“Hey! Good to see you. I’m glad you made it out tonight,” I said.
“Me too.” He looked around, nodding. “This is pretty impressive. I have to admit, I always thought you guys were going for a dive bar.”
I laughed. “Well, the whole dive bar thing might be trendy right now, but that was more inflicted on us than intentional. We’ve been trying to come up with ways to drum up more business, and my new bartender suggested this.”
I gestured over to the bar and saw Brian’s jaw drop. He’d been traveling for work over the last few weeks, so I hadn’t told him about Ava working at the bar yet. His reaction was perfect.
“Holy shit, is that Ava?”
Ava heard him and looked up. Her eyes widened, and she let out a squeal as she ran out from behind the bar and forced her way through the crowd to get to Brian. He gave her a tight hug and stepped back to look at her.
“Brian! I can’t believe you’re here!” she gushed.
“I can say the same for you. Nobody told me you were back,” he said.
He looked between the two of us with the obvious question in his eyes, but Ava and I both shook our heads.
“No,” Ava said without elaborating. “I’m just here for a little while to help out my parents. I needed a quick job and snagged this one. Never thought I’d be a real bartender.”
“Well, you’re a bit more than that,” I said.
Ava looked behind her at the bar where Jesse was already starting to drown in orders. She whipped her head back to us. “Not tonight. Tonight, the bar calls. Brian, it’s amazing to see you. Come up and get a drink later. I’d love to catch up.”
She scurried back behind the bar and picked up the slack. From there, the night only swelled. It was loud and busy, with everyone having fun and raving about the atmosphere. For a couple of hours it was so busy I had to go behind the bar to help. Ava and I got into an almost natural flow of making and serving drinks beside each other. I loved how well we worked together, how easily we still fit in each other’s orbit.11Ava“What are you doing?”
I was still most of the way asleep and had barely even processed reaching under my pillow to pick up my phone. Somewhere in the back of my mind, I was aware it had been ringing and I answered it. But my grogginess kept me from totally connecting to the conversation.
“Huh?” I asked.
“What are you doing?” Stephanie asked, saying each word slowly and over enunciating the syllables like she thought I’d suddenly lost my ability to understand the language.
“Sleeping,” I told her, bringing myself up into a seated position. “At least, I was until an annoying sound woke me up.”
“Trash truck coming around the neighborhood?” she asked. “Somebody’s car alarm?”
“My best friend calling me at the crack of dawn,” I groaned.
I’d taken to wearing a sleep mask over my eyes when I went to bed. Working at the bar shifted my wake-sleep cycles, so now I was up far longer into the night than I was used to and had to stay in bed a good portion of the day. I had always been one of those people who couldn’t sleep with any light around, so sunlight coming through my windows meant I wasn’t getting any sleep. Now I nudged my mask out of the way and rubbed my eyes.
“Your best friend is waking you up at the crack of eleven thirty,” Stephanie said. “Come on. Get up. I want to grab lunch.”
I wanted to argue with her and tunnel myself back under my covers, but I knew I needed to get up. Even with my late hours, I usually didn’t let myself sleep this late
But that day was different. The black-light night had me at the bar hours later than I usually was, so I didn’t even topple into bed until almost sunrise. I decided I was going to go into work at an almost normal time. Which meant I could meet up with Stephanie for lunch. I asked her to give me an hour, and she told me where to meet her. Hanging up the phone, I had to force myself out of the bed before I just fell back over and went back to sleep.
A shower and putting on my makeup woke me up enough to get moving for the day. By the time I got to the restaurant and sat down at the table with Stephanie, I felt like a functional human being. She grinned at me.
“So, tell me all about it,” she said.
I looked at her strangely. “Tell you all about what?”
“The black-light night,” she said impatiently.
“You were there,” I said.