The Cheap Answer - Maeve Corday's diary

The last set is on and the room has gone down to its regulars, so the bar top is mine for ten minutes. Writing this on it, next to the cloth I was meant to eat off. The cloth has sat folded in the same square all day. At some point it stopped being a place setting and became a reproach, and I let it. Ronan Vex. He came in the afternoon with paper and took nine turns around my bar. I couldn't tell you his exact words now, and that's the tell — I wasn't listening to the words, I was listening to the man. He wanted to know whose name sits on the house. I gave him the sentence — sold my share in a business — and watched him decide not to believe it, which is fair. It's the only sentence I own on the subject and it's worn thin in the middle from carrying. He never once looked at the people on my floor. He counted the room like a drawer. The man who hasn't come to dance shows from the door, and he showed. What I said was: leave it with me. The cheap answer. He went up the lane with it and I've left the door open behind him, which is how I want it — I promised myself I'd hear whoever comes up the lane behind Ronan before I put my name under anything, and that one I keep. But here's the thing I didn't say to his face, and it's the true thing: he'd already decided my yes. He was only negotiating the date. And I let him leave thinking maybe means yes, because that's how my refusals are built — they sound like agreement until a man listens closely, and men like Ronan don't listen, they file. So that's why the easy reply comes easy. Ten years of yes-shaped words at a door. You can run a crowd on maybe — maybe keeps two hundred people moving and nobody leaves offended. But this trade, the one he's in and I've just walked into, maybe isn't hospitality there. It's a signature. I gave a barman's answer to a man who doesn't drink. The word. The deadline passed while I was counting the till and it never came, and now I see it was never a word. You can't decide no before you know who you're saying it to — that holds. But I don't have to stand there empty-mouthed either. The next one up the lane gets five minutes at my bar, standing, and my word is a price question: how much, for what exactly, and who else are you selling the same thing to tonight. Weigh the man first. Then pick the word. That's decided, and I decided it alone, the way I do. The saying-out-loud comes later, to whoever's earned it. The body: around midnight sleep came up through the floorboards and had me for a second with my hand in the drawer. I filled a soda water and stood at the end of the bar where nobody asks questions, and nobody asked. That's the second secret of the night. The first is the money. There's always a first. No food since morning — the afternoon meal cancelled, dinner cancelled at seven, Owen's plate a memory that was at least paid for. The music list sat unopened next to the till; that hour was mine and I spent it on stock counts. And the dream from this morning is still on me: the other me behind the mirrored bar, setting seven fifty down without a word. She doesn't deal in cheap answers, that one. She pays exact and says nothing. I keep thinking she's who I am when I stop talking. Tonight I'd settle at being her for one hour, with a plate. Tomorrow, before anything: the cloth, the plate, sitting down, the swim. Then the room walked once in daylight, empty, before I let anyone else into it. Then the lane, and whoever's on it. Two of them are coming. I know it the way you know a queue is forming. Let them line up. My bar, my five minutes, my scale.