo of your mother that’s been wiped with a bar towel. Tequila appears, lime and salt. Cassini licks the back of her hand. Sue bumps you as she hooks a heel in a rung of your barstool to better brace herself. The salt and alcohol burn in your fingernails. Three rims touch in front of you, and as usual, life seems to be moving just beyond your control, but for the moment, the place you’re headed feels good.

“To cancer,” Cassini says. “A growth industry.” And you all nearly spray your drinks with laughter. In the mirror, Sue’s smooth head rolls back, a nautilus-curve. Her throat lifts and relaxes, and you drink too. A sharp, patient burn, like cactus, winters in your throat.

Sue is fine until the lime. She lifts it to her mouth but the smell of it triggers something in her that makes her stand up. She puts her hands on the bar. “Not again,” she says, turning, pushing away the hand you offer.

“Let her go,” Cassini says, anticipating your urge to follow. “She asked about you, you know. She’ll be back.”

“When?”

She passes you the salt. “Just a bit ago. Out back by the lake. I told her you were dead in the water.”

“Great. Thanks.”

“Stuck in a rut. Afraid to move on. Staring at your feet.”

“Okay, I get it.”

“It’s true,” she says and fumbles for a cigarette in her cocktail purse.

The bartender has the Weather Channel on now, and you glance at the bottle-necked shape of Idaho, seen from space. You are somewhere on that screen, you think. Idaho is blue, and Mrs. Cassini is in that blue next to you. So is your mother, somewhere. Your dad is watching this, you’re sure, but what he sees is clear skies.

Mrs. Cassini lights a smoke, and you do another shot together.

“I also told her you were looking to get laid.”

You lick the tequila off your teeth and shake your head. It’s all you can do. “You’re killing me, Mrs. Cassini.”

“Who gets the pretty one’s other shot?”

“Go ahead,” you say.

“See, that’s what I’m talking about. A rut. No zest. Your mom and I were pretty close. You know what she asked me? I mean at the end. She didn’t say look out for my baby or any crap like that. She said, ‘keep things interesting for Ben.’”

“Life doesn’t seem that thrilling right now.”

“Trust me. The excitement never stops,” she says, with a touch of bitterness.

Your mom’s picture is surrounded by shot glasses. “That’s easy for you to say.”

“Oh, you can be a little bastard.”

“I didn’t mean it that way.”

Mrs. Cassini puffs on her cigarette and looks at you. “You want a thrill?”

You meet her eyes.