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mirror behind the bar, “You’re something, all right. You’re it.” They clinked glasses and he told her to open her pocketbook. She held it beneath the lip of the bar and he swept the whole pile of nickels straight in. “A souvenir. Buy yourself some lipstick.”
    “Maybe I’ll teach John Douglas to spin.” She thought about pulling a coffee table onto the porch at the fraternity house and spinning nickels, music and light pouring out the window behind them. She’d tell funny stories about Milton and the crackers, her father’s game, all to entertain her friends.
    “There’s nothing like having yourself a daughter to keep you up. Hoisted me more times than she knows. Now she’s grown and gone. High hopes for this one.”
    Milton held up his beer in salute.
    “Thank you, Daddy.” She draped her arm around his shoulder and they both slouched over the bar.
    “I know we had some ugly times.” He scraped his callused hand over his chin, pausing so long she thought he’d forgotten who or what he was talking about. “Your mother and me.” Her father kept staring at her in the mirror, his tone slipping into an intimacy that made her uneasy. “Your eyes are nothing like hers.”
    She busied herself with a tube of lipstick, avoiding him. “We’d better get home,” she said, but it came out more like a question than a good idea.
    “Make yourself into something. That’s all that matters—if you’re something and if you’re happy. Right, Milt?” But Milton was down at the other end of the bar delivering beers. “I’m hanging on tight to what makes me happy.” Teddy chewed on his tongue, working up to saying more. He slid his hand from her shoulder down her arm as if stroking a cat as it passed on its way out the door. “I’ve been keeping the family together . . . all for you, Ruby Jewel. But you’re a woman now.”
    Looking in the mirror, she saw how they leaned together. Saw that she was drunk. She hadn’t thought about what it would mean to arrive home to her mother late and drunk. Just like her father. She applied a second layer of lipstick, dropped the tube into her pocketbook, and spread her hands on the bar to brace herself.
    “I love Beverly,” he said, his voice flat and even, as if he were asking her to pass the salt.
    Ruby’s feet slipped from the barstool and one of her pumps clunked to the filthy floor. Outside it was suddenly dark. How long had it been dark? Time tricked you in the Avenue. She remembered how it had dripped past as she’d waited in the Dodge, humming to herself, while inside the bar, time had been different for her father, and now it was different for her as well. Time evaporated like a puddle, so slow you didn’t notice till you looked up and all of a sudden it was gone.
    “Now that you’ve said it, what am I supposed to do with it?” She took the pack of Dentyne from her pocketbook, unwrapped two pieces, and held one out to her father. “Let’s go.”
    “Don’t you head upstate without coming in to say goodbye now,” Milton called after them as she and her father stepped into the parking lot.
     
    Ruby lit another cigarette to clear her head for the drive home. Slumped beside her in the passenger seat, her father whispered, “Loose lips sink ships.”
    She ignored him, rolled down the windows to blow away the smell of whiskey. The air was cooler now and she breathed it in—the salt, the tarry smell of the baked streets, the cinnamon gum—then started the engine. Her mother would be sitting in the silent house, staring out the window at the line of white rocks that defined their yard. Maybe she’d be watching TV. The quiet grew vast. It was the same numbing, after-the-fight quiet that often filled her parents’ house when she was growing up. Her father would scrub his nails with Lava soap as the start of his making-up ritual. He’d scoop Yuban into the percolator, crack an egg into his beer, and drop the shell into the coffee pot. He’d pull out a