There was a yellow stain on the bar top that day. The counter was so smooth it never even occurred to me that it could get stained. I’d used the all-purpose bleach, the disinfectant wipes, I’d even tried spitting on it but all proved fruitless. I was for a moment willing to believe it was just a part of the wood I’d somehow never noticed before, but then I looked through pictures of the bar top on my phone and saw no such yellow stain. There had to be a way to get it out. Should I paint over it? Was that even my job? The stain was a jarringly bright yellow, so much so that despite its relatively small size, it in a way consumed the entire bar top, as well as my mind.
It was for this reason I was caught completely, embarrassingly off guard by the 57-year-old Nigerian mother of two that had somehow spawned on the opposite side of the counter. Panic rose in my chest like steam and I spun back around, praying Mrs. Aluko hadn’t seen me, suddenly bedazzled by the many wonders of Home Essentials Basic Shot Glasses. In moments like those, the all-black dress-code and the u-shaped slab of wood before me become prison bars, or a pillory.
I don’t remember when I first met Mrs. Aluko. I don’t remember much from the affair, honestly. All those experiences melted together under the heat of my youth. The most vivid thing I remember is that one night, the first time I saw her cry, where I laid on her chest and held her as she told me about her day. It’s the old cliche. The older woman is pulled back to her actual adult life and the kid is plunged into their own personal apocalypse. Even then, I could tell she was inching away from me, scared of her family finding out, scared that her fantasy would marry my reality and bring her face-to-face with who she was. That night, as we laid there, breathing in her cigarette smoke, I noticed wetness coursing down her neck, and her stomach clenching and unclenching in an odd rhythm, like laughter in the uncanny valley.
I asked her what was wrong. She told me her son was ill. That he’d been hurting himself. That she was powerless, couldn’t love his pain away, scared it was her fault. I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t. I couldn’t understand that kind of suffering yet, not in any meaningful way. The only misery I’d ever been held accountable for was my own, so I just hugged her tighter. She said she was glad she met me. That she always wanted to date a bartender and see if they were like therapists, how they are in the movies. She said I was like the movies.
I wanted to tell her about my day. I wanted to tell her about the test I passed, the cat my roommate adopted, my student debt. I wanted her to be to me what I was to her, but she asked me to go make her a drink. I thought about saying ‘no’, but her voice was rough, well-practiced with age, and it seemed inexplicably rude to tell her no.
When I saw her reappear on the other side of the counter, my first reaction was to flee, and when that proved implausible, my second was to flee inwards: act as casual as I physically was able to.
“Be right there,” I said, dutifully wiping shot glasses. I scrubbed for a beat too long, before giving up and turning to her. She was quiet, staring numbly at the counter.
“What’ll it be, ma’am?”
Her gaze rose slowly, and I froze, ensnared the moment it found me,
Whisky, Neat, I thought.
She cleared her throat. “Whisky,” and, when she noticed me waiting, smiled and added, “neat.”
“How have you been, Peter?” she asked. My hand froze momentarily. I pulled out a bottle of Jack Daniels from the cabinet, and then got the eternally smudged shot glass my manager had asked me to toss. Responding via shrug, I poured her drink.
“You look…” her eyes roamed up and down, “bigger. Firmer.”
I placed the glass in front of her. “You look the same.”
She gave me that shy smile that always fooled me into thinking we were on even footing.
“What brings you here?” I asked.
Her smile withered, and she stared down at her drink like it was a yellowed family photo. Next to her, my index and middle finger rubbed at the stain.
“I missed you,” she said.
“Pardon?”
Something clear dropped from her face and formed golden ripples in the drink. I wondered what she saw in there; I wondered what manner of undulating, nebulous thing stared back at her.
“I was just… I was thinking about you.”
She looked back up at me, and I was nineteen again. I was laying on her chest while she wept, powerless to help her, utterly incapable of understanding the language of her world. Her eyes grew red and heavy and wet, and her lips quivered, and I was suddenly old enough to know she wasn’t here just because she missed me.
“What happened, Bumi?” I asked.
She stood up straight. I don’t think I’d ever called her by her first name before.
“S-sorry, Peter,” she said, wiping her eyes, “I didn’t mean to… it’s… um, my son. He finally… I guess it was only a matter of time.”
She was crying harder, now. Lips quaking under the weight of fresh sorrow. Her eyes flicked back up to me, and I knew what she wanted from me, and I knew the whisky wasn’t the medicine she was looking for, and the nineteen-year-old boy I buried somewhere in me rushed to hold her. To love away what he could not understand.
Sighing, I held him back and swung the towel over my shoulder.
“Do you want to start a tab?” I asked.
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Image: A remix