Cleaning Up After Hours

The Neon Note at half past midnight is a whole different animal than the Neon Note at ten. When I got there Tuesday night, the last singers were stumbling out the door with their receipt-length bar tabs, and the purple velvet booths already looked tired, like they'd had enough of people for one day. I clocked in, grabbed my mop, and got to work on the main floor.

Judith was already in the corner by the jukebox, wringing out her rag and muttering at nothing in particular. She's forty-five, been doing this three years longer than me, and she does not waste energy on optimism.

"Guess who was still here at eleven," she said, before I even said hi.

"Who?"

"Lukas. Again. Standing at the bar doing his little paperwork thing, like the man doesn't have a home." She slapped the rag into her bucket. "Kelli, I've worked this dump three years and I have never once seen that man lock up on schedule. Not once!"

I pushed my mop along the sticky patch by booth four, where somebody had spilled what I hoped was a margarita. The floors here are always sticky, no matter what. It's like the building sweats sugar.

"Maybe he's just busy," I offered, because I'm the one who always says maybe.

"Busy! He's the host, Kelli. He sings the welcome song, he hands people the mic, he makes his little jokes about how terrible everyone is. Then he sits in the back room for two more hours. For what? I ask you. For what!"

I laughed, which is what she wanted, honestly. Judith likes an audience. She went off toward the bathrooms with her caddy and I kept mopping, working my way from the stage outward, which is the only correct way to mop a room, no matter what anybody tells you.

Let me explain something about my life real quick. I'm Black, Baton Rouge born, raised by a mother who cleaned offices and told me there's no shame in a mop, only in a dirty floor. Six months ago I turned forty-two, and two weeks before that I ended a four-year thing with a man named Joshua who, near as I could ever figure, forgot I existed whenever we weren't in the same room. I broke it off myself, which people act like is some kind of triumph. It's not. It just means you get to be the one sitting alone on a Tuesday mopping a karaoke bar instead of sitting alone at home. Same result, better cardio.

Anyway. I was doing the edge by the stage when the back room door opened and Lukas came out.

Now, Lukas I knew mostly from a distance. He's thirty-eight, Filipino American, part-owner of the place, and he hosts like it's a religion. Nice enough, always said hi to me and Judith, but he kept everybody at about a sidewalk's distance. Tonight he had his sleeves rolled up and a look on his face as if he had lost a fight with plumbing.

"Kelli, right? Kelli," he said, crossing the floor with his hands still a little damp. "Okay, I need to ask you a favor and you're going to laugh at me."

"Probably," I said.

He grinned, and I noticed he had a good grin, which was annoying for some reason. "The men's toilet is stuck. Fully. And I already tried to fix it myself, and I may have made it worse, and the plunger situation back there is not inspiring confidence."

"You tried to fix it yourself?" I asked. "With what, your hands?"

"With a wrench and confidence," he said. "Turns out confidence is not a tool."

I set my mop against the stage. "Show me the crime scene."

The men's room smelled like, well, like a men's room at a karaoke bar at midnight, and the toilet had water sitting high in the bowl, dead still, like it was thinking about it. I knelt down and got my gloves on and Judith's good snake from her caddy, because Judith has better tools than me, she'd deny it but it's true.

"You want me to hold a light or something?" Lukas asked from the doorway.

"You can hold your pride and watch it leave the room," I said, and he laughed for real at that, and I liked that more than I wanted to.

I got the thing moving in about four minutes, which is not a flex, it's just the difference between doing a job every day and reading about plungers online. The water went down with this big gulping sound and Lukas actually whooped from the doorway like it was a sports thing.

"Yes! Okay. You are officially the most important person in this building," he said. "I'm serious. The toilets go down, this whole place goes down."

"Tell Judith that. She'll frame it," I said, and I went to the sink to wash my hands while he leaned against the wall, still hanging around like he had nowhere better to be.

That's when my phone buzzed in my back pocket.

I almost didn't look. But I was forty-two and curious, you know how that goes. It was Joshua. Of course it was Joshua. A photo, him at some club, dressed up, next to a woman who could not have been a day over twenty-five, both of them lit up blue and grinning. Under it, just: "no hard feelings right? :)"

I stood there with wet hands and read it three times. No hard feelings. Like I was holding a grudge instead of holding a mop. Like four years was a magazine subscription I let lapse.

"You okay?" Lukas asked.

He was still in the doorway, and I guess my face had done something, because he'd gone from grinning to careful. I turned my phone face-down against my thigh and gave him the smile I give people at the bank.

"Yeah. Nothing. It's nothing," I said.

He looked like he wanted to push, which, credit to him, he didn't. "Okay. Well. Thank you again for the rescue. I owe you one toilet's worth of favor."

"Judith's going to want it in writing," I said, and I walked back out to the main floor and picked up my mop like a person who was fine.

Cleaning a bar after it closes works like this. It takes exactly as long as it takes, and nobody is timing you, and some nights your body decides to move slow just to spite your brain. That was one of those nights. I did the booths twice because the velvet holds onto smells and I kept catching something sour in the second one. Judith finished her bathrooms, yelled something about seeing me Thursday, and left through the side door at one forty. And I was still there.

Lukas was still there too. I could hear him moving around in the back room, some clinking, a chair scraping. At two-something I was hauling my bucket toward the utility closet when he came out again, and this time he wasn't holding a wrench or paperwork. He was holding two glasses.

"Okay, so, don't yell at me," he said. "The bar's locked up, technically, but I keep the good stuff