Peril

ABE

He jiggled the key until it opened. It hadn’t turned smoothly in years. Like everything else, Abe thought, cranky and erratic, determined to thwart the smooth flow of things.

He switched on the light, closed the door, locked it. The clock over the bar read eleven-fifteen. Jake would arrive at noon, and the daily routine would begin in earnest, setting up the bar, checking the supplies, cleaning, polishing, paying bills. Jorge would show up twenty minutes later, mop the place, break down the boxes, gather up the garbage, all the drudge work of keeping the joint relatively clean. Susanne Albert, the college girl who’d worked in the place for only a couple of months, would come in an hour before opening, do the few things Jake hadn’t finished, then sit in the back booth, reading some book about Hindu philosophy. And last, Lucille, the bar’s only entertainment, a sixty-one-year-old former Broadway chorus singer who’d been at the bar for as long as Abe could remember, the singer he’d first accompanied all those many years ago, and who he’d kept on even after he’d bought the place.

That was it, then, Abe thought, the family.

It was a far cry from what he’d intended, but it was no doubt better than tapping out “Feelings” in some seedy lounge on the Jersey shore. He was forty-eight, old enough to know that the jazz pianist’s life he’d once envisioned for himself would not have suited him very well. In fact, when he thought of it now, it was as little more than a Blue Note fantasy, like becoming a writer or an actor. Mavis had always said that he wasn’t very adventurous, that all he really wanted was the anchor of a steady, predictable life. Toward the end she’d been plenty frank about it, When you get right down to it, Abe, you’re a stick-in-the-mud.

He walked behind the bar, took the canvas cash bag he’d brought from the bank around the corner, and began to fill the register. He’d just opened the quarters into the drawer when the phone rang.

“McPherson’s,” he said.

“Abe. Lucille.”

“You sound shitty.”

“It’s the mood, you know?”

“You need anything?”

“No. I’m just gonna sleep through it.”

“Well, if you do…”

“I know, Abe.”

He heard the click of the phone as Lucille hung up. Okay, he thought, his longtime chanteuse was in a mood and so wouldn’t be showing up for her set. But it was a Tuesday, the slowest night of the week, so with Susanne working the tables and Jake the bar, and Jorge busing and himself at the keyboard, the bar would make it through all right.

He glanced at the old piano at the rear of the bar and remembered the first time Mavis had leaned against it, dark-eyed and looking more experienced than she should have, this woman he’d later married and who’d promised to stay with him always but had run off with a guy who’d later made it big, and whose smiling face Abe continually confronted in record stores and concert billboards. He knew what Mavis’ flight had stolen from him: self-confidence, for one thing, along with the money she’d emptied from their accounts. All of that he could have gotten back one way or another, but what he’d never regained was the lightness of life, the sense of humor that had once so lifted him and made the good times roll and, more than his playing, brought buoyancy and joy to the people around him. That had gone with Mavis, and now seemed as irretrievable as the wedding ring she’d stripped from her finger and hocked at Forty-sixth and Eighth when Hell’s Kitchen still smoldered on the west side of the city.

Jake came through the door and seemed to read his face. “Trouble?” he asked.

“Just Lucille,” he lied.