Page 23 of Open Road

“Tomorrow?”

“We’ll see.”

“That means maybe.”

A beat. “Yeah,” he says. “It means maybe.”

Rose considers it the best available outcome and slides off the bike into his arms with the complete trust of someone who has never once considered she might not be caught.

He catches her without breaking stride.

I watch that too.

Chapter Seven

WINCHESTER

The call comes in at 10:40 a.m. on a Thursday. It’s Dani, my stage manager. Her voice is tight, the way it gets when she’s already run the problem twice, and neither solution has worked. Two girls are out. Mia has a fever her kid brought home from daycare. Renee hit a guardrail on Southside, and her car is wrapped around a concrete divider. She’s shaken, but fine, and neither of them will make the eight o’clock opening. Thursday is dollar bills and a light crowd. Not the problem. The problem is the Delgado party, a private booking, forty-person corporate event, three-hour minimum, the kind of booking Bare Assets doesn’t turn down because the money attached to it doesn’t come through often enough to refuse.

The schedule needs rebuilding. Whoever rebuilds it needs to know which girls will work a private, which ones won’t, who owes a favor or is owed one, and how to ask in a way that gets a yes instead of a no.

“I’ll be there at noon,” I tell Dani.

“Okay,” she says. A pause. “One thing.”

“What?”

“Nova already called me and said she’d handle it.”

Silence on my end.

“She knows everyone’s numbers,” Dani says. “She’s good with the girls. Winchester. She’s… I figured you’d want to know, in case it was already done by the time you got here.”

“I’ll be there at noon,” I say again.

Nova.

The name sits in my head with more weight than a name should have. She’s been on the schedule for eight months now.She comes in, works her set, goes back to her dressing table, and opens her laptop. The other girls talk about her nursing courses the way they talk about a foreign country, with mild disbelief. She doesn’t talk about them. She just works. Her stage name is Storm because Dani said Nova sounded too close to Novo and made men think of the pharmacy, but everyone backstage calls her Nova. She corrected me once when I called her Storm. Quietly. Not aggressive. She just said that’s not my name, went back to her laptop, and I stood there for a moment feeling like I’d made an error in a document I’d filed wrong.

I drive to Bare Assets with the windows down.

The club in daylight is a different building from the club at night. Night, it has the particular energy of any place where people pay to watch other people—dark, lit in red and blue from the stage, the sound system running, the particular smell of a full house. At noontime, it is a large room with chairs stacked on tables and the cleaning crew running mops across the floor in long, patient strokes, the bar empty, its bottles reflecting the working lights—a business. Mine to run.

I enter through the staff entrance.

The hallway behind the stage is narrow, always is in clubs, always has been in every club I’ve ever walked through, as though the architecture is reminding the workers that the show is out there, and they are back here. Two girls pass me coming out of wardrobe, say morning, and get a nod. The bulletin board at the end of the hall has the schedule posted. The schedule I came to fix.

There’s already a new page pinned over the old one.

Printed with clean margins, the whole night has been restructured. The Delgado party is blocked for the main stage from eight to eleven. Sadie and Carina are pulled to cover Mia’s slot, and Rio has moved to the second stage so the room can keepa show running while the private event has the main floor. At the bottom, there’s a note in small, level handwriting.

Carina confirmed. Owes Mia from the March conflict.

Rio agreed to the swap for Tuesday off in return.

Sadie is a yes. Called at nine this morning.

Whoever did this made three calls before the workday started and built a schedule that doesn’t fill the gaps. It uses the existing debts and favors in the right order so nobody feels used, and everybody gets something back. I’ve been running this club for four years. The schedule logic is sound. Better than what I would have done, if I’m honest about it. I would have called the girls Dani suggested. Nova called the girls who actually owed each other something, which means the yes came more easily, and nobody had to be asked twice.