There was still a feed store, a small grocery with a post office and health clinic inside, a gas station, a Micky’s, and a bar. Of those, the only one she’d never been in was the bar. She wasn’t going to find a secret venue in any of the others.
The bar was called Sweeney’s, according to the marquee, and the Shamrock, according to the front door, propped open. It was a sunny day and dark inside, so her eyes took a minute to adjust. Inside, it looked like a replica of the one hoodspace Irish bar she’d been in, unless she had that backwards.
There were only two customers this early, both older white guys, on opposite ends of the wooden bar, with eight stools in between them. The rest of the room held six tables, separated and sealed by clear floor-to-ceiling booth isolators, like at Micky’s. The bartender was middle-aged, another white guy, with more hair on his forearms than his head. She chose a stool midway between the two customers, realizing too late that it put her behind the tap handle contraption. She didn’t want to move, so she stuck with her choice. Brave enough to not be isolated in a booth, but nowhere near the other customers.
“Can I help you?” the bartender asked.
She was on the clock, but she wanted to look like she belonged, and SHL had made it clear she should do what she needed to get the job done. She pointed to the tap handle shaped like an apple slice. The bartender poured a tall golden glass. She sipped cider, as she’d hoped. She rested one elbow on the narrow bar and tried to ignore the fact that her elbow was now sticky with who knew what. Exude nonchalance, that was the key.
“So, ah, anything interesting happening around here tonight?”
The bartender squinted at her. “Here, like this bar? Or in town?”
“Either?”
“Neither.” He grinned like he’d been clever. “A new girl walking into my bar is enough to make the newspaper.”
“We have a newspaper?” Even after over a decade here, her family was still not part of the town. Her parents would say it didn’t matter because they had each other.
“Nah, figure of speech, sweetie.”
Ugh. She couldn’t tell now if the grin was a leer. Avs were so much easier to read than actual human faces.
It wasn’t like she didn’t know nothing happened here. She’d lived here forever, even if she was a stranger to the bartender. She remembered fragments of things before they’d moved to Jory: the water park, fireworks watched from a blanket on a crowded hillside. But here? No parades, no ball games, no dances. None of the stuff she’d read about or seen on-screen. This was a place where people followed the congregation laws. That was why her parents had moved here. Silly to think she’d find anything, even if everyone at SHL said all places had secrets.
Silly, too, to think even if the town did have secrets, anyone would tell them to her. Even here, in her own hometown, nobody knew her but the farm’s most immediate neighbors and the staff at the feed store. Maybe that was the trick. Instead of marching into this bar and expecting people to tell all to a stranger, maybe she needed to start with people she knew. Let them connect her with others, who’d connect her with others. She put her drink on the bar and reached for the pay terminal.
Rosemary tried. She browsed the gas station’s convenience store eavesdropping on other customers, but nobody talked about anything except the weather and the fishing. The grocery store was empty, except for a single bored-looking attendant and a security guard behind glass; if everyone else was like her family, they droned in most stuff they couldn’t grow or raise. The attendant was in her eighties and didn’t look like she’d be a source of hot leads.
She called her father. “Do you need anything at the feed store?”
“We’re low on probiotics for the chickens, if you want to pick some up.” She could tell he was surprised. She’d complained about going in there for years now.
Simmons’s Feed smelled sweet as grain, but was always freezing in winter and sweltering in summer, thanks to the open door to the warehouse. This was the only store she’d ever spent much time in, before she’d started inventing excuses not to go.
She’d always resented being dragged along to load the truck. It didn’t help that the Simmons kids never dropped their Hoodies, while Rosemary’s parents still insisted she not use hers outside school. It took until she turned sixteen to convince them she had no social life because of that rule, and even then she was stuck with her lousy old Hoodie. “Why do we have to come here? Can’t you just order it?” she would ask.
Her father would shake his head. “Feed, vitamins, salt. Too expensive to drone because of the weight.”
At least his insistence she come along had bought her a passing familiarity in this one place, and at least it was spring, so the store’s temperature was tolerable. She wasn’t sure if luck or the opposite had put Tina Simmons behind the register. Tina was the closest person to her age she had ever known in person until the last few weeks. She was two years older than Rosemary, and had taken her to the one party Rosemary had ever been to, when Rosemary was eighteen. That party was the only proof she had that people did gather occasionally, even in a by-the-book town like Jory, and she had never even thought to ask Tina how she had met those guys.
She still remembered it with embarrassment. Eleven total strangers, the only other teenagers left in a fifty-mile radius who hadn’t been killed by the pox or kept from leaving the house by their parents. It was nothing like hoodspace: a haze of too much beer; people sitting too close and talking too loud and calling one of their own friends Poxface, as if most of them didn’t have scars under their clothes; boys who smelled of sweat and kept trying to put their hands on her; a five-mile walk home in the dark because she wanted to leave before Tina. Bodies. Her overwhelming impression had been bodies in proximity, and every motion having so much more impact than it had in hood.
“Hey!” Tina said. Apparently whatever memory Tina had of that party, it wasn’t as awkward as Rosemary’s. She was always friendly, even if she’d never invited Rosemary out again. “I heard you quit your job.”
“Quit because I got a better one.” Amazing how fast news traveled; her parents must have been in while she was gone.
“No kidding?”
“Yeah. Actually, I have a funny question, related. You know those people you used to hang out with?”
“My friends?”
Rosemary’s cheeks burned. “Yeah. Your friends. Anyway, I was wondering, do any of them play music?”
Tina gave her a quizzical look.
“Like, a band,” Rosemary said. “Or computer stuff. Anything. I’ve been told there are bands in Jory, playing in secret rooms or barns or garages.”
“Sorry. I don’t know of any. Mike Powell plays guitar, but he isn’t exactly good. Oh! And Roberta Parker plays keyboard for her online church.” Roberta Parker was the elderly attendant at the grocery.
“Thanks anyway. Can you charge five pounds of Fancy Feathers probiotics to our account?”
“No problem! Do you want me to invite you the next time we get together? I can tell Mike to bring his guitar.”
“Sure.” Rosemary hefted the tub of chicken vitamins into the truck bed and drove back to the farm. There was no way Mike Powell was what she was supposed to be looking for if even Tina admitted he wasn’t any good. A church keyboard player wouldn’t impress her bosses, either. She’d hit a dead end. She could call her high school friends, wherever they were, and ask if any played music, though that promised a long, awkward series of conversations with people she hadn’t bothered to stay in touch with.