“Fine. Everybody’s happy. Now give me something real. A new car? A trip to New York City? What’re you going to do for yourself?”
“To tell you the truth, I haven’t given it much thought. I’m okay with what I’ve got.”
“Slinging drinks is what you want to do forever? Haven’t you ever asked yourself what you’d do if money weren’t an issue? You have some freedom now.”
“Not until the sun comes up,” Lola said.
Beau scoffed. “I’m glad to see one blowjob hasn’t killed your spirit.”
What a blowjob it’d been. Lola was incredibly turned on, and she’d barely even been touched. She made an effort to control herself, even though she squirmed in her seat a little. “What do you want me to say? That I love to paint landscapes, or I’ve always dreamed of backpacking through Europe? I don’t and I haven’t. Not everyone has hobbies or dreams. That’s not the kind of life I live.”
Beau slammed on the brakes. The car behind them swerved and honked. “So tell me what kind of life you live.”
“What are you doing?” Lola asked. “You can’t just stop in the middle of the road.”
“Conventional methods aren’t working,” he said. “I don’t want platitudes. Just give me a real answer.”
“Are you drunk?” Lola asked. “You’re drunk, aren’t you?”
“I didn’t even finish my drink. I want to know more about the girl I played darts with.
Who you are when he’s not around.”
Lola shook her head. “You’re getting sentimental on me just because I let you come in my mouth?”
Beau barked a laugh. “Can you blame me? You’re so charming.”
She smiled through the honking of passing cars. “You’re really going to stay here?”
He nodded. “Here’s an easier question. Tell me something you don’t want out of life.”
She squinted through the windshield. It was an easier question, and even though she’d never articulated it, the answer didn’t come with difficultly. “I don’t want Johnny to lose his sense of self-worth along with the bar. I was afraid if he didn’t have Hey Joe, he’d have to start over somewhere else, and he’d feel like he’d failed.”
“Failure’s good for us, you know.”
She looked over at him. “Are you saying I shouldn’t have taken the deal?”
“I’m saying you can’t be the sacrifice for the fulfillment of his dreams.” He took his foot off the brake and resumed driving. “When he asked what you wanted to do with the money, what’d you say?”
Lola chewed the inside of her cheek. She wasn’t sure Johnny had asked. There’d never been any other option. She was using the money to keep them intact. Johnny knew the ins and outs of Hey Joe. He was master of that domain. Maybe it wasn’t her dream job, but she’d never had a dream job—so she wasn’t losing anything. Only, Beau seemed to think there was more to it, and now she wondered if there was. “You’ve made your point.”
“You need to figure out what you want,” he said. “Not what you want for him. Then you need to tell him.”
“I don’t know if you’re right,” she said, “but you might not be wrong.”
He pulsed his eyebrows at her once. “That’s a start. So what would it take to get you to figure it out?”
They happened to be in a familiar part of town. Giving in to Beau had loosened her up a bit, and he was working hard to shine his spotlight on her, so she decided to help him out by moving under it a little more. “How about a trip down memory lane?”
“What’d you have in mind?” he asked right away.
She pointed in front of them. “Take a right up here.” After only a few minutes of driving, she told him to park at a curb. “See that place?” she asked, nodding through the window.
“The Lucky Egg,” Beau read the flickering sign off the corner diner.
“When I was a kid, my mom worked there. Days and nights. The life of a single mom.”
“Where was your dad?”
“Gone. I don’t have a lot of memories of him. I remember weird things, though, like the smell of his shampoo when he’d pick me up before leaving for work, or the time he kissed my elbow after I’d fallen climbing a tree in the backyard. Then it was just me and her.”
“Have you seen him since?”
“No. If he’d come back, I think my mom would’ve killed him. She got so angry after he left. It flipped a switch in her. They married right out of high school, so she’d never been on her own. She thought we were going to lose the house, or they were going to take our car. She’d get really rundown from working so much.”
“Sounds the opposite of my mom. When my dad died, she became helpless. I kept waiting for that maternal survival instinct to kick in, but it didn’t.”
“I don’t even think it was maternal instinct for my mom. She just saw me as this little person who drained her meager bank account. Around seventeen, I moved in with some older kids. We partied a lot. The first night I went to Hey Joe, Johnny should’ve kicked me out because I was underage. Guess he took pity on me, though. He gave me a tequila shot instead.”
“Or he was trying to get in your pants.”
Lola shook her head. “We didn’t start sleeping together for a while, actually. And when we did, I didn’t take it seriously until he broke up with me.”
“I see. Obviously that didn’t last.”
Lola kept her eyes out the window. “He was sick of me screwing around. He gave me an ultimatum—grow up or get out. Quit the drugs, the partying, the—” She paused. “He saved me. Turned my life around. If not for him, I don’t know where I’d be.”
“You should give yourself more credit. You’re a fighter. That much is obvious.”