was a deluge. She would find a way to float, find something to hold on to.
Hearts
The last week of February, and the nights were frigid, the air tight as a closed fist. The gales punched sideways, launching last week’s powder, made it sting like slivers of glass.
This was how all of Laverna’s weeknight shifts ended, playing hearts with the regulars as the washer whirred. The Applehaus brothers were drunker than usual, probably because she had offered shots at one o’clock, out of dirty shot glasses, because she wanted to start the dishwasher. Their fourth was Rocky Bailey, who didn’t drink but was retarded, so the playing field was level in her estimation. Rocky drank Mountain Dew out of a can and chewed great wads of grape Bubblicious at the same time. How he wanted to spend his grocery store wages was his business, but she feared he would develop diabetes.
Bert was the only other patron, silent and sullen as always. Laverna slid a pitcher and a pint glass in front of him whenever she felt like it. He sat far away from the others, in his usual spot, under the air conditioner. He never said a word, but tipped well, especially for an unemployed asshole.
Laverna had forgiven the Applehaus boys for their indiscretions with Rachel, all those years ago. The town was too small, and patrons were too important. Anything the Applehaus boys had done with her daughter would always be dwarfed by Rachel’s own betrayal. However, Laverna still held a tiny grudge and would mention her revulsion from time to time, especially when an Applehaus unloaded the queen of spades.
Talk turned to the completion of the new church. Last summer, Reverend Foote and his family had relocated from Kansas, and he had built the church by himself. He contracted out the plumbing and the electricity, so the citizens of Quinn took comfort in the fact that he wasn’t totally self-reliant. He had named his church New Life Evangelical—a denomination new to Quinn. Laverna loved the Catholic church in town—even though it was a small congregation, they drank heavily, and often. They already had Lutherans, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and Methodists. The Methodists were a bunch of backsliders, vaguely pious. Black Mabel sold the Methodist wives diet pills, so they were also vaguely wicked.
Reverend Foote slowly but steadily poached his parishioners from each of the other churches, proving Laverna’s long-held theory that nothing stuck in Quinn, except for the snow.
The new church was a perfect square, plain, slung low to the ground, much like Reverend Foote himself, whom Laverna had chanced upon at the post office. He was a short man with thick auburn hair carefully parted. He wore brown pleated slacks and a tucked-in button-down shirt that was the worst shade of yellow, faint, like a white shirt completely stained with the sweat of a chain-smoker. She hated him on sight.
Laverna shot the moon for the final time of the night, and the game was over, because she declared it so. She pointed to the Budweiser clock mounted above the door, set fifteen minutes fast.
The Applehaus boys began gulping what was left in their glasses; Laverna had eighty-sixed people in the past for not honoring closing time, or even those who dared to argue, who pointed at their watches to compare them to the Budweiser clock.
Rocky Bailey pushed back his stool and swept up peanut shells. Bert poured the inch and a half left in his pitcher into the glass and considered it carefully; Laverna knew it was warm but didn’t care. Bert was a slow drinker. He was determined to get drunk, but did so at a methodical pace. This was how the unemployed drank at the Dirty Shame. On slow nights, Laverna longed for the distraction of Red Mabel, even though she was partially to blame for the very existence of the insidious Rachel. Red Mabel was her right-hand man, and Laverna always described her as such, and nobody dared argue about the genitalia.
Twenty-seven years ago, it was Red Mabel who drove a crazed Laverna into the mountains, directions to Frank’s cabin gleaned from bar patrons, nebulous and contradictory. Laverna and Red Mabel prided themselves on being adventurous, and pieced together the directions, written on the back of a receipt from the grocery store, a cocktail napkin, and the back of Red Mabel’s hand. They navigated the fire roads and one-lane bridges until they found his cabin. Though the roads had thawed to muddy ruts, the snow still fell