The phone in Carl’s office had no dial tone. Their cell phones couldn’t find a signal. She slumped onto a stool, head in her hands, and stayed that way for some time. She couldn’t dispel the image of Carl’s dead face. She couldn’t stop thinking of Penny, that poor, slow dog. Was she trembling from the storm, waiting for Carl to come home? It all caused a wretched pain in her chest. And what would happen to the bar with Carl gone? It felt wrong, for it all to end this way. She was supposed to leave. She was supposed to choose to leave, to cut the cord, not have it snatched away from her. When she was ready, she would have gone.
“My father died from a heart attack,” Hootie told Manny.
“You never told me that.”
“Well. It’s true.”
They sat side by side at the bar. Their reflections glimmered in the candlelit mirror. Two phantoms. They looked at each other through the glass.
“My father was shot,” Manny said.
“God.”
“By his own brother.”
“Jesus!”
“Yes,” Manny said, nodding. “A hunting accident.”
The rain turned from forceful to torrential. It clobbered the roof, the windows. Hootie raised her voice to be heard.
“My mother once told me she wished I was dead.”
Manny blew out a sharp breath. “When?”
“At my father’s funeral. She said she wished it had been me instead of him.”
“My mother was a painter. She painted my sister a hundred, two hundred times. She painted me once. And you know what she said when she gave me the portrait?”
“What?”
“Now you can stop bothering me. When she died, I left the portrait at a gas station.”
The crackling ferocity of thunder swept over the bar, reverberated through Hootie’s bones, exalted, and then passed. Manny said: “I remember when you started working here. I asked you how long you were staying. You remember what you said?”
“Stop, please.”
Manny put his hand on her wrist. “You said, two months tops.”
“Don’t fucking tell me that. Don’t say that.”
“I’ve been here longer than you.”