The Life I Chose novel · Chapter 21 of 24

Chapter 21: A Place of Her Own

I called him back before the photo finished loading.

"Where are you?"

"Standing in front of it," Daniel said. "In the rain. Like an idiot."

"How long has the sign been up?"

"The owner's retiring to Florida. He says he remembers you. He says you were the only one who ever told him his house red was bad."

"It was bad."

"He agrees now." I heard the rain on his hood. "Margo. You've got eighty-six thousand dollars of Holt's money in a bank and nothing to do with it."

I stood in my front hall with the new locks behind me.

"Give me his number," I said.

On the first Friday in March, at five o'clock, I turned the sign on the door of my own wine bar from CLOSED to OPEN.

It had twelve stools, four little tables, a brick wall, and a chalkboard I'd written on myself.

Ruthie had painted the name on the front window in gold.

THE BET.

"It's tacky," I'd told her.

"It's perfect," she'd said. "Shut up."

She'd quit Federal Hill to come with me.

The owner had cried, and then sent her off with a case of his grandfather's Chianti and a note that said "Traitor. Come back on Mondays."

At five past five the door opened and the first customer came in out of the cold.

The woman from the cake stand.

She had her husband with her, and two of the committee women behind her, and the commodore with his white eyebrows.

She stopped in the doorway and looked around at the brick and the chalkboard.

"We'd like a table," she said. "If you'll have us."

I looked at her for a long moment.

She'd sat at that luncheon.

She'd also been the first one clapping at the yacht club.

"Sit anywhere," I said. "Ruthie, the Txakolina."

"You're serving them the terrible one?"

"Everybody gets the terrible one first. House rule."

By seven, every stool was full and people were standing three deep along the brick wall.

Half of them I didn't know.

Half of them were from Marjorie's world, the boat shoes and the pearls, the people who'd read the Journal and believed it for a week.

They came in one after another, and they all said some version of the same thing.

"We were at the gala."

I poured.

I talked about a white Burgundy for one minute and a skin-contact Slovenian for another.

That was the job, and I was good at it, and that was all the job got tonight.

At eight, Holt's father came in.

He'd lost weight since November.

He looked better for it.

He sat at the end of the bar, the stool by the wall, and ordered a glass of whatever I recommended.

"How is she?" I said.

"Big," he said. "Very big. And bored. She's taken up knitting. It's a hat. It's going badly."

"And the other one?"

"The other one is living over a dry cleaner in Pawtucket and selling cars at a Honda lot on Route 1." He turned his glass by the stem. "He's not very good at it. People recognize him."

"From the video?"

"From the gala." He took a sip. "This is very nice."

"It's a Muscadet. It's fourteen dollars."

"Don't tell anyone that."

The cake-stand woman stood up at her table near the window.

She tapped her glass with a fork.

The room went quiet.

"I'd like to say something," she said. "I sat at a table in November and listened to Marjorie Thackery call this young woman a liar, and I didn't say a word. Then I read that she was frightening, and I believed it. I was wrong. We all were."

She lifted her glass.

"To Margo," she said. "And to whatever this terrible wine is."

"Txakolina," I said.

"To Txakolina."

Thirty people drank it and made faces.

Ruthie laughed so hard she had to hold on to the taps.

Daniel had been in the corner by the door all night, on the stool he'd claimed at four forty-five, in a clean flannel shirt, nursing one beer.

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