by Nicole Bross
“I’m so naive to think she would want to work with me,” I say, shaking my head. “What on earth would she gain from partnering up with me instead of owning the entire place herself? Of course, she turned me down. And I’m angry about it. Even though it makes perfect sense. I am so. Fucking. Angry.” I punctuate each word by slamming my fist into a pillow. Kellen tries to rein me in, pulling my body toward him, but I shrug him off and push myself to my feet. “It wouldn’t have killed her to pretend to be nice, you know? Instead, I’ve gotten the cold shoulder from the moment I got here, despite bending over backward to reach out to her. Some part of me even hoped that even though I’d lost one aunt, I could maybe gain another. At the very least, she should understand that I didn’t ask for any of this. Roz, there’s another one. What the fuck was she thinking?” I’m pacing back and forth in front of Kellen now, gesticulating broadly. Jana must be able to hear me downstairs, but I’m past the point of caring. “Throwing the two of us together, she must have known what would happen. She should have realized as much as she wanted us to take this on together—and even that’s questionable, according to Cora—it would never work without her. On top of that, she thought I’d have no problem throwing away my entire career to move across the country on a whim and start all over again. I’ve got a master’s degree from Columbia, but sure, I’ll just drop everything and spend the rest of my life asking people if they’ve been happy with their stay.” Tiny drops of saliva are flying from my lips. “Then that asshole Bill Blackmoor has to go and die too and make everything ten times more complicated. Great timing, Bill. And you.” I stab my finger at Kellen, who’s been remarkably calm as I rave. “You and your ridiculously white teeth. Smiling at me. Bringing me food all the time, and taking me for literal long walks on the beach like we’re living some personals ad. And your stupid perfect dick. You’re the worst of them all.” I wad up a piece of scrap paper and toss it at him. He catches it easily and gives me an inscrutable look.
“So, you’re mad at me because I fuck you too well, and I feed you?” The corner of his mouth twitches ever so slightly.
“Shut up. Yes.” If he laughs at me, I don’t know what I’ll do. I feel like hurling furniture over the balcony, so this tirade is, in my opinion, me showing considerable restraint.
“You’re angry because I make it harder for you to want to leave.” I look at him for a long moment and exhale noisily, finally nodding before turning my back on him to face the bookshelf again.
“Not just you. Everything.”
“But I’m the worst.”
“Yes, all right? Congratulations. You win. You’re the worst.”
“I would have gone with you, you know. Back to wherever it was you were headed if you’d decided to sell.” I turn around to see if he’s serious, and from the sober expression on his face—no trace of a smirk now—he is. “I mean it, Audrey. You’re not some casual fuck. I’m all in.” Inexplicably, my eyes fill with tears, and I swipe at them furiously with the back of my hand. I can’t even explain to myself why this makes me angrier, only that I can feel myself tipping over into a complete emotional overload. My head fills with an endless stream of wordless screams. I know what he’s talking about, know exactly what he means, but if he says it out loud right now, I know I’ll push back and walk out because that’s all I know how to do. Not because I don’t feel the same way, but because I’ve spent my entire adulthood carefully crafting a life that rejects any type of permanence, of the sort of intimacy that would bring me to rely on someone else for comfort. On the deep nourishment you can only receive from others. Roz had tried, and that’s probably why I held her at arms’ length and ‘forgot’ to write and call her so often.
Kellen rises from the mattress and pulls me close into him, wrapping his arms around me in a tight embrace. Gradually, the rhythmic sound of his heart beating against my ear penetrates the screams, and they begin to still.
“Can we try it?” he asks, his voice muffled in my hair. I realize I’m holding my breath when I start to see bright spots in my eyes. I scrunch my face together and nod before I can think too much about what he’s asking. This is already more than I’ve ever let anyone offer me.
“Okay. Good. Whew.” I can hear the relief in his voice. He was holding his breath too. “Into bed,” he says, and sitting me down, he unlaces my Chucks himself and slides my jeans down over my hips in a completely non-sexual manner. All this time tiny fragments of his past are buzzing in and out of my head like wasps, moments I should probably be paying attention to, but can’t summon the mental clarity to give them their due. The fact that I’ll never get them back nearly sets me to crying again, until I feel the cool pillow under my cheek, and with it, the unstoppable pull of sleep. Hazily, I sense the heat of his body envelop me from behind.
“Hey, Kellen?” I say before darkness overtakes me.
“What?” he replies, his mouth close to my ear.
“I’m thirty.” He half snorts and gives me a squeeze. Then sleep drags me under.
***
After retrieving my belongings from Cora’s the next morning and leaving her key in the dish by the front door with a note saying I’ll be staying at the inn, Kellen and I drive to the closest big-box store for a few items to make the office suite more livable. As we unload the microwave, hot plate, and a few other small appliances I’d deemed essential, a man walks through the inn’s parking lot, headed in the direction of the beach.
“Hey, Aaron,” Kellen says, giving him a nod.
“Kellen.” His voice is neutral, but he gives me what feels like a dirty look, despite the fact that I’ve never met him before. He’s about my age, with a reddish-blond beard and a red #MAGA hat. Nevertheless, I try to reserve my judgment.
“Hi, I’m Audrey Eames,” I say, dropping one of my bags momentarily so I can extend my hand to him.
“I know who you are.” His voice is cold, and he ignores my hand until I drop it awkwardly back to my side and stare at him, perplexed.
“Is there a problem?”
“Just heard the news this morning is all. Yeah, there’s a bit of a problem.” I stand there, waiting. Out of the side of my eye, I can see Kellen tense, and he, too, puts down his bags. “We figure you’ll run the inn into the ground in six months, max. With no inn for people to stay at, there go half the other places in town. We all depend on tourism to survive here, and you’ve got no business threatening our livelihoods. You’re in over your head. Everyone thinks so.”
“That’s way out of line, man,” Kellen says, stepping forward at the same time I chime in saying he has no idea what I’m capable of. This Aaron has just voiced my worst fear since I decided to stay, but there’s no way I’ll let him see it.
“Why’re you defending her when you’ll be one of the first to lose your job? Are the two of you setting up house together?” He tilts his chin at the bags of appliances. “Take my advice, Audrey. Leave the inn to people who know what they’re doing. Visit all you like. Enjoy our lovely town. Get laid if you want. If Kellen’s not willing, I certainly am, and I bet you’d look great on your knees—”
Kellen’s fist comes out of nowhere, leveling Aaron in one swing. The sickening crack of the punch echoes in my ears. “You fucking pig,” he snarls as Aaron picks himself up, bleeding badly from a split lip and breathing so hard he’s almost panting. I can see bits of gravel embedded in his palms, and that makes me wince more than the blood does. For a moment, I think Aaron is going to tackle Kellen and try to take him down, but instead, he spits a mouthful of frothy red saliva onto the pavement and looks murderously at us both.
“I won’t forget that, Greene,” he says, pointing his finger at Kellen before turning and resuming his original track to the beach, shoulders hunched inward. He spits again and wipes off his face with the tail of his shirt as he reaches the far edge of the parking lot.
“I fucking hope not. Maybe it’ll remind you not to talk shit.” Once Aaron is out of sight, Kellen leans against his car and cringe
s, cradling his hand against his chest. The bravado falls from his face. “Broke my fucking fist on his Neanderthal face,” he says, examining his knuckles gingerly.
“You shouldn’t have hit him. People have said far worse things to me, and I suppose I’m going to have to get used to it here if people really are as upset about me and the inn as he says.” I reach out to examine him, but he pulls away reflexively.
“That’s not why I did it. You don’t know the guy. He doesn’t stop at catcalling or groping girls in bars. He’s been accused of drugging and raping women twice but got off both times because there wasn’t enough evidence to convict him.”
“Oh. Well, then I guess I’m glad you hit him.” I try to catch his eye to give him a smile, and eventually, he relents and the corner of his mouth lifts. “Also, he’s right, you know. I do look good on my knees, and I’ll show you later if you let me have a look at your hand.” He chokes back a laugh and holds it out to me after exacting a promise that I’ll be gentle. With the lightest possible touch, I take his hand into my own.
Father Lvov knelt before Pavel, his hands soaked with blood, staring at the knife plunged in his chest. The knife he had put there. The hilt was the only part visible, and he could still feel the sensation of its weight in his hand the moment he struck. He reached out with a trembling hand to pull it back out, wishing he could somehow take back the wound he had inflicted, to reverse time, even. But he could not. Pavel’s unstaring eyes looked toward the heavens, and he, Father Lvov, had sent him there.
18
“What is it?” Kellen asks. My shock at the vision he gave me must have shown on my face and given me away. The kind-hearted, progressive priest a murderer? It didn’t fit in with everything I’d seen of him so far, both from Kellen himself and some of the other residents of Soberly. I shake my head to remind myself not to jump to conclusions, and focus on Kellen’s hand, which is starting to swell.
“Nothing,” I say. “Just thinking about how much this must hurt. I think you should go to the clinic. You might need a cast.”
“Awesome,” he says, frowning.
I drop him off since he can’t shift gears himself and head back to the inn, finally hauling the shopping bags up to the office. I bypass the front desk, not wanting to confront Cora at the moment. There’s a piece of mail waiting for me on the table from my lawyer, with a copy of the title of ownership for the inn showing that it’s in my name now. Reading it gives me a strange thrill, fear warring with excitement. It’s actually real. For better or worse, the Soberly Inn and Public House belong to me. Then the excitement loses ground and fear surges, making my heart pound and vision narrow. I have no idea what I’m doing. Aaron is right. I’m in way over my head. Surely Cora won’t let things fall apart, especially since Roz extracted that promise to help me. Except Cora said she didn’t want to stay on. Would she also let her work slide until I found a new manager?
I have my answer when she comes into the office a short while later.
“Payday is tomorrow,” she says in a clipped voice. “You need to sign these checks.” I nod and sign my name one by one, burning with shame that I haven’t once thought about the people who work here, and whether or not Roz’s death had interrupted their pay schedule. There are a few I haven’t even met yet—the two housekeepers, a server, and one of the kitchen staff in the pub. These are the types of things I don’t have a clue about. Meanwhile, I’ve been spending my time imagining up bootlegging tours instead of focusing on the basics of keeping operations going.
“Thank you,” I say quietly as I hand the checks back to Cora. Mustering up my courage, fully expecting she’ll turn me down again, I ask her if she’ll sit down with me and go over the day-to-day operations of the inn, as well as things like inventory management and the schedule for payroll. “I know it’s not something I can learn in a few hours or even a few months, but I’d like to start somewhere,” I tell her.
“I think that’s a good idea,” she surprises me by saying. Her voice is still acidic, and she’s looking somewhere over my shoulder instead of meeting my eyes, but at least she’s agreed. “You can start by reading these,” she adds, and pulls a couple books off one of Roz’s bookshelves. I’d never noticed them before. She drops them on the table beside me with maybe more force than necessary, but I’m not intimidated by the thickness of the tomes at all. Research is what I do. I flip through the top one, noting how multiple passages are highlighted in bright yellow and sometimes accompanied by Roz’s notes in the margins as well.
“Thank you,” I say again, and Cora retreats back to the front desk, checks in hand. I grab the top book and a pad of paper for my own notes and questions and take them out to the deck to begin my crash course in hotel management.
Kellen texts an hour later to pick him up, and when he emerges from the clinic, he has a neon pink fiberglass cast on his right hand. “Three weeks,” he says before I can ask him how long he has to wear it.
“Can you work?”
“I dunno yet. I’m going to try.” His index and middle fingers aren’t bound by the cast, but his ring and pinky ones are completely immobilized, as well as his hand and wrist. He won’t be able to pick up or carry anything; something which I imagine is pretty critical for a bartender. Not only that, he’ll have to work with his left hand.
We drive back to the inn without saying a word to each other. Kellen’s face is set in a sort of semi-grimace, and I can’t tell if it’s from the pain in his hand, or because he’s started to regret hitting Aaron. Myself, I can’t think of anything to break the silence because I’m still thinking over the brief flash of a vision I received about the killing of Pavel. It had been so short I hadn’t gotten any sense of context from him about the events leading up to it. Was it a calculated act, or did it happen in a sudden burst of anger? Was it an accident, or self-defense? I do know the priest was shocked when he realized what he’d done but was that on account of the possibility of being caught? It was impossible to know.
When we walk into the pub, more than one person nudges their neighbor to point out Kellen’s pink cast.
“I think I figured out what happened to Aaron Glass’ face,” Drew says, eyes widening. He holds out his fist for our customary bump, but his eyes never leave Kellen’s face.
“Was he back here?” Kellen asks, his voice lowering to a near-growl.
“No, I saw him about an hour ago when I was on my way in. Told him he should come in and have a round or two to numb the pain, and he said he was never setting foot in this place again. Said he’d do all his drinking over at the Mast and Mussel from now on.” The Mast and Mussel, I knew, was a popular bar and restaurant in the next town over. “Why’d you beat on him?”
“Cause he’s a shit-talking prick, that’s why.” This outburst causes Drew’s eyes to widen further, but he doesn’t press for specifics.
“All right, calm down. People are staring,” I say out of the side of my mouth. His jaw clenches tighter, but he stalks through the tables to the bar, silently daring anyone to challenge him. No one does, thankfully, but I’m sure that won’t last for long—Naomi hasn’t seen him yet. I bite my lip and glance at the kitchen door, where she’s sure to emerge at some point.
“It’s her day off,” Drew tells me, following my gaze. I breathe a sigh of relief. Given the speed of the gossip train in Soberly, it’s likely she’ll still hear about it before he gets home, but at least they can hash it out in private. “So, what happened?”
“He said some nasty stuff to me, is all. That no one in town wanted me to stay on at the inn. Then he made a crude remark. That was the last straw.” I’m assuming that at this point, Drew knows Kellen and I have at least some sort of relationship. I look around the pub. Almost all the tables are vacant, and of those that are occupied, none of the faces around them look familiar. “Slow day?” I ask Drew. It’s that time of the afternoon when people have already finished lunch, and it’s too early for supper, but I’m used to seeing at least a few old-timers sitt
ing around, shooting the shit over a pint to beat the heat.
“Little bit,” Drew replies with a shrug, his face glum. I know the majority of Drew’s income depends on tips, so a slow day at the pub means he earns less.
“Do you think it’s because of me?”
He shrugs again. “Who knows. People will probably be a bit weird about it for a few days, then get used to the idea and things will go back to normal. Change is a part of life. Is it really true? You’re not selling to Cora?”
“Yes, it’s true. Roz wanted me to do this. It took some time to get on board, but I’m starting to understand why. I wish I could get Cora behind me too.”
“I’d like to say maybe she’ll come around, but…” he trails off. “Anyway, I gotta get back to work. Don’t want my boss to see me slacking off.” One side of his mouth pulls up in a grin, and he heads to one of the tables to check on its occupants.
Kellen is still in a foul mood when the pub closes, and heads for home after a perfunctory kiss and a promise that he’ll be in better spirits tomorrow. I’m glad for a night apart—the emotional rollercoaster of the past couple of days has finally caught up to me.
The next morning my reflection is a testament to the quality of sleep I had. The dark, puffy circles under my eyes are only superficially masked by concealer, and for unknown reasons, my skin is breaking out to the left of my mouth. It’s at this point I realize I didn’t buy a hair dryer yesterday and will have to let my hair air-dry, the result of which is always a lank, wavy mess. Awesome. I walk over to Sheena’s shop; hopeful she’ll be able to fill me in on the pulse of Soberly with respect to my decision to keep the inn. The sign on the door reminds me that it’s closed today, however, so I walk a few blocks further to her house and knock on the door.
“You look like shit,” she says without preamble when she answers. She, on the other hand, looks effortlessly casual, hair flat-ironed, makeup flawlessly understated, in a breezy white lace-trimmed sundress. I give her the finger and scowl. Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea. She beckons me inside with an understanding smile and tells me she’ll put on some tea.