By midnight, her feet were aching and she hopped miserably from foot to foot. By two o’clock, closing time, they’d gone numb and her exhaustion had given way to exhilaration; she wiped down the bar and glanced around to see what else she might do. Declan was seated at a small table, settling the till. “Go home,” he told her, waving a meaty hand in her direction. “You’re done. Good work.” Outside, she closed her coat against the chill air and walked up and over a block to wait for the Second Avenue bus. She could take it to Fourteenth Street and transfer to the L train. The bus, usually so unreliable, came right away and zoomed off down the deserted avenue. She was the only passenger. At this time of night, she thought, rich people took taxis and poor people were asleep or at work. Furtively, she unzipped her backpack and leafed through the bills she’d collected, which amounted—she was shocked to see—to almost two hundred dollars! And this was a Wednesday!
On Friday, she made even more, and the following Monday somewhat less, but still enough to make it worth the effort. That Tuesday, at work, she was tired, but not all that much more than usual, and her job—her day job—definitely didn’t require any particular level of alertness. At this rate, she could work for a few more weeks—say, until after New Year’s—and make enough to catch up and get them through the holidays.
After Thanksgiving, business at the bar picked up and Emily’s tip take-home increased, but it still wasn’t enough. She’d managed to cover the holiday meal—Clara had, typically, invited the whole neighborhood—and the various expenses of the weekend, and pay back a bit of her accruing debt, but then December rent came due, and with it the bills. And the holidays were rapidly approaching. She’d told Clara, firmly, that things were a bit tight and they should skip gifts this year. “Okay,” Clara said, but the look on her face suggested that she would not obey this edict and Emily, in a state of panic, asked Declan if she could take on another shift or two. As it turned out, the other “girl” was going home early for Christmas. Emily could work Tuesdays and Thursdays, if she wanted. “You can have Saturdays, too,” he said, keeping his gaze on the till. “We can always use an extra hand. But I wouldn’t necessarily recommend it. These guys can get pretty rowdy on Saturday night. And five nights a week is enough, anyway. You don’t want to exhaust yourself.” Emily nodded. Those rowdy men would tip well, she thought, especially near Christmas.
“Maybe I’ll try it this Saturday and see how it goes?”
“Okay. We’ll see how it goes. If you’re wiped out by Friday, let’s forget about it.”
“Okay,” Emily said, but she knew she would come in.
Come Friday, she understood his reservations. Working every night until two—getting home close to three—was pretty different than working every other night. Saturday morning she slept very late. In the bathroom, she had to turn away from her reflection in the mirror. The thin skin under her eyes had swelled in the night and turned a dull shade of gray. Her eyes themselves were red and itchy from the smoke and lack of sleep. Faint creases ran from the sides of her nose to the corners of her mouth. Had they always been there? All day her bed seemed, quite audibly, to be calling to her, asking her to please, please come back and lie down, just for a minute; but she did her laundry and straightened her room and read a novel until it was time to go uptown to work. Walking to the train, she could barely lift her feet, and kept tripping on jutting bits of sidewalk and stumbling into people. But once she arrived at the pub, she felt better; for a few hours, she needn’t think of anything but beer. For a few hours, others would tell her exactly what they needed from her: pint of Guinness, bottle of Sam Smith, vodka tonic.
At seven—when her shift started—the bar was already half full. Short-haired men in sweaters sat at the small tables and laughed loudly, far more loudly than usual. In fact, all the sounds in the bar—the music of the jukebox, the clink of glasses, the crunching of pretzels—were decidedly amplified today. She stashed her stuff in the back room, applied some fresh lip gloss, and took her place behind the bar. Men—and even a few women, in low-rise jeans and little sweaters and high-heeled boots—poured in, all of them wanting Sam Adams special Christmas ale, which was good, because they had too much of it—the distributor had made a mistake—and, Declan said, come December twenty-sixth no one would touch the stuff. “It’s really good,” she told the endless stream of men, though she hadn’t tried it herself. “It’s brewed with nutmeg.”
Around ten, as her eyes began to droop with exhaustion, she heard, among the clamoring voices, one that sounded discomfortingly familiar. Scanning the room, she was confronted with the sloping profile of Dr. Gitter—truly the last person she wanted to see. In the three-odd weeks since his visit he’d left six, maybe seven—more, actually, but Emily didn’t like to think about it—messages on Emily’s cell phone, first simply asking her to give him a call, then informing her, in brisk, efficient tones, that he’d arranged for Clara to be admitted to the clinic, gratis, but that Emily needed to call him immediately so they could “get things going”; then imploring her to call him, as he was “seriously concerned about the Clara situation”; and finally chastising her for ignoring his previous messages and warning her that if she didn’t call back soon, he and Dr. Lang might not be able to help her (“I don’t understand this, Emily. Dr. Lang is very concerned. Please just give us a call back.”).
Each day at work, Emily added “Call Dr. Gitter” to her list of things to do. Each day, however, six o’clock rolled around and she hadn’t made the call. By now she’d waited so long that she was embarrassed—by her own rudeness, her ingratitude, and by the knowledge that this man thought her dilemma so dire. That he viewed Clara with the cold eye of a clinician made sense to her. That he viewed Emily herself in a similar way made her furious. Her face flamed just thinking about it, and she slunk to the corner nearest the storage closet and farthest from where he stood, near the bar’s front window, drinking what appeared to be some sort of scotch, in the company of three similarly dressed (faded jeans, sweaters) and bespectacled (small, wire-framed) men who she presumed to be other members of the Lang team. He won’t recognize me, she thought, sloshing gin over ice for a stocky guy in a football jersey.
But a sort of panic—exacerbated, she knew, by her exhaustion—had set in: her heart thumped wildly, so wildly that her eyeballs seemed to rattle in their orbs. She knew what Sadie would say—that she couldn’t face Dr. Gitter because she knew he was right—even though she’d not given her the opportunity to say it. She’d been so wrapped up in Clara, and now work, that she’d barely seen her friends all fall. Maybe I should tell Declan that I’m too tired and need to go home, she thought, whipping her head toward the back wall just as Dr. Gitter turned slightly toward her, futilely scanning for an empty table. What is he doing here, she screamed inwardly. The answer came to her a moment later, so obvious that she started to laugh at her own stupidity: the hospital. The hospital was down the street. It seemed a private enclave—removed from the towers and brownstones of the Upper East Side—but it was, in reality, a relatively short walk away. Chances were, Dr. Gitter—and all his cronies—lived nearby. Once they coupled, they’d move to Scarsdale or Greenwich or Tenafly, like the Drs. Lang and their cronies. She pulled three more pints for a trio of sniggering guys with gelled hair. “Here you go,” she said, pushing the glasses of beer toward the rim of the bar with a satisfying clink. “Um, miss…” said the fat one, pointing toward his glass. And Emily saw her escape: the glass was filled with foam, which meant the keg was killed and needed to be changed.