Coin Return

Heat sits on the street like a big dog, panting through the open door. The air inside is only cooler by the width of a fingernail, the difference between sweat you notice and sweat that tucks itself into your shirt. My glass sweats for me anyway, rings spreading on the bar like the aftermath of decisions. It’s late afternoon, the sun walking its way down the back alley, and the jukebox hums the way a sleeping throat hums. Bourbon warms its way toward my ribs, a slow radio turned down low.

I keep a small ledger in my head called Lives I’ll Never Lead. It’s a messy account book. The diver and the carpenter. The man who said yes to the girl who wanted a house with a lemon tree. The one who left that job before it stripped him to wire. The father, steady and always home for dinner. The cop who grew old on a porch. The boy who got on the bus and didn’t get off until the ocean said stop. I add a line item every year or two, depending on the heat.

Outside, asphalt smell boils up and mixes with smoke. Not fresh smoke; old, the kind that sits in the wood even if the state says you can’t light up in here. Someone somewhere is burning a pile of leaves, or a brake on the highway is losing its nerve. The bartender’s towel leaves a ghost of bleach and beer each time he swipes. Neon draws its own tired halo around the mirror behind the bottles. My face is in the mirror only when I go looking for it.

She comes in then, bringing a piece of the tinfoil-bright street with her. You can tell the heat has its hand on the small of her back; her dress sticks, then lets go. She’s got hair the color of the jukebox’s cherrywood veneer, pinned up in a way that says not for long. A cigarette tucked behind her ear like a pencil. A little scar at the mouth, the kind that belongs to a story cataloged under As A Matter Of Fact, Not Drama. She smells like smoke and lilac and road dust. The door shuts and the light pours back onto the sidewalk where it came from.

“Bourbon,” she says, voice sanded. “Neat.”

The bartender—Eddie, a man whose shirts always look like they already belong to tomorrow—pours without comment. He looks at her the way you look at a song you sort of remember. She doesn’t look at me. That makes me look harder.

Etta, I think, or Lila, or any name with a vowel at the end that sounds like someone calling from the top of a stairwell. I don’t know her, but I’ve met her often. She is the person at the exact edge of a decision. She is how leaving looks right before the door. She lifts the bourbon and takes it like medicine. The glass doesn’t sweat. Maybe her hands don’t either. Maybe she runs cooler than the room.

“What does it cost?” she asks, not the drink. She nods her chin toward the jukebox. Its guts clunk as if it’s shifting in its sleep.

“Quarter,” Eddie says. “Same as always.”

She slides a coin from somewhere flat and mysterious—no purse, no pockets—and it flashes dull and honest in the light. The jukebox wakes: lights like honeycomb and a shuffle like someone rustling through sheet music. She presses B-17 with her thumb and the song that comes out isn’t one you hear unless you’ve been in a car when the county line is a dare.

It’s not the one my mother used to sing while cooking; it’s the one that makes you turn the burner down and think about who else you might have been if not for the six o’clock news. A steel guitar sighs. Somebody sings about a train that stopped running but kept its schedule. In the mirrored glass, I see the woman’s mouth make the shape of the second verse before it arrives.

“You from here?” she asks, still not looking at me. Some questions are rhetorical fishing lines; they come with hooks. This one feels barbed and kind.

I shrug. “Depends which entry you check.”

She smiles at that. I made her smile. That’s something to write in the ledger. “I used to come up from the river,” she says. “Back when the owner’s wife put chili on and the old men played cards until dawn and we’d dance in the kitchen because there was no room anywhere else.”

“You dance now?” I don’t mean on the barstool. I mean, does time still make sense in her body in the way that it translates to the floorboards. Do strangers think they know her because of the way she moves.

“Not sober,” she says, with that flat common sense that has whiplashed more than one man.

The steel guitar laces through the sweat-smell and the bourbon-smell and the faint ghost of soap. That’s the thing about certain songs: they carry smoke inside them; they carry the shape of hands on your back. I can feel the heat of the day sitting on us both like two palms. Inside my little ledger, a new entry blinks: The man who says, come on, let’s go, and actually goes. I see him, me, with a duffel bag and a car that doesn’t complain and a woman like this in the passenger seat, feet on the dash, the map upside down.

“You stay too long,” she says, and I can’t tell if she means in this town, or this bar, or this hour of your life. Her hands are tan in the way that says she uses them for more than typing. There is a small tattoo on the side of her finger, the vowel of a name worn to almost nothing.

“Sometimes,” I say. “Sometimes I don’t stay long enough.”

“Men are always certain or late.” She tips her glass back and drinks the measure of both. “I was certain once.”

“About who?”

She knows I mean the tattoo. She puts her finger flat on the bar, the word a secret seen from orbit. “About leaving,” she says instead. “The who keeps changing. The leaving’s the same.”

The jukebox clicks into a second song without anybody touching it. Somebody’s voice warbles about July heat and a porch swing chain that squeaks exactly in time with the chords. Sweat has found a straight line down my spine; it tickles. Her scar catches the light when she smiles at the memory of something she doesn’t tell. If I look too hard, I’ll fix her in place, and she looks like someone who hates being pinned.

The wall behind the bar is a collage of Polaroids gone to sepia—men with fish, women with birthday cakes, babies held like contraband, a dog that looks like a kitchen mop with self-esteem. One photo keeps hooking my eye: a girl standing on a chair to reach the microphone at the back of the room, the jukebox behind her like a red planet. Some notes scrawled beneath in blue marker: Lila, ‘78. Gone too soon. A heart. Eddie’s handwriting, or the kind bars have when everyone contributes.

Her name turns over in my mouth like a coin: Lila. I don’t say it aloud. The woman at my elbow stubs a cigarette that never got lit into the ashtray, as if ritual alone could conjure smoke. The room smells like someone else’s cravings.

“What happened to the girl in that picture?” I ask.

Eddie shakes his head without looking. “Bus didn’t stop,” he says. “Or it stopped too long. Depends on which story you buy.”

The woman laughs, low. “Stories are just receipts,” she says. “Proof of purchase for something you already spent.”

The second song ends like a door easing shut. The jukebox returns to its honeycomb hum. She sets her empty glass down. No ring. I put my palm where her glass sat; the wood is dry, and when I lift my hand a circle of dust shines on my skin.

“Another?” I ask her, because there are only so many moves you get to make in a place like this. My heart does a small dog-paddle.

She looks right at me, finally, and her eyes are the color of whatever you tell yourself just before you cut north. “You already bought me one,” she says, a little politely. “You always do.”

I glance at Eddie. He’s at the register, head bowed, counting out change to no one. The bar has gone quiet enough that my own breath sounds like a lazy radio. Outside, a motorcycle coughs and moves on. Inside, the jukebox lights are still winking even though I can't hear its motor anymore.

“Lila?” I say, and my voice comes out breathless in the way of a man who has, just now, stepped into the wrong room in his own house.

She tilts her head. She is exactly the girl on the chair and also every other version. Older in the way that doesn’t show. Younger in the way that matters. The scar at her mouth is in the Polaroid too, sharp as a stitch. She presses that secret finger to her lips like a shh or a blessing.

“Not the life,” she says. “Just the shape of it.”

I blink, and the jukebox isn’t humming after all. It is dark as a whale. There’s a rip in the cloth on its speaker like a healed mouth, and a hand-lettered sign taped to it: Out of Order. Eddie is watching me with a look that says he’s seen people talk to ghosts and songs before and that he will refresh my drink regardless.

“You good?” he asks.

“Hot,” I say, though the bourbon ice has melted into the shape of a past tense. “You ever fix the box?”

“Been dead a year,” he says. “I keep the lights on for company.”

My hand still holds the ring of dust like a coin. On the stool next to mine, the cushion is split and the stuffing pokes out like dandelion fluff. There is nothing on it. There never was. But there is a smell of lilac threaded through the smoke like somebody’s joke.

I look again at the ledger in my head. The man who asks the bartender the story and the man who doesn’t. The one who goes to the back of the bar and touches the microphone stand where a girl once stood on a chair. The one who spends the next hour pretending the Out of Order sign means something else. The one who leaves before the song that isn’t playing is over.

I stand, a small act. My shirt peels from my back and then lets go. The door’s rectangle is hot with evening. I put a quarter on the bar—on instinct, on ritual, on hearsay—and it wobbles and settles and makes the tiniest, brightest sound, like a bell.

“See you,” I tell Eddie.

“See you,” he says, and then because he is generous: “Tell her I said hi.”

Outside, the heat touches my face like someone who knows my name. The motor oil and cut grass and someone’s laundry vent all mix together. Inside me, a steel guitar plays a note that isn’t there, and I walk into it, into what it might sound like if I kept going. If I were the man who—just this once—led a life on purpose.