Page 59 of Handful

“And his name is Handful.”

“Mm,” Indira said again. “Yes. There is that.”

It was nothing — a small sound of agreement. Except it came too easy, and a shade too light. Indira didn’t think Handful was the downside. She was up to something. I didn’t call her out. You didn’t show a woman like Indira that you’d seen her hand.

“Daytime only,” I said. “I build the bar, I train the staff, and I am never — not once — in that building when it’s open and the lights are down. I do my work and I’m gone before the first customer.”

“Done.”

“And I’ll look at it before I say yes. I’m not signing on to a disaster I haven’t seen.”

“Of course.” Indira slid off the stool and gathered her bag, every inch of her screaming success. “I happen to be driving out there now.”

Derek had appeared at the end of the bar somewhere around bottle service and had been pretending to count the reservation book ever since.

“You’re going to consult,” he said, “for a strip club?”

“For a venue repositioning.”

“Oh my God, she got you saying it.” He put the book down. “Austen. With respect. The man. Might I remind you that men like that have three modes: charm, apology, charm again.”

“I’m aware of ‘the man’, Derek.”

Jamie leaned out from behind the bar, delighted, a towel over his shoulder. “Is it his strip club?”

“It’s Venom’s strip club. He runs it.”

“It is his strip club.” Jamie was grinning like it was Christmas. “You’re going to go work at your ex-boyfriend’s strip club.”

“I’m going to go look at a bar. In daylight. With a chaperone. For an amount of money that would make you both weep.” I untied my apron. “And when I come back, neither of you is going to say one more word about it, because you’ll be busy covering the floor.”

“He’s going to be there,” Derek said, gentler now, because Derek had stood between me and the door the night when Handful came in to grovel, and Derek didn’t actually find any of this funny.

“He might be.” I hung the apron on its hook. “I’m a grown woman with a calculator and a grudge. I’ll cope.”

❧

The Dollhouse in the middle of a Wednesday afternoon, half torn apart, was the least sexy building I had ever stood inside.

They’d gutted it. Where the carpet had been there was bare swept concrete. The stages were gone — not stripped down, gone, just clean rectangles where they’d stood. Somebody had already started putting it back: a new wall framed up in clean pale lumber, fresh conduit run along the open joists, a pallet of drywall parked right smack in the middle of everything.

And the bar.

Oh, the bar.

“Indira,” I said, walking the length of it slowly, the way you walk past something in a museum. “Somebody sold real drinks here once. Look — there’s a back bar, there’s a whole row for top-shelf bottles. But they put the pour station here and the ice all the way down there, so you’d have to turn your entire body for every single drink. You can’t run a service bar like this. Not a fast one, not a good one. It won’t work.” I reached the end of it and looked back the way I’d come. “So they gave up, quit making anything that took more than one hand, and sold beer. Honestly, I can see why beer was the only thing that worked.” I crouched to look under the counter and regretted it instantly. “What is that? No, I don’t want to know. We’re taking the whole thing out.”

“Are we?” Indira sounded smug and I knew why. She’d been fishing for that word since she sat down at my bar.

And I’d done it. I’d said we. There was no taking it back and we both knew it.

“It’s a good problem,” I admitted. “A great one, honestly. The best blank slate I’ve seen in years — and it kills me that it’s attached to—”

“To?”

The back door opened.

He came in with his sleeves shoved up, a clipboard in one hand, sawdust on his boots, talking over his shoulder to somebody about a delivery — easy, unhurried.