For Good (27 page)

“It's not that I don't want to know you.” The woman still held Tate's hand, now stroking the back of Tate's knuckles with her thumb. “It's just…I don't live here. I live a thousand miles away.” The woman raised Tate's knuckles to her lips and kissed them. “Right now I don't want to be me.”

“You're straight,” Tate said.

Behind the woman's head, Vita mouthed,
So?!

The woman said nothing.

“You've got a husband and two kids at home.” Tate extracted her hand. “A husband with a shotgun and two kids who will spend thousands of dollars on therapy when they realize you weren't going to the PTA meetings at all.”

The woman bowed her head and laughed. Tate could only see her dimples, suddenly apparent in the smooth face.
All right
, Tate thought.
I'll take it
. It was the first time in months that she had sat at the Mirage and not thought about Abigail. She hadn't even looked up to see if Abigail had come back in the room.

“I don't have any kids,” the woman said. “I can promise you that. I was married once, but we divorced years ago, and I'm not straight. I just wanted one night where I'm not what I do or where I work or who I know, but that's silly, isn't it?”

Tate thought about Out Coffee. About Maggie, Krystal, Vita, and the Mount Tabor Community Garden Association. About her studio apartment off northeast Firline and the old Hungarian couple who lived in the unit below hers. She thought about Portland, with its mossy side streets and its glorious summers.

“If you're not who you know, where you work, where you live, who are you?” she asked.

“I'm this,” the woman said and took Tate's face in her hands and kissed her.

At first it was just a soft kiss, lip to lip. Then Tate felt the woman's hands tremble against her cheeks. Their lips parted. Her tongue found Tate's. Beneath the bar, their knees touched, and Tate felt the woman's legs shake as though she had run a great distance.

A second later, Tate pulled away, but only because she wanted the woman, and she felt herself going down in the annals of barroom legend. She could already hear Vita's rendition of the story:
Tate just reached over and grabbed the girl, practically swallowed her. It was like she unhinged her jaw, and the girl's head was in her mouth.
Bang! Like a boa constrictor.
Friends and customers would listen attentively, waving away Tate's protests. Who wanted a story about a lonely barista longing for summer romance when they could have Vita's tale about Tate Grafton, Python Lover?

“Would you like to play a game of pool?” Tate said, to get out from under Vita's grin and to give herself a moment to think.

She was not the kind of woman who picked up girls at the bar. Vita picked up girls. Vita had picked up so many women she remembered them by taglines like “The Groaner” or “Wooly Bicycle Legs.” She often told Tate that Tate could do the same, if she would only “put out some effort.” According to Vita, half the girls at the Mirage were in love with Tate. But Tate did not believe her; nor did she want an assortment of half-remembered encounters.

But she wanted this woman.

They moved toward the side of the bar where two pool tables stood on a raised platform under low-hanging lights.

“Are you any good?” she asked.

“I'm all right,” Tate said.

The woman rolled her pool cue on the table to see if it was true.

“None of them are straight,” Tate said.

“I suppose not.” The woman glanced toward the door. “Not here.”

Tate laughed.

“You break, then,” the woman said.

Tate cracked the balls apart, sinking two solids and following with a third.

“So, if you won't tell me your name,” Tate began. “Or where you live or what you do, what are we going to talk about?”

“We could talk about you.”

The woman sank a high ball but missed her next shot. Her hand was unsteady, and she looked around the bar more than she looked at the table. She looked at
Tate
more than she looked around the bar—but only out of the corner of her eye.

“I already know where you work,” she said, casting that glance at Tate and then looking down. “And I know that, prior to right now, you've had bad taste in women. So…what's your name? How long have you worked at the coffee shop?”

Tate took another shot and sank a ball.

“No,” she said slowly. “I'll tell you what you tell me.”

“Okay.” The woman leaned over the pool table and her hair draped in a curtain over one side of her face. She took her shot but missed. “I learned to play pool in college with three girls who I thought would be my friends for life. We played at a sports bar called the Gator Club. And I don't know any of them now. They could be dead. They could be professional pool sharks.” She leaned against the wall and surveyed the table. “How about you?”

“I learned to play here the summer I turned twenty-one,” Tate said. She sank another ball and shot a smile in the woman's direction. “The table is off. It slopes. It's not fair, you being from out of town and all. I should give you a handicap.”

“Tell me how it slopes and give me two out of three.”

Tate had never been the kind of person who made bets or the kind of person who sidled up to beautiful women, looked down at them lustfully, and said things like,
What will you give me when I win?

But apparently that was the kind of woman she was. Tonight. In the summer.

“What will you give me if I win?”

The woman did not step away. Or laugh. She rested one hand on Tate's chest, right over Tate's racing heart.

“I'll answer one question,” she said. “About anything. I'll tell you one true thing. And if I win—it's that corner, right?—I want you to take me someplace.”

“Where?”

“Someplace special. You've been playing pool here since you were twenty-one. You must know someplace no one goes. Someplace I wouldn't see otherwise. Something I'll remember.”

“Okay.”

They played in silence, standing closer than necessary, touching more than necessary. The woman seemed to relax, and her game got better. Tate won the first game but only just barely. The woman won the second, masterfully compensating for the uneven table. Tate was in line to win the third game but scratched on the eight ball. The woman laughed a sweet, musical laugh tinged with victory.

“Take me somewhere,” the woman said.

At the bar, Vita pointed and mouthed,
You rock.
At a table near the door, Abigail leaned against Duke's leather vest and scowled. But Tate did not see them. She slipped her hand through the woman's arm and stepped out into the moonlight.

Karelia Stetz-Waters is an English professor by day and a writer by night (and early morning). She has a BA from Smith College in comparative literature and an MA in English from the University of Oregon. Other formative experiences include a childhood spent roaming the Oregon woods and several years spent exploring Portland as a broke twentysomething, which is the only way to experience Oregon's strangest, most beautiful city.

Her other works include
The Admirer
,
The Purveyor
, and
Forgive Me if I've Told You This Before
. She lives with her wife, Fay, her dog, Willa Cather, and her cat, Cyrus the Disemboweler.

Karelia loves to hear from readers. You can find her at KareliaStetzWaters.com.

 

Something True

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