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It was quiet. In his head. Without his phone. Finally.
A sign informed him that the next town was called Riddle. “Well, there you go,” Kinnick said aloud, the first of a million times he would talk to himself in the next seven years. He decided to let the car choose its course, and removed his hands, the Audi’s crap-alignment drifting him off the freeway into this skid mark of a little freeway-side town.
On Riddle’s Main Street he found an Irish bar, with a lit neonopensign in the window.Blessed be thy... Front awning of the building was held up with the kind of posts cowboys might’ve once tied their horses to. After Kinnick got out of his car, he pretended to tie the old Audi to a post. “Settle down, girl,” he said to the car.
The front door of the Irish bar opened with that pleasing squeal into darkness—a daytime drink always thrilled him, and he plopped onto the first stool he saw. Shamrocks, beer signs, pool tables—the place was exactly what it should be. Two other men were at the bar, bent over plastic pie-shaped bowls with draft lagers at their sides.
“Happy Thanksgiving,” said a barmaid, perhaps six months pregnant, a tattoo of roses rising from her cleavage to her neck.
“You, too,” Kinnick said.
She held up a microwavable turkey pot pie. “Only one left, you want it?”
“Sounds like it’s all the rage.”
“Six bucks.”
“A bargain at half the price.”
She took it out of the box and put it in the microwave.
I’ll move up to the old Kinnick homestead, he thought. He’d been trying to decide what to do with the forty acres he’d inherited a decade earlier, when his father died, Kinnick’s dad having inherited it fromhisdad. He could fix up the old, vacant cinder block house. Live off the grid. A simpler life.Disappear up there. Yes.
Itwaspossible to disappear from others’ lives, of course—from Lucy’s, from Bethany’s—but he suspected that when he woke up tomorrow, wherever he was, the person he really wanted to never see again would be staring right back in the mirror.
Maybe don’t get a mirror, he thought, and this made him smile.
“What do you want to drink, smiley?” The bartender pushed the steaming turkey pot pie in front of Kinnick with a fork and a single paper napkin.
“Seeing as how this is going to be my last one for a while,” he said, “dealer’s choice. What doyoulike to make?”
She turned to the taps. “Bud. Bud Light...”
“How about a Manhattan.”
“I don’t know how to do that.”
“It’s just whiskey, sweet vermouth, and bitters.”
“Of those ingredients, I got the whiskey is all.”
“Then whiskey it is.”
“Beam, Jameson, or Jack?”
“When in Cork—let’s go with the Jameson.”
“Double? Same price as a single before five.”
“Lucky day,” Kinnick said.
The bartender set a double whiskey next to his pot pie.
“Thanks,” Kinnick said, and, looking to make polite conversation, added, “So, when are you due?”
“Do what?” the bartender asked.
“Never mind,” Kinnick said.