Page 83 of Reckless Woman
All in all, it’s the perfect place to celebrate a tragedy.
I walked in five hours ago, and I’m still sitting in the same corner booth. I’m still staring down the same bottle of Bud. No one’s giving me grief about it, though. The clothes I’m wearing keep the owner’s mouth shut, the bartenders away, and the clientele respectful.
It’s a cheap black suit, but it’s all I could afford. I was honorably discharged from the Marines a couple of months ago, and the bills are coming in with red letters on them. White shirt, skinny black tie loosened to my chest, the top button flapping. I bought everything for today because no man in his early twenties has a funeral outfit on stand-by unless he’s experienced some real crap in his life already.
Turns out, I have, but I’ve gotten pretty good at ignoring it.
She left me a note. It’s lying on the sticky table next to the Bud, with one word on the envelope:
Joey
Only people who die young call me that.
I recognize the stationary. It’s from the set her mom sent her the Christmas before last.
I can’t bring myself to open it because I don’t want to know her reasons. I don’t want to know how badly I failed her.She wore her kindness in a smile, but if you flipped that shit around, the only thing propping it up was desperation.
She was sick, but I thought she was getting better.
She swore to me she was getting better.
The doctors were trying her on some new medication. She hadn’t been manic all summer, and she’d started smelling like summer rain and strawberry crush again. Then two weeks ago, she drank a liter of vodka and wrapped the family Ford around another on the rural freeway, doing one-twenty in a seventy. Caleb was strapped into his baby seat in the back, but velocity didn’t give a damn about how old he was. Neither did the broken glass that pierced his heart, killing him instantly.
Two weeks later, I’m sitting here all alone again: a twenty-four-year-old tin soldier, wearing nothing but a cheap black suit and a blank expression, when, inside, my grief is carving my heart out with a knife.
I pick the letter up, running my fingers along the sharp edges. Wondering if my son felt anything when the glass stole him away from me.
The ache is relentless.
I swear to you, God. If the devil himself walks in tonight, I’m selling my soul to bury it.
An hour later, I’m still sitting here when the door opens.
It doesn’t take much to change the atmosphere in a place like this. The jobless around here are always looking for an excuse to punch their frustrations out. A newcomer is fair game if they look funny or if they order the wrong beer.
This feels different.
The newcomer is changing the atmosphere alright, but it’s not inspiring the drunks to fall off their bar stools and challenge him. If anything, it’s making them stare even harder into their whiskey sours.
“Bottle of bourbon,” calls out a deep voice. “And it better be fucking aged.”
A beat later, Dante Santiago is sliding into the booth opposite me.
He hasn’t changed much since I last saw him in Afghanistan eleven months ago, right before he disappeared off the face of the earth. But I read the news. I chase the headlines. I already know that Colombia’s Santiago Cartel is under new management.
His hair is longer. His clothes, blacker. His dark eyes burn with a hunger for stuff I haven’t had a taste of yet.
I watch his gaze dip to the envelope in my hand as the bartender bangs a bottle of bourbon and two smeared glasses down on the table between us. Without looking up, Dante holds out a crisp, neatly folded hundred-dollar bill.
“Keep the change. I was never here.”
“Sure thing.”
He pours out two glasses and pushes one into my other hand.
“A man once said to me that hate and grief are like two lovers who fight and fuck their way to inner peace.” He quirks his lips. “Personally, I’m more inclined to fight and fuck my way to war.”
“What are you doing here, Santiago?” I say roughly.