By Ellen Birkett Morris

It was cliché to go into a bar on the same day her heart got broken but Gracie did it anyway. The blues bar was in an old building down the street from the reclaimed warehouse that held the art gallery where she worked, a mixed-use neighborhood with old brownstones next to new apartment buildings. Despite the proximity, she had never gone in, never even thought about going in. The neon sign above the door had most of the letters burned out so it read “e Ra.” Even through the dirty windows, the dark inside was evident. The sounds that usually came out the door were guitar driven, rambling and sad.

She always thought of herself as a roots music girl. Dylan, her ex, had played banjo and ukulele and accordion. Playing three instruments felt like an excise in performative coolness. He didn’t own a television or a computer. He was, as he liked to proudly proclaim, “unplugged.” This would make it easier not to look him up on social media. She just had to avoid the record shops and coffee shop jam sessions where she was likely to run into him. He’d split with her by text (so much for being unplugged) saying the relationship was “just not his jam.” Rude, besides what did that even mean?

***

Mark was on day 2,965 of his sobriety. He considered it a noble challenge to keep working behind the bar. That and he couldn’t afford to hire anyone else right now. His pack of regulars had been dying off in the last few years and Covid had wiped out his savings.

The girl in the doorway looked like his first girlfriend, straight auburn hair, cotton dress, leather sandals. He was tempted to call out “Gina,” though he knew Gina hadn’t looked like that in thirty-five years. Where the fuck did the time go? Gina had signed on to be with a guy who made stuff, not drank stuff. Someone who bathed every day and never woke up in his car smelling of his own urine. Mark had disappointed Gina, and so many women after her. There was nobody now besides a few old drunks who rarely combed their hair, their lipstick askew. He flirted back and that was all, just to see their eyes light up for a second. Then he could see the girls they had been.

***

Gracie didn’t want to go home and have her cat Petra watch her cry. She didn’t want to tell her sister Liza about the breakup. She once overheard Liza call Dylan a poser at a party. She wanted a drink and the bar was right there. Gracie’s shoes stuck to the floor as she made her way to the dank bar. This day called for a cheap beer. “I’ll have a PBR.” The bartender looked to be in his sixties with a mustache from the seventies and a flannel shirt from the nineties. She opened her wallet.

“On the house. We don’t get many pretty girls in here.”

“Thanks…”

“Mark. Owner, proprietor, and chief bottle washer.”

“Thanks, Mark. I’m Gracie, a recent dumpee looking for a quiet place to settle my thoughts.”

“It’s either this empty joint or the library on Fifth,” Mark said, working a rag in circles across the same spot in the bar. 

Gracie was careful not to smile. She didn’t want to encourage him. She picked her way across the floor to an empty booth that faced the stage. The seat leather was cracked, patched by duct tape. Its rough surface pressed into the backs of her legs. Some things just couldn’t be patched up. Then she laughed at herself. That sounded like one of the slogans on the many pillows at her dad and stepmom’s house. Her secret fear was that one day they would leave her those pillows—Believe, Faith, Be Strong, Live Laugh Love—and she would have to throw them away or donate them to a retirement home. If this bar had a pillow it might say, “Make Mine a Double.”

An electric guitar and a bass perched on stands on the stage. Dylan hated the blues even though even Gracie knew they were at the root of so much music. Dylan was a snob and not just about music. Sure he was the hottest guy she’d ever seen, but Dylan had impossible standards. He was picky about the brand of oat milk he drank. How was Gracie supposed to measure up?

Dylan was a faker. This insight would only occur to her a few weeks later when she would be out with girlfriends and see Dylan walk past the café with a girl who looked eerily like her on his arm, except she was carrying a didgeridoo over her shoulder. Poser.

***

Mark hadn’t dreamed of owning a bar. He didn’t have any grand aspirations of being an athlete or musician like his father wanted. He always loved shop class, especially leatherworking. When he was seventeen, he could cut and fashion purses and belts. He could stamp the leather with a steady hand. But at twenty-five, when the whiskey had gotten ahold of him, he couldn’t keep his hands still enough to do the work. He slept in his car, and ended up hanging out at Stevie Ray’s blues bar, cleaning the bathrooms, sweeping the floors with the sound of the blues playing nightly rolling through his brain. The bar was his home. A home with free beers. He would pace himself until closing time and then he’d drink until he couldn’t remember a thing.

He’d wake up lying across a booth, his neck stiff and his mouth tasting like a dump. Stevie would have covered him in an old table cloth and placed a bucket nearby. Mark loved Stevie for his kindness, and Stevie couldn’t help loving Mark: his bar was a refuge for underdogs, after all.

When Stevie Ray died he left Mark the bar. Mark knew then that he had to clean up or he’d lose everything and end up rolling a shopping cart with his shit in it down to a park bench somewhere. It was a new era for Mark.

Today, there was just him and the girl and the people passing by on the sunlit street beyond the open door. He liked it best this time of day, noonish, before his regulars took their spots for the afternoon, before the musicians set up and the tourists and blues fans came in looking for an authentic experience. Mark thought authenticity was overrated. Obedient son to a mean father, leather crafter, failed employee, successful drunk, failed partner, and now old man behind the bar. If there was one true self he didn’t know how to find it. He just showed up every day and poured the drinks and fooled himself into thinking he didn’t want one himself. That was enough.

***

Gracie sipped the beer slowly, watching the old bartender stare at the people walking by the door. How nice it would be to be older, no more drama, all the challenges met. You could just watch the weather and wear comfortable clothes and not have to worry about it all. She had

her job at the gallery and her big dream of getting into Rhode Island School of Design, her cat to take care of, family stuff and now she needed to find a new, better boyfriend.

***

“Refill?” Mark asked as he placed a full pint on the table in front of the girl. 

Gracie looked up, startled.

“Yeah, I guess I am relieved.”

“Why?” Mark asked. He’d learned to just go with it when customers were off in their own worlds.

“We wanted different things. Besides, I have plans.” She drank the dregs of her first beer.

“What are your plans?”

Gracie reached for her second beer and took a large drink.

“Get into Rhode Island School of Design, learn to blow glass, open my own studio where people can watch me work and buy what I make.” She wiped the foam from her mouth.

“That sounds hot,” Mark said, settling into a chair.

“Eww.”

“I mean it sounds like hot work around all those big ovens.”

“Okay.”

“That sounds cool,” Mark said. There’s nothing like making stuff with your own hands. You can get lost in it and at the end of the day you have something beautiful.”

Gracie thought of the glass blowing class she took last summer and the feeling that it was just her, the blazing heat hitting her face and the molten glass she swirled on a metal rod.

“You make stuff? I thought you were a bartender.”

“I used to make stuff.” Mark pulled a battered hand tooled leather wallet from his back pocket. The outside was worn but the sides were hand stitched and the front was embossed with the image of large swirling blooms. 

“Western design,” Gracie said.

She reached out slowly and ran her fingers across the grain. “So you know.”

“I do, kid. I do.”

Gracie studied his face. He had the same eyebags most old people did but there was something else there. A spark of interest, something kind, if careworn.

Mark studied her face. She had the same smooth skin and shiny hair that most young people do, but there was something else. She was curious, if naïve.

I think she’s going to be alright, Mark thought.

I think he’ll make it, Gracie thought.

They turned toward the sound coming from the door. A kid on a tricycle rang a bell as she rode in circles on the sidewalk.

~~~

Ellen Birkett Morris is the author of Beware the Tall Grass: A Novel, selected by Lan Samantha Chang for the Donald L. Jordan Award for Literary Excellence. She is also the author of Lost Girls: Short Stories, winner of the Pencraft Award, and of Abide, and Surrender, poetry chapbooks. Love Thy Neighbor, a collection of short stories, is forthcoming in early 2028 from Cornerstone Press. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Newsweek, Antioch Review, and South Carolina Review, among other publications. Morris is a recipient of an Al Smith Fellowship for her fiction from the Kentucky Arts Council, and grants from the Kentucky Foundation for Women and the Elizabeth George Foundation.