Read Torch Song: A Kickass Heroine, A Post-Apocalyptic World: Book One Of The Blackjack Trilogy for Free Online Page B

know.” I was beginning to see that. She kept the restaurant open all night for a dozen diners, but if those dozen diners were up all night gambling, and they gambled enough, the place more than paid for itself. Blackjack not only stayed in business it built its rep as an old-style always-hot casino.
    Fredo, it turned out, was my relief. Just before the end of my shift, when I was pushing hard to cover my filled tables, Timmy mentioned that he wished Waldo would let Fredo start after three a.m., when things were really quiet, because he had a tendency to fall asleep.
    I thought that was funny, but only until I realized it was one o’clock. Then I got nervous. Had he fallen asleep before he even got to work that evening? By the time he tottered in, ten minutes late, I was tense with waiting, sure that Jo expected me to be exactly on time for our meeting in the lounge. And I had to pee.
    “You’re late,” I snapped, handing him a plate I was carrying to table 12.
    He shook his head, dislodging the few hairs he’d combed across his nearly bald head. “Well, aren’t we cranky?”
    “Yes. We are.”
    He shook his head again. I could have sworn his big ears flopped, but that was probably just a hallucination. I was exhausted. The long drive, the long evening, and a performance still to come.
    “Sorry, princess.” He seemed to mean it. Guilty, I mumbled and shrugged, and he smiled, taking my inarticulate response for the apology it was. He balanced table 12’s steak plate on his palm and set off slowly across the room.
    Trying to gather my energy, I made a quick stop at the restroom and leaned for a moment against the sink, closing my eyes. I saw lightning in Nebraska, sunlight in Nevada, and long miles of road passing under the car. I felt my chin drop to my chest, shook off the half-dreams, and splashed cold water on my face.
    I’d just have to keep my eyes open while I was singing.
    The lounge was definitely not finished, but at least someone had turned on a light, a temporary-looking globe that dangled from a beam and washed out the shadows and contours. The room stank of fresh paint. Jo was sitting on the edge of the small stage at the far end of the room, drinking a glass of red wine. I walked toward her. She wasn’t smiling. Two tall stepladders stood against a wall. One row of spotlights lay on the floor near them, wires trailing, another was attached near the ceiling to the left of the stage.
    “Sorry I’m late, I—”
    “Never mind.” She waved a graceful hand at the stage. The steps to it were half finished, missing the last two treads. I made the stretch. Jo moved to the back wall, flipped a switch, and the room was dark. She flipped another one and a single spotlight lasered through the darkness to blind and illuminate me. On the stage, in the spotlight, dressed in old black pants and a white shirt with beet stains on the sleeve, I felt underdressed even for a construction site.
    “Sing, Rica.”
    Jo had said she wanted to hear a sad song. All evening, waiting tables, I’d leafed mentally through my repertoire. There were a few good new sad ones; I’d picked up a couple in Middle a year or so ago, in a village on the Mississippi. But the mid-Twentieth Century was enjoying a romantic revival these days, in Redwood and probably in Sierra, too. Jo might follow the fashions in music, as well as in clothing and hair, and somehow I didn’t think she’d be inclined toward Twenty-Teen, so mid-twentieth seemed right. I had settled first on “I’ll Be Seeing You,” rejected that as possibly too hopeful, and veered briefly toward “I’ll Walk Alone,” before I decided finally on the torchiest tragedy of all— “I Wish You Love.” I’d heard Marlene Dietrich’s version of that once on a remake of a very old disk. Dietrich was legend, a god of torch. The song bled tragedy.
    Picturing Sylvia’s sad good-bye face, tight with held-back tears, and breathing deeply to relax and call up reserves of