Page 1 of Roma King
1
ZARA
HITCHIN’S
‘During her sleep, she dreamed of him and wept. He was light. He was sound. He was the ever-loving beating of her heart.’
Being in love with someone you’ve never met before isn’t as uncommon as you might think, y’know. The internet connects people from all walks of life, maybe even thousands of miles apart, and enables them to communicate and get to know one another in ways they never could before. Women fall in love with prison inmates incarcerated on the other side of the country. A business man in Japan loses his heart to a neurosurgeon in Sweden. A shipping clerk in Fairbanks, Alaska tumbles head over heels for a museum curator in Wollongong, Australia. People find each other. They talk. They ask questions. They learn, and they develop complicated feelings for each other. It happens all the goddamn time.
Sitting at the poorly-lacquered, extremely sticky bar in Hitchin’s, following a very long, emotionally draining shift, I present this argument to the four other patrons, who all nurse their drinks, eyeing me with fairly open pity.
None of them say anything. Well, no one except Henry, the bartender, but he doesn’t count—a slightly unfair statement that undoubtedly forms in my head because I don’t like what he has to say. “Zara, sweetheart. It’s true. Stuff like that does happen all the time. But your situation’s a little different. Your mystery man doesn’t actuallyexist, does he? How can you be in love with someone you made up in your own head?”
I roll my rocks glass between my palms, my cheeks prickling with embarrassment. “I never said I was in love with him. I’m just saying…people are weird. Strange things happen all the time.”
“You’ve had a few dreams about a guy, and now all other men are ruined for you? Don’t you think you might want totrygoing on a date or two? Never know. Someone might end up surprising you. No way you’ll find someone as perfect as dream guy, but hell. A few compromises here and there…” Henry shrugs. “You could be happy. You’re too damn young to have given up this easily.”
Ha.
Afewdreams.
I’ve known Henry, along with the people sitting at the bar with me, for the past three years. Long enough for them to know plenty about me and vice versa, but I’ve kept this one thing to myself. Kept it close to my chest. Too personal, too private, far toointimate—the dreams starring my mystery man haven’t been a one-off kind of thing. Far from it, in fact. They’ve been a two-or-three-times-a-week kind of thing for the past three years—occasionally even more often than that—and I can’t possibly share that with my friends.
They’ll think there’s something wrong with me.
They’ll think I’m fuckingmad.
I grumble into my drink, making half-hearted noises that, yeah, he might well be right, and maybe, we’ll see, while the others still watch me with confusion and curiosity. Hitchin’s is closed, but that doesn’t matter to any of us. We each sip on our drinks. Short drinks, without mixers or ice. We’re professionals and don’t waste time on such frivolous accoutrements. Our beverages are sacred, and heaven forbid anyone ever try and dilute them.
Henry knows precisely which amber elixir to pour for each of us. We’ve been coming to Hitchin’s for a long time now, creatures of habit, never deviating from our poison of choice. For Andrew, the retired stock broker: Laphroig. Balvenie for Sarah, the sixty-three-year-old nail technician. Garrett, the mute bus driver: a Jack Daniels. It’s Kentucky Bourbon for Waylon, the night manager of the Franklin Luxury Apartment Building. And for myself, Zara Llewelyn, twenty-six-year-old emergency dispatcher and collector of quirky postcards: apple juice.
An outsider might take a look at the collection of souls gathered at the bar and see five people so vastly different in every way that they might assume it was pure coincidence that brought us all here tonight. They’d be wrong, though.
Yes, Andrew dresses in a suit and tie, and very obviously has a little money he’s squirreled way. Garrett has the sallow, sunken look of someone who might knock over a convenience store for a pack of smokes. Sarah wears way too much leopard print, and insists on six-inch heels, even though she can barely walk in them. Waylon is still starched to the point of rigidity from the twenty-nine years he spent serving in the US Marine Corps. And as for me…Iamyounger than anyone else in the bar by a solid ten years. Our backgrounds, our families, and the trials we’ve faced on the individual roads that have brought us all here, to Spokane, Washington, are as diverse and conflicting as can be.
However, thereisone thing our motley crew has in common: we are all residents of the Bakersfield Apartment Building—the bland-looking six-story structure across the street from Hitchin’s.
Sarah’s lived at the Bakers’ for close to eighteen years. Andrew’s been there for ten. No one knows how long Garrett has been around since he never speaks, but the general consensus is that he’s been a resident for around five years. Waylon, for five. I was the last to move in, just shy of three years ago. By some unspoken agreement shortly after my sixth month living in the building, we all began meeting at Hitchin’s every Tuesday at ten pm, and we’ve been doing so ever since.
It's almost two in the morning, technically now Wednesday, when Andrew turns his attention on me. “Speaking of dating, my grandson’s coming into town at the end of the week. Maybe you could show him around or something, Zara.”
I quit spinning my glass around and give him a wry sideways look. Garrett’s the only one who hasn’t tried to set me up with a family member or a friend over the past couple of years. They’ve been blatant about their matchmaking attempts in the past, but after months of polite refusals on my part, telling them I have no interest in blind dates or orchestrated meet-cutes with their delivery men, cable technicians, or nephews, I finally told them all in no uncertain terms that they shouldn’t waste their time. I’m never going to give in and ‘find someone to take care of me.’ I don’t need anyone to take care of me. That was also when I’d finally admitted to having the dreams, though I downplayed how graphic they were, and how they were the sole reason why I didn’t feel like I needed a damn boyfriend.
“Sorry. Working this weekend,” I tell Andrew.
Sarah snorts into her glass of Balvenie. “Now there’s a bare-faced lie if ever I’ve heard one. We all know you don’t work Saturdays.”
“Schedule changed last month,” I fire back. “My Saturdays are now spoken for. I’m sure your grandson’s got better things to be doing, anyway, Drew. I’m a terrible tour guide.”
Drew’s eyes roll heavenward as he slumps back in his bar stool. You never need to check your watch at Hitchin’s; you can always tell how late it is by how loose Andrew’s tie gets. The length of purple and black paisley print silk is now sitting in a coiled heap on top of the bar next to his wallet and his cell phone, which means it’s incredibly late indeed. “He’s gonna be crashing on my couch for three days. I’m pretty sure his mother kicked him out again,” he groans.
“Then maybe he needs to spend those three days looking for a job instead of drinking coffee with me.” I give the man a wink to let him know I’m only playing. But seriously. How old is the kid if he’s still living with his mother? And why would Andrew think the guy is suitable boyfriend material if he keeps getting his ass thrown out of his mom’s basement?
“Chance of him finding paid work would be a fine thing,” Andrew agrees. “Maybe you could ask at your place. He’s got a good phone voice.”
A good phone voice does come in handy when you were answering emergency calls, but there’s a hell of a lot more to it than that. An emergency dispatcher needs to be able to think under pressure. They have to be reliable and reassuring, and they have to keep a cool head. I had to jump through numerous hoops to land my job, including countless rounds of psychometric testing. I had to reallywantit. A person doesn’t become a dispatcher because the job just lands in their laps and they have nothing more interesting going on in their lives.
I’m pretty sure Andrew and the others see me as a glorified answering machine. I just nod and smile. “I’ll see if they have any vacancies. They usually post them on the website, though. Tell him he should check it out?”
