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He thought, at first, they’d go right back to the way they were before. He thought she’d start stopping by the bar again, to surprise him. He thought she’d start grinning at him again, looking at him like she knew a juicy secret. It’ll take a while, he told himself, have patience. But then she was gone.
sad
[...] The guys came in for extra security on big nights, and Jess had a memory of the one called the Grog hitting on her even though she was newly married to Malcolm, who was twenty feet away. Pleasantly buzzed, she was waiting for the bathroom, leaning against the wall. She closed her eyes for a moment, and when she opened them, he was standing in front of her. He put one hand on her hip as if to ask her a question, and she put her hand over his and gave it back to him like she was apologizing, like it was awfully tempting but she was a good girl.
clever
A memory skittered through him, how he’d been brushing his teeth with the bathroom door open one morning and in the mirror he’d seen Jess lift his work shirt out of the hamper and press it to her face. He was about to ask what she was doing, when it hit him. He tried to never mention Emma at home, but maybe it was the omission of her name that pointed Jess to his interest. But interest wasn’t a crime. Nor was the way his belly tightened when he passed close to her in the narrow space behind the bar. When Emma asked him a question, she didn’t immediately doubt his answer, and that felt good. When she reported a problem, she looked at him with an expression of total faith that he would figure it out. One time, once, he stood so close to her as they were looking at an invoice that he could feel the light down on her arm brushing against him. She held perfectly still and so did he. Then Roddy came in and Malcolm shifted away.
He should have followed her that day. He should have stopped her from getting in her car and talked everything out with her, like Dr. Hanley said was important. But he’d just let her go. Because he was shocked. Why else? Because his feelings were hurt. Why else? Because he didn’t know what to say.
“To think,” he repeated, and she nodded, looking up at him like she was making herself brave, like she was ready to answer anything he might ask her. He could see her pulse flickering in her slender throat, her long dark hair swept up as it always was when she was around the house. But he was too surprised to ask another question.
“I can’t deal with this,” he said. “Not this week. Do you even know what’s going on at the bar? I can’t.”
He gestured at her little piles of clothes and shook his head as if to say this—leaving—was what they promised each other they’d never do. They’d never even joke about it. They were family, thick or thin. And yet.
such a mismatch of concerns!
“Because you know those wineglasses you like have no place in a bar like the Half Moon.”
She knew she sounded like the exact kind of wife she swore she’d never be, speaking to him like she was his boss, or his mother. Did she want to speak to her husband like he was a child? Of course not. But when a person dreams of partnering with someone for life, no one ever considers the fact that there’s no dependable way to communicate a thought except to say it.
“God,” Jess said the first time she saw Malcolm, standing behind the bar, “who’s that?” It was her friend Jenny’s birthday. They’d been co-captains of the track team their senior year of high school, and they still ran together sometimes when Jess was home. Jenny had just broken off an engagement, and Jess had just broken up with a classmate she’d been seeing half-heartedly. He always finished her sentences and he was always wrong. So they were due for a night out. They’d rounded up a few other friends from high school Jess hadn’t seen in a while.
lmao
[...] When they went out he always had plenty of cash and kept it neatly folded in a clip. He made the guys searching the opens maws of their wallets look like little boys.
true
Siobhán was positive Jess had met him at some party or other, their wedding at the very least. As if Jess would be able to recollect all three hundred people who’d attended Siobhán and Patrick’s wedding seventeen years ago, after an entire bottle of prosecco and a mishap with the shuttle bus. As if she ever talked to anyone at those parties other than the people she already knew. That was Malcolm’s thing. He was the host of their table. He was the host of the elevator that brought everyone to the top floor. He was the host of the line that snaked its way to the buffet, cracking jokes and pumping the hands of everyone he knew and hadn’t seen in ages. [...]
It wasn’t that he’d care. It was just embarrassing. Jess had been at Bloom for a few months by then. They owned the Half Moon but it was still so new. They weren’t behind yet, though a simple comparison of the profit and loss sheets month over month, charted on a graph, predicted very clearly where the line was headed if something didn’t change. She’d followed that line to its obvious conclusion, had stayed late at work one evening creating a spreadsheet so she could show Malcolm. And she’d been generous! There were expenses she didn’t know about, surely. The unpaid tabs. The unspoken etiquette of cash put down on a table and then pushed away. The macroeconomics of an entire industry, how to tip and why and when and to whom and how much. Cash passed in envelopes or folded into thick wedges and tucked into shirt pockets. Stacked in a safe deposit box, sure, but also removed in denominations of one inch, two inches. But when she brought home this presentation of facts, he glanced at it exactly once and then told her to just tell him what it said. When she explained, said they’d be in the red within six months, said they’d be up an actual creek if they didn’t make a change—get an investor or sell or come up with a brand-new idea for how to get bodies in a dingy room, buying drinks—he said her work was too binary, what with its columns for profit and loss, success and failure. His world was full of nuance, determined by moods, weather, current events. If the Mets made it to the World Series, the bar would kill it in October. Things like that couldn’t be captured on a spreadsheet, he said, and she said yes it certainly could, she’d done it, all he had to do was look.
lol. good characterisation tho