Crown and Coke by Steve Passey

I just want to watch football but she wants to talk. To anyone who will listen. She wants to broadcast her rage, to find an audience to assuage the indignity imposed upon her. Her husband had confessed to going to prostitutes.

Can you believe that, she said? Can you fucking believe that shit? Me at home, free and easy and willing to do whatever, all he’s got to do is talk nice to me, and off he goes to whores. Why? Why? Why? What is wrong with men?

Big Billy the bartender shrugs. I wait until a commercial comes on before I answer her.

There’s lots of reasons, I said. Men go ‘cause their lonely. Men go ‘cause they’re sad. Sometimes – more often than you might think – men go ‘cause they’re mad and they don’t want to talk nice.

That brings on just enough silence for her to throw a drink – my drink – on me. Crown and coke, head and shoulders.

Fuck you, asshole, she says. What do you know? You look like a fucking homo anyways.

Off she goes.

Big Billy cleans up but he doesn’t stand me the drink.

You need to stay out of that kind of thing, he says, and leave it to a professional.

Like a bartender, I say?

Like a divorce lawyer, he says. A whorishly expensive divorce lawyer. That shit is rats in cages, Big Billy says, and eventually leads to blood on the floor, and maybe even cannibalism.

Next Monday night I come back in for football and order my crown and coke - tall. Billy sets it up and tells me it’s free.

Been a long cruise sailor, I say?

Nope, Big Billy says. That woman who showered you last Monday night? She came back in. Said she wanted to say sorry, but by then you were gone. I told her I didn’t know who you were, that you weren’t some sad-sack regular drowning in here every Monday night. I said I thought you might be a tourist. She paid for your drink. She felt bad, she said. She said to tell you, if I ever saw you again, that she was sorry and that she was going through a bad time and wasn’t herself and that was not what she is like.

Well alright, I said. Here’s to angry women and big, ugly, stupid – and honest - bartenders, and I set to my drink.

As far as I know, she never came back in again. Big Billy would have said, I think, but then he again, maybe he wouldn’t.

Bio: Steve Passey is originally from Southern Alberta. He is the author of the short-story collections Forty-Five Minutes of Unstoppable Rock (Tortoise Books, 2017), Cemetery Blackbirds (Secret History Books, 2020), and many other things. He is a Pushcart and best of the Net Nominee and is part of the Editorial Collective at The Black Dog Review.