Mimi's Bar, Jane Halpern, Page 10

After the Jackie incident, Marty and Mimi and Karen stayed apart for a while, just because they needed a break from one another. Mimi closed the bar for a few weeks, and spent a lot of time sitting out on her front porch, her legs dangling over the edge, watching the birds flit from tree to tree and humming odd little snatches of song. For some reason, her entire perspective seemed to be tilted in a happy direction. Getting away with it had knocked the ferris wheel of her mind slightly off balance, but for some odd reason it was running better than ever before. Mimi was functioning, for the first time, as a gloriously bejeweled, merrily spinning, loudly singing, just slighly off-kilter TILT-A-WHIRL, and she loved it. There was only one thing wrong. She felt, for the first time in her antisocial life, lonely.

The next day

Karen was sitting at home with her head in her hands, rocking. Deputies from the Office of Animal Control had come by and shot her dog. They had ignored her screams, raised the rifle, and shot Layla, the beautiful old german shepherd whom she had loved for fifteen years. They had treated her like a hysteric afterwards, holding her, telling her they were under orders, it was all for the best, that the dog had attacked a deputy. The chow stayed under the porch and whimpered. Only one thing saved its life. Karen was screaming and crying so loudly and incoherently that the deputies did not understand what she was saying: WRONG DOG.

The next day

Marty sat in his office at Tidewater Insurance, watching reruns of "L.A. Law" and eating leftover pizza, not taking any phone calls. He had locked his office door and his boss was pounding on it intermittently, threatening to break down the door unless Marty opened this door right now. Marty simply turned up the volume on the television set and yelled, "I'm not in right now, but if you leave a message at the beep I'll call you back." He was enjoying himself. But when his boss began to cut through the door with a chainsaw, Marty realized the terms of his employment were in serious jeopardy and let himself out the office window, leaving by the fire escape.

He walked around. He wandered. He had left his keys in his desk drawer. After a while, he started wandering in the general direction of Mimi's. It was a sunny day, and the dragonflies were humming and zipping around in their speedy, businesslike way. The walk, though somewhat muddy, was pleasant. Marty felt reenergized and brisk. For the first time in a year he didn't feel the need to curl up in front of the television and zone out.

When he saw the walkway leading up to Mimi's he began to lose his nerve. Seeing the water brown instead of the clean black of night he remembered, and all those trees in broad daylight, really took it out of him. But then he heard something across the water - a rough voice, untrained and unused but not altogether unpleasant - singing along with a radio. Marty forgot his fear and stepped out onto the boardwalk. When he got to the bend in the walkway his knees buckled a little, but he straightened himself up and walked on. He saw, as he neared the building, that the door was standing open. And when he got closer, he saw the golden flash of his ex-wife's leg, for just a moment, inside. She was dancing around the room in shorts, singing to the radio. He climbed the stairs slowly.

"Hey, anybody home?" he said, knocking on the doorjamb and smiling. Mimi halted in the middle of her spin and looked at him through a curtain of dark hair. "Merkle, is that you?" she asked. "Yup," he said, stepping inside. Mimi went and turned off the radio. She looked down at herself, blushing. "Let me go and change out of this," she mumbled, and padded off in the direction of her bedroom. "Take your time," Marty called after her. He stood and looked around at the old digs. They were nice, if a little dusty. He could get at those cobwebs with a ceiling sweeper, if Mimi'd let him. He needed a job.

Mimi came back into the room, gathering her hair back into one of the red bands she always used. She had changed into a pair of jeans, so she could respect herself once again. They stood there and looked at each other across the room.

"It's good to see you again, Marty," Mimi said in an unusually soft voice. "Yeah, well, it's nice to see you too, squirt," he said. "Don't call me squirt." "The place looks nice." "Yeah. I've been doing a little work on it. Nailed up the drywall on the ceiling." She pointed. They both looked around in the sunny, slanting afternoon light. The bandstand was empty, the microphones dangling various wires forlornly. The wood of the floor near the bandstand and jukebox was especially scuffed with years of steel-toed boots and scraping table and chair legs. The pictures were tilted, the old beer mirrors thumbprinted and dusty. The pool tables were glorious. The bottles behind the bar were dusty, and speaking of the bar, no one had yet shoved a knife into it. Mimi considered this a personal victory.

"You remember when I first walked in here..." Marty started out. "And sat down over there." Mimi pointed. "I said it would be a good bar," Marty said in a hushed, almost reverent whisper. Mimi nodded. "You said it would be a good bar." They stood in silence.

Karen showed up on Mimi's doorstep in the pouring rain. "They killed Layla," she said right off the bat, and Mimi immediately enfolded her in her arms. Karen sobbed. Mimi patted her on the back, and again wisely said nothing. "I can't stay there," Karen said. "Can I stay here?" "You can stay as long as you like," said Mimi.

One day later

Mimi had a lot to do. There were tables to be moved back out onto the floor, chairs to be gotten out of storage. The stove had to be cleaned out before it could be restarted. A whole new mess of fish and shrimp had to be ordered in, since she used all hers up during the hiatus of business. She went to the phone and gave Marty a call.

"Marty. We need you down here. Yes, right now. I need you to fix the stove. All right." She hung up the phone and went to the pool table where Karen was sleeping. "C'mon Karen, wake up," she said, shaking Karen's shoulder gently. Karen moved and moaned under her sheet, which was the warm thick nubbly flannel kind that you never want to get out from under. "We gotta lot of work to do," said Mimi.

"Okay, okay, I'm up, I'm up," Karen said. "I had the nicest dream."

"Yeah?" said Mimi, leaning one her elbows on the edge of the magnificent pool table and looking down at Karen. "What about?"

"You know, I don't remember. But I think it had to do with an eightball, and all I heard was ‘all signs point to yes’, and I felt really comforted. You got any ideas what that means?"

"I have no idea," said Mimi, and she truly didn't, but she was happy. She held Karen's hand for one minute longer and smiled into her eyes, then went to go get her coat from the door.

"You stay here and make yourself some breakfast," she told Karen. "I've just got a couple of errands to run. I'll be back before long."

"Okay," said Karen, and she sat up, stretched, and looked around at her surroundings with new eyes. She leaped out of ‘bed’ and began to make coffee. When Marty showed up in the middle of the pouring rain, water dripping off the brim of his hat and the tip of his nose, she offered him a cup and they sat, sipping, looking out at the rain.

Mimi was moving ahead of the rain. She was driving fast in her pickup truck towards town with her windshield wipers on even though she didn't need them. She was going to see someone.

She found the building on Main street. It was just an ordinary brick building with a logo painted on the glass door, which pulled outward. You went inside and up a flight of steps with a window visible at the top, turned a couple of hallway corners, passed three ficus plants and an indignant secretary or two, and found the room you were looking for. There was a sign on the door. It wasn't hard to find at all.

Mimi looked through the window of the door and saw who she was looking for. He was young and nervous looking with thinning brown hair and a slightly worn-out, pleasant face. He was speaking into the microphone and reaching forward to drop the needle into another record. Mimi went in quietly and waited until he had the record playing before clearing her throat. He looked up, startled, and both of them had to catch their breath. She stuck out her hand and he reached out and took it. "Hi," she said. "I'm Mimi Delacroix."

Post Script

Since 1997, some people have written asking me what's been going on at Mimi's lately. Well, I always suggest that they go down to Mimi's and find out for themselves... but just in case some of you can't get your bosses to give you a night off, here's all the news that's fit to print.

Danny Simon and Mimi got married sometime in the winter of '98, and Mimi had her first child, a girl, the next December. The girl's name is Jackie Diane, which I suppose is a play on that John Mellencamp song, though I'm not sure.

Marty Merkle left his job at Tidewater Insurance and has since started up his own restaurant, an indoor-outdoor joint on the edge of a river about sixteen miles from Mimi's. The theme of the restaurant is sort of like what you'd get if "Pirates of the Caribbean" and a Red Lobster were involved in a head-to-head collision. There are lots of tiki torches and stuffed parrots, and Jimmy Buffet plays on the radio all year round. Marty can usually be found on the back patio with one of the waitresses at the restaurant, who are all young and beautiful, and very, very blond. He is looking very well. He still has his haircut.

Karen Voorhies still lives alone; she has started a larger kennel and has hired three employees to help her with all the dogs.

Leia Higgins left the area about two years ago, though some people have reported seeing a woman who looked a lot like her at Karen Voorhies' house. Once she bought a German shepherd from Karen's kennel.

Christopher Jason, the young deputy who pointed out the meaninglessness of the expression "less than nothing", now has his superior's job.

He has since begun dating one of the witnesses he questioned in connection to the disappearance of Jackie Wallace.

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