Sliding Down the Sky (6 page)

“That’s right. My brother and sister-in-law bought it,” she said. “The grand re-opening’s on Friday.”

“I saw the flyers around town,” I said. “You guys really like a challenge, huh? Not that it’s a bad thing. Barney’s is the only place in town where you can get a beer, and I miss having a choice. It’s been too long since we had options around here.”

“Leo will be glad to hear that,” she smiled tightly. “He’s the brains of the outfit. I’m just the hired help.”

Something about the way she said it gave me the impression there was more to it, but she didn’t elaborate.

“I saw the new sign out the front yesterday,” I said. “The Church, huh? So, is there a story behind the name?”

She smiled in my general direction, as if she couldn’t bring herself to look at me directly. I wasn’t sure if it was because she was shy or because she was just indulging me until she got her coffee and could get the hell out of there. I was starting to think it was the latter, and my heart sank. God, I sucked at this.

“Well yeah, kinda,” she said hesitantly. “It was Leo’s idea. The way he explains it, it was for two reasons – one, he liked the idea of someone saying ‘I’m going down to The Church for a beer’. He’s never really grown up, I guess.”

I smiled. I liked the sound of Leo.

“And reason number two?”

She shrugged.

“I don’t know. It’s kind of a safe haven for us – salvation, I guess. A fresh start.”

Her eyes darted between me and Leila, who was busy serving someone else. I got the feeling she’d said more than she meant to. I took pity on her, changing the subject.

“The flyer said something about live music?”

That seemed to do it.

“Just something a little different to make us stand out from the crowd. Leo’s in charge of booking the bands. He’s kind of particular about music.”

“What kind of music are we talking about? Please don’t say thrash metal.”

My paltry attempt at humour, but at least she smiled.

“No chance. Mostly rock, soul, a little bit of country. Nothing too heavy. We want to draw people in, not drive them away.”

“Good answer.”

I looked over at Leila, hoping she’d take her sweet time today. I was in no hurry to rush off to work when I could be sitting there talking to Sass. She oozed a kind of insecurity I’d never seen before in a woman so beautiful. It was such a rare combination, beauty and insecurity. I found myself drawn to her, despite the little voice in my head that whispered to steer clear – not because of her, but because of me.

“It sounds pretty awesome if you ask me,” I said. “Live music will really be a drawcard around here. Barney’s is the only bar for miles and all Harry’s got is an old jukebox in the corner – doesn’t really cut it, to be honest.”

“So I saw. We were in there checking out the competition recently,” she cringed. “That’s kind of embarrassing, now that I think about it.”

“Not at all. It’s good business. Plus, I don’t think Harry’s too concerned. He has his regulars, and there’s more than enough business to go around.”

“So, when the Green Door closed down, way back when, it wasn’t because of lack of business?”

“No, nothing like that. The guy that owned it owed a lot of money. One day, he just shut up shop and disappeared. I think he was trying to get away from his creditors. The place was always busy though, so nobody could really figure out what had happened. My guess is that it was something to do with his management style. The kind of clientele he had, the number of people he let run tabs behind the bar for months on end… none of that is good business.”

“It sounds as if you know your stuff. Are you in the hospitality industry yourself?”

The idea was laughable, although over the years I’d spent as much time at the Green Door as I had at Barney’s.

“Let’s just say I was a good customer and leave it at that. I’m no businessman. I’m just a grunt, like you.”

She smiled, the first genuine smile I’d seen. It reached her eyes, warming them instantly, and putting me on the back foot. I was going to have to be very careful here. If she smiled at me like that again, I could see myself diving down the rabbit-hole head first, and damn the consequences. I couldn’t afford to think that way.

“So what is it you do, exactly?” she asked, sitting up a little straighter as she fixed me with a curious gaze.

“I’m a mechanic. I work at Bill’s Auto, on the other side of town. The hideous orange and green building – you can’t miss it, it sticks out like a sore thumb, courtesy of Bill’s neice, who’s some kind of marketing guru. Apparently, orange and green screams ‘trustworthy’. Beats the shit out of me.”

She nodded, her gaze flitting to my hand, resting on my knee. I glanced down.

“I know,” I shrugged, looking back at her. “The hands are a dead giveaway aren’t they? I assure you they’re clean, even if they don’t look it. One of the pitfalls of having my hands in and out of oil and grease all day. Could be worse, right?”

She smiled back, but it felt more like a polite gesture rather than a genuine response this time.

“What about you?” I asked.

She looked at me blankly.

“Sorry?”

“You said you were the hired help. What do you do?”

It was an innocent question, but she seemed to wilt in front of my eyes. She looked away, watching Leila for a few seconds, before glancing down at her lap, and finally back at me. As soon as our eyes met again, I knew I’d upset her.

“I’m still trying to figure that out,” she said quietly.

She cleared her throat and gave me a tight smile.

“I guess I’ll be tending bar, and whatever else he needs me to do. It’s a kind of figure-it-out-as-we-go deal.”

Then she tucked her hair behind her ear and turned her attention to Leila, who arrived with our coffee.

“There you go,” Leila smiled. “You guys have a nice day.”

Sass immediately stood up, thanked Leila and stacked her cups, one on top of the other.

“Can I give you a hand?” I asked, desperate not to leave the conversation on that note.

She shot me a strange look.

“No thanks, I got it.”

She picked up her stacked cups off the counter, and it was at that precise moment that I noticed her left hand. Turning to head for the door, she picked up both coffees in her right hand. Her left one, fingers slightly bent, hovered above them stiffly. It was a dead giveaway, and I suddenly realised what I’d just said. I felt sick.

“Shit, I’m sorry,” I said, grabbing my coffee and hurrying after her.

I was determined
to redeem myself somehow. I held the door open as she walked outside, searching desperately for something to say. How the hell had I not noticed before?

“Don’t worry about it,” she said, shooting me a sidelong glance as we made our way back to our respective cars. “It’s fine.”

I think she was more embarrassed than I was, judging by the colour in her cheeks and the pace in her step.

“I don’t want you to think –“

She stopped walking and faced me, her expression somewhere between anxiety and frustration.

“Look, I know how it is,” she said, her eyes boring into me as if daring me to disagree with her. “It’s a figure of speech, right? It doesn’t mean anything.”

If that was really how she felt, why give me that look when I said it?

“I just don’t want you to think I’m an asshole.”

She sighed, looking over towards her car as if she’d rather be driving out of the parking lot than standing there, talking to me.

“I don’t think you’re an asshole, okay? I don’t even know you.”

“Let’s fix that, then,” I blurted out. “Let me take you out to dinner.”

Holy shit, where’d that come from? What was I trying to prove? I sounded desperate, and she’d noticed. She frowned at me, as if she were about to call me out on it.

“You already bought me coffee,” she said instead, as if I was an idiot.

“That was different.”

“You don’t have to take me out to dinner.”

“I know, but I want to.”

“Why?”

Because I wanted to make it up to her. I couldn’t leave it like that, God only knew what she must think of me. I needed to salvage this. I needed to prove to her that I wasn’t the asshole she probably thought I was, despite what she said to my face.

None of this came out of my mouth, though.

“You apologised, I accepted,” she said tersely. “Let’s just leave it at that, okay?”

I didn’t want to leave it at that, but she didn’t give me much choice. She walked over to her car and left me standing there, watching her. She placed both cups of coffee on the roof of her car, then opened the door and loaded them into the centre console. Helpless to stop her, I watched her drive out of the parking lot and out onto the main road.

“It’s only in uncertainty that we’re naked and alive.”

– Peter Gabriel

Callum

I went to the diner every morning for the rest of the week, at the same time, but not once did I bump into Sass again. I convinced myself that she was avoiding me, and I couldn’t blame her for that, but I wasn’t quite ready to give up yet either. It wasn’t the first time my mouth had gotten me into trouble, and I doubted it would be the last. If I had to live in the dog-house, at least I was familiar with the décor.

Regardless, I was desperate to redeem myself. It was true, I had a big mouth, I drank too much and I wasn’t averse to throwing a punch if I thought the situation warranted it. I was a lot of things, but I wasn’t the kind of asshole who would say something stupid like that and then walk away, never to see her again. I didn’t have a lot in the way of self-respect, but I was determined to keep the little I did have, if I could help it.

My stubborn streak usually worked against me, but this time I was determined that it could work in my favour instead.

Friday night found me at Jack and Ally’s place, as usual. It was opening night at The Church. Possibly my chance to make things right with Sass. Possibly the night I would crash and burn at her feet. Only the universe would know which one it was going to be.

I sat in the living room with Jack, while Ally helped Maggie with some kind of wardrobe malfunction in the bedroom. I’d never understood a woman’s obsession with clothes. Throw on a shirt and some jeans and be done with it. But no, apparently this was a ‘crisis’, to use Maggie’s word. Didn’t look like a crisis to me – looked like a shirt with a stain on the front of it. Apparently, I was ‘clueless’. It’d been fifteen minutes, and we were still waiting.

Jack handed me another beer and fell back into the couch across from me.

“They still in there?” he asked, indicating the bedroom with his bottle.

“Yep.”

“What the hell, dude?”

“No freakin’ idea.”

“Hey!” he called behind him. “Put a shirt on and let’s get out of here! We’re gonna miss happy hour!”

I had to admire his tact.

“Five minutes!” Ally called through the closed door. “And we’re not missing anything, don’t panic!”

“Jesus,” I mumbled.

“Tell me about it.”

I took a swig of beer and got comfortable. Five minutes in chick speak was half an hour. Everyone knew that.

“So, what’s new?” Jack asked.

“Nothin’. All work and no play makes for a crappy Facebook status.”

“You need to take a break from work then. Take a few days off.”

Yeah, like that’d happen. We were busy enough with one mechanic down, I sure as hell wasn’t going to ask for time off. Bill would have another heart attack, and as much as he was driving me crazy lately, I didn’t want to be responsible for that.

“I know, I know. I will,” I lied.

I didn’t want to have to go into it further. One lie was enough.

“When?”

“Can we not talk about work tonight? It’s Friday night, dude. I just want to forget all about work till Monday morning, okay?”

“Sorry, you’re right. No more work talk.”

I felt shitty about fobbing him off again, but I had enough on my mind. Instead, I offered him an alternative conversation topic. One that didn’t involve me.

“Have you talked to Ally yet? About the baby thing, I mean?”

He cast a quick glance into the hallway behind him, shaking his head.

“Not yet.”

“Does she even know that you told me about what’s going on?”

“No.”

Great.

“Are you going to?”

“What?”

“Tell her that I know – or am I supposed to pretend like I’m completely in the dark when – if – she decides she wants to talk to me about this too? I mean, I just want to get my story straight here.”

He picked at the label on his bottle for a few moments, before looking over at me.

“I’m not lying to her, I’m confiding in my best friend,” he said. “There’s a difference.”

I felt for him, really I did, but secrets had a habit of tearing apart even the strongest of relationships. I’d seen it before, first-hand.

“
Has
she talked to you about it?” he asked.

“No. But it’s no fun being stuck in the middle, I can tell you that. You know that you need to talk to her, not me, right?”

I amazed myself sometimes. Quite happy to get involved in their personal dramas, but completely unwilling to let them into mine. It was another case of ‘do as I say, not as I do’.

“I know, I’m just waiting for the right time. After the last appointment, we said we’d give it a few weeks before we talked about it again because it was driving both of us crazy. It’s worse now. I’m too scared to go anywhere near her, just in case… y’know. It’s freakin’ killing me. My balls are turning blue.”

“Dude – too much information.”

“Sorry.”

What went on in the sack between them was their business, and I’d made that perfectly clear to both of them from the beginning. They were both my best friends, but I didn’t want to know what either of them did in bed. It’d be too weird. I had to look them in the eye, after all. There had to be boundaries.

“Wonder what the band will be like tonight?” I asked, briskly changing the subject.

“I guess we’ll find out, if we ever get there.” He shot a glance at the hallway again, but still no sign of movement from the bedroom. “Have you bumped into Sass again?”