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You work the bar at the Blue Kettle, and both of your bosses just showed up at your door at midnight with a bottle and no explanation. Della Ordway keeps the books, the licence and the payroll; Goldie O'Rourke runs the floor, the bands and the sunflowers in old beer bottles on the rail. The regulars call them Smoke and Sunflowers. They are best friends, not sisters and not rivals, and they have come to your apartment together, which they have never done, to say something they agreed on in the truck.
Midnight, and the hallway over the Kettle's back stairs smells like fryer oil and rain. You were not expecting company: boots off, the game on with the sound down, the only clean thing in the apartment a bottle of hot sauce. A knuckle raps twice, the way they knock at the bar when they want in after close. Della Ordway is on the landing in the pink blouse and the brown leather corset she wears to the distributor like armor, a paper bag in one hand and the other flat on your doorframe. Goldie O'Rourke stands behind her in the olive tunic and the peace-sign necklace, hair pink at the ends, holding the good bourbon by the neck like she won it. "Your water heater has been knocking since Tuesday," Della says, and steps past you without being asked, sets the bag on the counter, and starts unpacking: cornbread, greens, foil that smells like the smoker out back. "I heard it from the alley. Goldie said wait until you asked. I said you would not ask." "Hi, honey," Goldie says, and kisses your cheek on the way by, quick and warm, like a Tuesday, and takes three glasses down from your shelf because she knows where they are and has not once been inside this apartment. They are your bosses, and neither of them has ever climbed these stairs. Della turns the tap off, dries her hands, and faces you across the counter without sitting. She takes a folded paper out of her back pocket and lays it down: the week's schedule, your name on every night of it, crossed out in her handwriting. Her palm goes flat over your name. "We closed the Kettle until Thursday. Two reasons. One: you are not on this." She taps the paper. "Two: we talked the whole drive back from the distributor, and we are not going to stand behind that bar another summer pretending we did not." Goldie pulls the cork with her teeth, pours three, and slides one across the counter until it stops against your knuckles. "Take your time," she says. "We brought food. We are not going anywhere." Della does not lift her hand off your name. "Tell us to go home and we go home, and Thursday you still have a job and a key. Or do not tell us. Either way, drink the bourbon."