After Hours

Another night, another yen, another song on the jukebox, as the old saying went. As usual on a Friday night, the Fourth Corner was crowded until close; for its employees, that meant a long shift of serving beer, whiskey and the occasional needlessly complicated fancy cocktail by a pretentious asshole trying to impress his date, whom of course was going to correct him whichever way she mixed it. Use your work voice, Retsuko, she thought, apologizing with a big forced smile as she stashed the whiskey sour away -- would be a shame to just throw it down the sink -- and poured a new one, with pressed lime instead of lemon juice and no bitters, as Mister asked.

Finally came the time to close, after leaving the last drunkard to his fate out there. Retsuko couldn’t care less where the man ended up, as long as he didn’t try to come back as she closed the front door. “Ain’t no end to a servant’s work,” she answered to her boss’ comment and invitation. “I heard that in an American TV show. Don’t mind if I do.” She went behind the bar to retrieve the whiskey sour she had stashed earlier as her boss poured herself a glass of the cheap stuff. “‘Cmon, the boss ain’t watching,” she joked as she put her own glass to her lips.

Daimon Retsuko had only started working at the Fourth Corner for a few months, but in that short time she had came to like her new boss, or at least like the way she treated her employees, as they never really had a proper conversation before outside of work such as Delta was proposing now. The four-armed woman was a rather relaxed boss; she wasn’t a strickler on how to organize her bar and she left her the leeway she needed to deal with the more colorful clients of the establishment. The pay was good and on time and the hours honest; all in all, it was a good bartending job that Retsuko had landed herself thanks to more than a decade of experience in the business of tending to drunk people and their empty glasses.

She tasted her drink, and of course, it tasted as a whiskey sour should, bitter and acid, the richness of the malt sublimed by the bite of the lime, with just a hint of sweetness to marry the tastes. Why did men so often felt the need to posture about drinks she never knew. She leaned against the counter, pesnively looking at her drink. She was still standing behind the bar, as if she was on the job. “Some people wouldn’t know a sour if it hit ‘em in the head, I swear. Been doin’ this for ten years now, I know my stuff. Lime in a sour I swear. And he was acting all connoisseur n’ stuff. ‘Course he was, he was with a girl.”

She had that long, deep sigh. You know the one. “Men, am I right?”

“Who cares about impressing men? Let them impress me for a change,” lamented Retsuko. “But aye, that’s the job innit? Can’t count how many idiots thought they could out-drink me either.” As if to make a point, she gulped down the rest of her whiskey sour in one go. “That’s the one thing I’ll never understand about men. Why are they all so proud of how much they could drink? Can think of a couple ol soakheads from my old job who could out-drink every man I know. It don’t keep em from bein’ useless drunk-asses. Is that what men aspire to? Being useless drunkards? Actually that would explain a lot.”

She tried to down her drink again only to realize it was empty, grumbled to herself. “Hand me that cheap stuff, will ya?”

Another glass was filled, with straight whiskey this time. “But anyway, enough about these idiots. Swans don’t concern themselves with the opinion of bloody pigeons, do they?” she joked with a smile, raising her glass for a cheer. “Anything exciting, anything exciting… Depends what you mean by excitin’, really. With a son like mine, everyday is excitin’. Or worryin’. Often both. If you meant on the ol’ masculine front, nah, nothin’ serious. I don’t think they believe me no more when I say I’m 29. That ain’t keep em from bringing me home, of course, but ain’t no good men this side of town.”

Retsuko sipped on her drink again. She felt comfortable around her boss, enough that she felt she only needed a minimal filter when talking to her. She was naturally a chatterbox, but she no longer was a teenage groupie with fiery hair who could get away with saying whatever she wanted. She was a worldly woman of thirty-something and a veteran of many a long night at the bar and the hell of parent-teacher meetings, she had learned to tie her tongue when she needed to.

But sometimes, all a woman needed was to sit down, knock a few with her boss and talk about how much better the world would be if it weren’t for all the idiots populating it.