this is still a really rough piece - just finished, still needs to go through revisions. feedback's always appreciated, though!
Padding down Western Avenue, he reaches for her hand. She doesn’t take it, can’t, and he whispers her name in frustration. Kate. A quick nod towards the sky and he shuts his eyes so tight that he swears he can see the creases in his eyelids. Still, he can’t stay mad at her. After all, this isn’t her fault.
He has to struggle to shrug his eyes open again; it’s as if they’ve been stuck together with pitch, a darkness that relentlessly pulls at the lids against the glow of the street lamps, the fluorescents illuminating the "L" track. He fiercely wraps his fleece more tightly around himself and focuses on the rhythm of the clacking heels and twang of cocktail hour laughter that rings all around. A gust of wind whips between the rows of brownstones, between the goosebumped calves of legs hardly sheltered by workday pencil skirts. God, he thinks, it’s way too cold to be just the end of August.
And it’s exactly that, August 31st, the beautiful bridge between summer and fall, when the sticky Chicago humidity is quite suddenly sucked dry with the burning red of leaves. August 31st. Her birthday.
Actually, it’s her twenty-first birthday, and he was keeping his end of their night-on-the-town pact as he finally pushed into the crowd at the Celtic Crown. The Crown hosted a slew of regulars, and at 7:30 on a Tuesday night, the place was still packed with the nine-to-five cronies, shoved in booths that would seem etched with their presence all week long, even long after the rush hour mecca had claimed them again.
He begins to edge through the clientele, and again reaches behind himself for Kate’s hand, but swipes the air instead. He doesn’t turn around, doesn’t even think to look behind, even when her fingers don’t immediately fold over his. It’s way too cold outside, and a heat seems to be radiating from the blaze of the neon draft ads that hang above the counter, a visible steam of blues and reds and greens that drew in sidewalk wanderers with a promise of the impossible. If their ethereal pull was as compelling as he knew, there was no doubt that she would have followed him in.
And regardless of the bar lights’ mystique, she wouldn’t have dressed properly anyway; those skinny jeans and plum cardigan she always loved to wear would be no match for the sudden temperature drop. He might have told her to put on something warmer, or offered her his jacket, if he could have, if she would have let him. But Kate had always made decisions, regardless of how foolish they may have seemed, and held fast to them. It was one of things he loved most about her; she was stubborn beyond belief. She had this way of furrowing her eyebrows together, a knit of concentration as she braved even her most ridiculous choices. She was that over-the-top, British Invasion-kind-of-poptastic beautiful when she did that, and it drove him crazy.
Had driven him crazy.
Two steps through the door, and already people have turned to stare, parting like a white-collared Red Sea. They know it’s her birthday. Many nod and smile, a slight, pained gesture that exudes such blatant genuineness that a sickening pit nestles in his marrow, leaving a twinge that aches away all the months of getting over. He pushes the thought far from his mind and forces a quick grin in return, so fleeting that no one may have noticed the tremor in his lip. Stuffing his hands into his pockets, he shoulders through the stragglers who haven’t caught the hint. Their faces are pink with punch drunk exhaustion, but seem happy all the same. Hearty laughter harmonizes with the tinkling of giggles, a symphony of have-you-met’s and when-can-we-do-this-again’s that he tries to drown out, but can’t ignore.
He finally finds their table in the far corner of the bar, shaded in the emerald of hanging bank lamps. Both their table and two stools have been bussed to an eerie perfection, wiped down so that an oily sheen reflects the cheery, faceless shadows of the patrons – a ballet of ghosts flickering across the hardwood grooves. He sat, and so would she. He’d pull out a tattered deck of cards and they’d play gin rummy, the game he’d taught her when they’d first met.
It’d been May, and she’d been nineteen at the time, wandering the bar with the skittish excitement of someone who’d never truly broken the rules before. She kept eyeing him in the back, hunched over a Rolling Rock and a smear of cards, playing solitaire. He’d caught her staring and looked up, smiling to himself when she turned back into her gaggle of college girlfriends, done up just a bit too much, their disguises for the evening. When he finally packed up his cards to leave, he approached her, sipping a gin and tonic on one of the high-backed chairs at the bar, and asked for her name. She’d had to look down at her friend’s borrowed I.D. before she could honestly say, her eyelashes a canopy that could barely contain the lie her brown eyes playfully gave away.
“Sarah. Sarah Greenely,” she’d finally stammered.
“Oh, yeah? Your address?” He quickly grabbed the license away from her. And then, before she could try to answer, “And baby, what’s your sign?” His grin broadened, and he leaned over the back of her chair, noticing the splash of freckles on her bare shoulder. He wondered what it’d be like to kiss each one.
“Ah, um. Eleven. Eleven, zero, four, Lilac Lane? And I know for sure that I’m a Leo.” She’d laughed and he fell as hard as every pop song had promised.
The quizzing went on for a few more minutes until her got her to tell him that her name was actually Kate Lewis. She was a sophomore marketing major at a local university. She loved baseball and Ingmar Bergman films, but hated cats. He’d led her back to his table, their table, and he’d bought her another gin and tonic, commenting that if she was going to drink gin, she should know what going gin really meant. So, they’d played gin rummy nearly every time they came to the Celtic Crown in the past two years.
Tonight was no different. He began to shuffle the cards, and when a waitress approached, he didn’t need to check with Kate. He’d have a Rolling Rock and a gin and tonic, no lime; she hated lime. The waitress paused at first, but then gave a knowing nod, and dutifully walked back and behind the bar. When she’d returned, he’d dealt out a set of ten cards on opposite ends of the table and she set down the gin and tonic at Kate’s stool, shielding her eyes as she walked away.
He then grabbed the neck of his bottle, a crutch to steady himself before he finally raised it. He toasted Kate, and her worn copy of Jane Eyre that never left her nightstand, her single dimple and perfect collarbone, her saltwater taffy cravings, the way her nose crinkled when she winked at him in public. He raised his glass to her fingernails, brittle after years of biting them, her date book that was still laid out on his desk since she’d left it the last night she’d stayed over, how she’d chew her bottom lip when she was nervous and the way her cheeks were rosy after only an hour in the sun. He toasted the lingering scent of his bar soap on her that last morning before the accident, and how, even now, he loved the way she couldn’t walk in heels and how they’d sit on the curb on their walks home and watch the cars go by, everyone in a rush to reach the same end.
There’d been no resounding clink in response to the tilt of his glass, the tumbler remaining motionless on the table. He quietly finished his beer and left the pub, pushing through the same crowd, who finally began to whisper the truth of his celebration, a hollow beating he could never keep from aching. Kate. Dead. Dead. Dead.
The rhythm beat on as he struck a foot into the odd chill of August’s end, and knowing he’d left any lingering sense of her in the bar, he edged his way into the startling breath of a tragic something new.
