At halftime the place was still upbeat and she'd been busting her ass. It was mostly a beer crowd with an occasional round of party shots. On this particular night one of the distributors had put a premium on bottled beer, two for one, so she'd been juggling them all night and carried a big chrome opener which she stuck in the back pocket of her tight jeans, and she knew the guys kept an eye on it when she walked from one end of the twenty-foot mahogany bar top to the other. The opener was like a thing with her. A girlfriend back home had given it to her for her very first bartending gig and confused her when she said it would make a difference. Now the girlfriend was long gone but she'd been working bars long enough to know there was always a bit of performance going on and always a subtle scent of sex. God knows why else she would wear these tight hip-huggers and the cotton shirt that rose above her navel and dipped low enough up top to show what cleavage she could manage to bunch together. Her boyfriend didn't like it, except for when it was just for him, but to her it was a harmless part of the bartending business.

She'd gathered some good tips from the halftime crowd, and then when her regulars started cashing out their tabs in the third quarter she looked up and saw the home team was down by seventeen and registered why the place had gone from festive to grumbling sarcasm. By one o'clock she was restocking the coolers and draining the wash sinks. By two she'd totaled out the register. She'd made four hundred dollars in tips for the shift.

"I'm heading out, Mitch," she called to the manager, who was still in his tiny office next to the kitchen. She heard his swivel chair creak and waited until he stuck his balding head around the corner.

"You got a ride, right?"

"Yeah, I do. A safe one," she said and nothing more. She wasn't the kind to share her personal life with coworkers, and for some reason she especially liked leaving Mitch out of the loop.