Truly (New York Trilogy #1) (2 page)

She’d been left in an alley with five bucks and a MetroCard, and the only logical thing to do was go back to the apartment.

But the before-and-after line she’d drawn had followed her into the alley. She’d sensed
that if she turned around she might see it, thick and black and wet, painted across the ground directly behind her heels.

The line said
You can’t go back
.

She didn’t
want
to. She didn’t want to talk to Dan. But neither did she want to be sitting here, broke, with no purse and no friends or family within a thousand miles, and no phone to call them with.

She wanted a magical unicorn to arrive, nicker at her with gentle understanding, and fly her to her family’s cabin in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, where she could take the rest of Labor Day weekend off from reality.

Too bad there were no magical unicorns in sight. Only the bartender, whose gaze she was assiduously avoiding.

And this guy.

This guy with the book and the elbow and the face that said
Don’t even fucking think about it
.

The trouble was, it was difficult to know what to look at when you couldn’t look at the guy or the bartender, and you’d already been sitting at the bar for two hours. She’d had plenty of time already to take in the tiered rows of liquor bottles and the decorations—the novelty cheese-wedge Christmas lights strung along the ceiling, the pristine gold and green
HOLMGREN WAY
street sign, the placard that advertised the availability of Old Fashioneds made with real Door County cherries.

She’d read an article about this bar, back before she moved. Pulvermacher’s had a colorful history as a Beat-scene watering hole, but these days it made its money on New York’s Wisconsin exiles. Packers fans gathered in Greenwich Village on game days to drink beer and yell at the television in the company of dozens of other people who cared as much as they did about the fate of Titletown’s team.

May’s kind of bar, and May’s kind of people.

She hadn’t come here on purpose—she’d never even been here before. She’d just been walking aimlessly, head down, mind spinning. She’d been thinking,
You have to come up with a plan
. But no plan had occurred to her. She’d wandered into the Village and was thinking about sitting down in the little slice of public park she’d spotted, when she saw the awning over the basement bar’s entrance.

Pulvermacher’s.

She’d recognized the name, and her feet had stopped moving of their own accord. The line had nudged at her heels, urging her inside.

It had seemed possible two hours ago, when she slid her last five bucks across the bar, that she would meet some nice Wisconsin person—some woman named Pat who was built like a tank and knew how to make football dip with two cans of Hormel, a package of Philly’s, and some sliced Muenster. Or a Steve from Oconomowoc who hunted elk just like her dad. May and her new friends would exchange names, origins, stories. Imaginary Pat or Imaginary Steve would buy her a beer, and she would carefully glide the conversation on lubricated alcohol wheels in the direction of what had happened to her.

Here, hon
, Imaginary Steve would say,
use my phone to call your folks
.

Imaginary Pat would clap her on the shoulder.
You’ve had a run of bad luck. If you want, you can sleep in my guest bed tonight. We’ll get you squared away and off to the airport tomorrow
.

It was a fantasy—she knew that. Her mom always said May couldn’t tell the difference between fantasy and reality, but of course she could. Fantasy was what had convinced her to move here and had pulled her into this bar. It was the voice in her head that told her,
Dan’s the one. You’re going to love New York. Pulvermacher’s is going to rescue you from yourself
.

Reality was the thing that was always letting her down.

In reality, bars sat virtually empty between the hours of two and five, even on Fridays, and the people who came in weren’t, generally, the sort whose mercy May wanted to throw herself upon.

In reality, Imaginary Pat and Imaginary Steve didn’t live in New York.

People like this guy did.

The bartender had begun cleaning the counter with a damp rag. He shuffled closer to her, sweep by sweep, and cleared his throat.

Nervous, May lifted her beer and drained it, realizing only with the last warm swallow what she’d done.

“Can I get you another round?” he asked.

This was it, then. Time to go.

But the line was behind her, drawn across the floor, invisible but
there
, and she didn’t
want to leave.

She had to choose. Dan’s apartment or this bar. Before or After.

“Maybe,” she said. “Do you have a wine list?”

“I think we’ve got one somewhere in the back.” His disapproving tone made it clear that no one ever asked for a wine list here. Which, yes—she might not know Manhattan, but she knew bars—this was not the sort of place where you asked for a wine list.

“Can you look for me?”

“Sure.” He put his rag down and walked toward a door marked
PRIVATE
. She saw him roll his eyes as he passed the guy.

The guy didn’t look up. He wasn’t interested in the bartender any more than he was interested in her. But his companion wasn’t here yet, and maybe wasn’t coming. He could talk to her for a few minutes, buy her a drink. It wouldn’t kill him.

May hopped off her stool, sucked in her stomach, and approached. “What are you reading?” she asked.

The guy canted the book so she could see the cover, but his hand covered most of the title. All she could read was the word
Dying
.

Awesome.

“Any good?”

He didn’t look at her. He was a bent, dark head, an ear, a declaratory elbow. When she heard a low voice, it took her a second to understand that it belonged to him. “They’ve got their mother’s corpse in a coffin in the back of this wagon, and they’re taking her into town to bury her. The youngest kid thinks the dead mother is a fish, but he also thinks she can’t breathe, so he bores holes into the coffin and right into her face.”

The bridge of her nose wrinkled. A totally involuntary response.

“One of the two older sons is going insane,” he added. “The other one’s broken leg is starting to rot, and the sister’s knocked up.”

A few beats passed. She tried to think of some kind of segue into normal conversation. The best she could do was “Yeah, but is it any good?”

“It’s super.” He injected the maximum amount of sarcasm into the word.

Sarcasm didn’t scare her. Her sister, Allie, had spent her freshman and sophomore years of high school dripping it all over everyone.

“I’m May.” She extended her hand.

He looked away from the book then, though not at her face. At her hand first. Then down at her shoes, which made him frown. She allowed him some leeway there, because she was wearing dark green leather flats with bows on the toes, and she didn’t like them much, either.

When he lifted his gaze, it got stuck on her breasts for an uncomfortable period of twelve to fifteen years. “Ben,” he told them.

This offense was harder to forgive. Men had been addressing her breasts since she was thirteen. Her breasts had yet to respond to this treatment.

I’m up here
.

She didn’t say it aloud, but his head lifted, and he finally looked right at her.

He had sort of sleepy eyelids that went with his broad-planed face, his full mouth—a face that made her think of bear-taming and those male dancers in the tall black boots and flouncy white shirts who crossed their arms and stuck their legs out.

Slavic, that was it.

His eyes were brown, lighter than they should have been in the middle and rimmed with black. Weird eyes.

Weirder still, he didn’t seem embarrassed to have been caught boob-ogling, and he didn’t take her hand. She had to retrieve it from the air in between them and find a place to stow it along the seam of her pants.

“What’s with the jersey?” he asked.

“Hmm?”

“Season doesn’t start until next week.”

Oh.
Oh
. The stupid jersey. Not her breasts.

“Believe me, I know.”

“Plus, Einarsson is a douche.”

Right. That.

Even back home, she sometimes got flack about continuing to wear the old jersey of a quarterback who’d abandoned the Packers for the Jets, only to lead his new team to a Super Bowl victory against the old one. She might as well be sporting a pin that read,
I support Benedict Arnold!

Still,
douche
seemed a little harsh.

Ben sat up straighter, his eyes refocusing on something over her right shoulder. He slid off his bar stool and raised a hand. May turned just as another man came off the last basement step and into the bar. A blond, good-looking man who actually knew how to smile.

“How’s it going?” Ben asked.

“Good,” the other man said. “Sorry I’m late. Erin’s been texting me about some crisis, and I lost track of the time.”

“Don’t worry about it. Got you a PBR for old times’ sake.”

“Classic. But you’ll have to drink it—I can’t stay long, and I’m in training anyway.”

“You’re always in training.”

“Tell me about it. Let’s go in the back.”

Ben pushed the spare beer a few inches in her direction. “You want this one?”

“Sure. Thanks.”

He took the other, and the two men walked past the pinball machine and disappeared into the back room.

May allowed herself a small, self-pitying sigh.

She’d hoped to throw herself on the mercy of some kind Midwesterner, and instead the universe gave her Ben. An intimidating stranger who liked to read books about corpses and who’d called her boyfriend—her
ex
-boyfriend—a douche.

This whole Pulvermacher’s fantasy was a lost cause.

But at least he’d given her another beer. Now she had until the bottom of this glass to come up with a better plan.

Ben Hausman took a deep breath, quieting his body and his mind.

He thought of the farm. The view of Lake Superior from the roof of the chicken house, flat and deep blue, stretching away until it fell off the end of the world.

Calm
.

Lifting his arm, he bent it and directed all his energy toward the target on the wall. On an exhale, he cocked and flung the dart.

It hit the outermost ring of the target at an angle, bounced, and fell to the floor.

“Dude, you suck at darts,” Connor said from his perch on the arm of the bar’s ratty couch. “Give up. I’ll play you at pinball.”

“Bite me.”

Connor shook his head with a grin. “It’s Tron.”

“What’s Tron?”

“The pinball. They changed it. Didn’t you see? It’s Tron now.”

“Tempting, but I’ll pass.”

“What are you so worked up about?”

“I’m not worked up.”

“Your neck just disappeared.”

Ben blew out a deep breath and rolled his shoulders. Fuck. The whole point of playing darts was to practice
not
being tense. He refocused on his technique.

Right as he was about to send the shot, Connor said, “You didn’t used to be this hostile.”

“Yes, I did.”

“Yeah, okay, maybe. But you were good at darts.”

Ben had been good at a lot of things.

“I read this article about Tiger Woods,” he said, aiming. “Early in his career, he had some problem with his drive, so his coach made him take the whole thing apart and build it up from the ground level. He spent more than a year playing like complete garbage. None of the different parts of the swing were working in concert like they were supposed to. But then he pulled all the elements back together again, and it was magic. There was this
click
. The swing came back. He
became Tiger Woods, you know? But even better.”

“Your point?”

“It’s a process,” Ben explained. “I’m evolving into the Tiger Woods of darts.”

“You don’t want to be Tiger Woods. Everybody hates him.”

“What, because of the adultery thing?”

“Yeah.”

“He’s still a great golfer.”

“Doesn’t matter. You need a better role model.”

“Fine. I’ll be the Jack Nicklaus of darts.”

Connor smiled. “That barely even makes sense.”

“That’s what you get for messing with my analogies.”

The analogy didn’t matter. The point wasn’t for Ben to get good at darts, it was for him to get better at
life
. To break his personality down to the raw elements and then recombine them for a less disastrous result.

“You going to shoot that thing or not?”

Ben threw it without aiming or thinking. The dart hit the very edge of the board and dropped to the floor. Connor shook his head, amazed. “Who was that blonde you were talking to?”

“What, at the bar?”

“Yeah.”

May. Her name was May. “She asked me about my book.”

“She looked kind of …”

Like a dairymaid in jeans. Brown eyes with golden lashes like wheat stubble. Milky skin. Freckles on her nose. “Kind of what?”

“Like she was having a bad day.”

She had. Uncomfortable, nervous, a little sad—way too pliable. She reminded him of three-quarters of the girls he’d gone to high school with, and she interested him not at all.

Except that when he’d told her Einarsson was a douche, the sour shape of her mouth had chastised him with all the force of a whip, and his heart had kicked in his chest, hard.

Then she’d blinked and turned innocuous again.

“Not my type.”

“No shit. She’s all soft. You spend a week filling in for Sam in the kitchen, and you look like you’re ready to take somebody’s head off. I’m surprised she even had the courage to talk to you.”

“I’m not that bad.”

“You’re worse. I bet you couldn’t be nice if you tried.”

Ben exhaled and threw another dart. When it lodged, quivering, in the floorboard, he felt like ripping it out and stepping on it, but he didn’t do it.

Progress. Even if it looked like failure.

He used to bulldoze his way through his days fueled by tension and aimless hostility. He’d wanted to be the best chef in New York. He hadn’t had a lot of time for darts, but on the rare occasion that he’d played, every missile had flown straight and true from his fingertips, like a bolt of sheared-off fury.