Daria fingered the new scratch on her bass, freshest scar, so many dings and scrapes there already that one more couldn’t possibly matter, and Theo thought about all the stickers on the instrument’s case, glossy Band-Aids hiding a hundred scuffs.
“Yeah, Mortie,” Daria said. “I’m coming,” and Theo felt unexpected relief, the knot in her stomach beginning to loosen a little. Daria stood, flushed the toilet for no reason Theo could see, turned on the tap and splashed her face with cold water.
“I’m right behind you,” she said, drying off with the front of her T-shirt, and Theo opened the bathroom door.
2.
As McJobs came and went, Daria had certainly done a whole lot worse than the Fidgety Bean. Whenever the crowd of yuppie poseurs, the wannabes and could’vebeens, began to eat away at her fragile resolve not to get canned, all she had to do was remind herself of the months she’d put in at the Zippy Mart, two armed robberies in as many weeks, and that last time, the slick and shiny barrel of the.38 or.45 or whatever so close to her face. Or the fast-food nightmares, scalding showers after every shift, scrubbing with sickeningly perfumed soaps and shampoos until her skin was raw and her hair worse than usual, still stinking like deep-fried dog turds.
There were no drug tests or polygraphs at the Bean, no security cameras. And at least Claire and Russell, the two aging Deadheads who owned the Morris Avenue coffeehouse, allowed her to dress like a human, the less threadbare of her own clothes instead of some middle-management fuck’s idea of dress-up, somebody’s poster child for corporate identity.
Tonight, Friday morning already, the Bean was quiet; there’d be a little rush toward dawn, when the clubs along Twenty-first Street emptied out and the rave crowd, sweatsticky and half of them sizzling on ecstasy, wandered in.