The Last Call Shifts

My name is Sal and I'm thirty-four years old, and for the last fourteen months I have been a lunatic about a jukebox.

I drive a sedan for a rideshare company. It's a 2011 with a cracked dash and a passenger door that only opens from the outside, and I've put about two hundred thousand miles on it in seven years of hauling strangers to airports and bars and weddings. Most nights the job is fine. You get your regulars, your drunks, your guy who wants to talk about crypto the whole way to O'Hare. You nod, you drive, you go home.

But every ride I took near the west side, I was really scouting. That's the part I should have caught earlier.

Here's the backstory, quick. I dated a woman named Harley for two years. She was a bartender, thirty-one now, and she was good at it in a way that made people drive across town for her old fashioneds. We broke up fourteen months ago, when I was thirty-two, and I won't pretend the breakup was clean, because it wasn't. There were words thrown on a porch at two in the morning. There was a box of my hoodies thrown into a hedge. I said something I still think about while stuck in traffic, and she said something worse, and that was the end of it.

Then last winter she started posting about her own place. A craft cocktail bar on a residential street, the Corner Tap, taking over an old neighborhood joint with the wood paneling and the neon palm tree in the window. She posted renovation photos. She posted a liquor order like it was a birth announcement. And in October she posted the crown jewel: a restored 1958 jukebox she bought from an estate sale upstate, chrome trim, original glass, the whole thing. She wrote under the photo, "she sings again on opening night."

I saved that screenshot. Then I saved every other one. Fourteen months of screenshots in a folder on my phone named something boring, because apparently I planned a revenge felony the same way I organized my tax receipts.

The plan was stupid and simple. Her opening night was Friday. Thursday night, the jukebox sat in the back alley by the loading door, because there was no way to move it through the bar until the last counters came out. I knew this because she posted a video of four guys pivoting it into the alley with furniture pads. She even posted the alley. She practically mailed me a map.

So Thursday I told the app I was offline, drove to the west side, and sat there working up my nerve while the security light behind the building flickered in the damp.

That's when my phone lit up with a fare. I don't know why I took it. Maybe because sitting in that alley feeling crazy was worse than working. Maybe because gas isn't free.

The pickup was a catering commissary over on Division, a big tin building where small food businesses rent kitchen time. The fare was a woman named Phyllis. Thirty-three, known her five years, ever since I stopped to change her flat tire outside a diner where she worked the line. We'd been friends since. She'd fed me at three different diners over those years and never once let me pay full price.

She came out the side door pushing a stack cart. Aluminum catering trays, six deep, covered in foil, and the smell hit me before she did. Brown sugar and smoke. She'd been cooking brisket since the afternoon and it showed on her, in her hair, on her forearms, everywhere.

"Wedding brunch tomorrow," she said, wrestling the trays into my back seat. "Two hundred people want smoked brisket at ten a.m., which means I have to be in that kitchen by five."

"You picked a hell of a night to need a ride."

"I pick every night. It's my whole life now." She slammed the door and got in front, and my car filled up with that smell so strong I nearly lost my train of thought, which, given my train of thought, was probably a mercy.

She looked over at me. "You're not driving like a driver tonight. You're driving like a guy thinking about something."

"I'm always thinking about something."

"Yeah, but usually it's where the nearest bathroom is." She dug in her jacket and found half a bag of peanut M&Ms and offered me some. That's Phyllis for you. Five years of friendship and she's never once asked what's wrong without also providing a snack.

I pulled out of the commissary lot and gave the app the destination, some event hall on the north side, and started driving. And here's where I did the dumb thing. She asked me what was up, actually asked, twice, and I lied both times, and the second lie was, "I've got a fare after you." I had no fare. I had a felony.

She talked about the wedding the whole way. The couple had met in a community garden, the mother of the bride kept calling to change the headcount, her van was in the shop so she was renting one in the morning. Normal life stuff. It made my little folder of screenshots feel even smaller than it was, and it still didn't stop me.

Because here's the route her brunch hall needed. You go north on Ashland, and to get to Ashland from the commissary in any kind of traffic, you cut through the west side. Past a certain residential street. Past a certain bar with a palm tree in the window and a loading door in the back alley.

I told myself it was just the route. I told myself a lot of things with my hands at ten and two.

We rolled onto her street around eleven, and the block was quiet except for one bar with its back lights on. I could see the loading door down the alley as we crossed the cross street, and I could see that the jukebox, or whatever was under those moving blankets out there, was still sitting against the chain-link fence like a headstone.

"Sal." Phyllis snapped her fingers. "You just missed my turn, buddy."

"I didn't miss it. I'm going around."

"Going around what? It's eleven at night, there's no traffic." She leaned over and looked at my phone on the mount. "That's my street back there."

"I know a faster way."

"Nobody knows a faster way in this city, that's the whole joke of this city." She settled back and looked at me, and I could feel it without looking. "You want to tell me what's actually going on?"

And that's when my engine died.

Not sputtered. Died, and then made a sound I'll hear in my sleep for years, a grinding wheeze like the car was trying to cough up a gear, and then a clunk, and then nothing but the tick of hot metal. The dash lit up like a slot machine. I coasted to the curb and put it in park and we just sat there.

"Well," Phyllis said.

"Yep."

"Sal."

"Yep."

"That was your engine. That wasn't a belt, that wasn't a battery. That was the whole engine having an opinion and dying on it."

I turned the key. The starter made a halfhearted noise and gave up. Under the hood there was nothing but the tick, tick, tick. Seven years and two hundred thousand miles, and it picked tonight, one block past the alley with my revenge project in it, to die.

I put my forehead on the wheel. The steering wheel horn pad was cracked and I'd been meaning to fix it for three years, and now I'd never fix anything again, because I was going to die of embarrassment on this curb.

"Okay, don't spiral," Phyllis said. She got out, lifted the hood, looked in there with the confidence of a woman who knows exactly one thing about engines, which is where the oil goes, and closed the hood. "Yeah, that's dead. Or it's pretending. Either way we're not going anywhere."

She got back in and pulled out her phone. No signal worth anything on that block, apparently, one bar that flickered. She called her rental van place anyway and got a machine. She called a cab company and got a wait time of forty minutes, maybe.

Then she went quiet, and I watched her do the math I was already doing. Behind us, half a block back through the fence line, the neon palm tree glowed through the rain haze.

"I know this block," she said slowly. "Sal, this is the block."

"Don't."

"This is the block with your ex's bar on it. The one you've been weird about for a year. The Corner Tap." She turned in her seat and looked back down the street, and I watched her see the palm tree. "Oh my god, it's right there. Your car died in front of the thing you've been brooding about. That's hilarious. That's the funniest thing that has ever happened."

"It's not funny."

"It's a little funny." She was already unbuckling. "And I know Pablo, the old mechanic who's helping set up in there this week, he fixed my van's alternator once and only charged me for the part. Somebody's always there the night before an opening. They'll let us wait inside. It's raining, Sal. I'm not sitting in your dead car for an hour with six hundred dollars of brisket."

"You don't want to go in there."

"Why not, is she going to poison us?"

"It's complicated."

"You saved screenshots of a jukebox, Sal. Nothing about you is complicated." She opened her door and grabbed her keys. "Come on. You can brood on a barstool like a normal person. And maybe Pablo will look at your engine in the morning, since apparently the universe wants you to do this the long way around."

She got out and started unloading her trays onto the curb so we could lock the car, humming something, completely unbothered. I sat there one more second, looking back up the block at that loading door and the blankets and the shape underneath them, close enough to touch, farther away than it had ever been.

Then I got out and grabbed a tray stack, and the rain came down a little harder, and we walked toward the neon palm tree like two people with nothing better to do.

The bar was empty when we got there, lights low, chairs up on half the tables. The front door was locked but the side door by the alley was cracked open, so we came in through that, me carrying trays and trying to keep my hood up so nobody recognized me, which was stupid in an empty bar.

The place was nicer than I wanted it to be. Wood paneling, warm light, stools that wobbled just a little like regular bar stools do. There was a bar top polished down to the grain and a wall of bottles and it looked like Harley had spent money where it counted. That made me feel worse, honestly.

"Hello?" Phyllis called out. "Anybody here? Pablo?"

A voice came from the back. "Bar's closed. Opening night is tomorrow, come back Friday."

"Is that Pablo? It's Phyllis, from the commissary. My van's alternator."

A big man in his fifties came around the corner wiping his hands on a rag. Gray mustache, flannel shirt, the works. He looked at Phyllis, looked at me, looked at the brisket.

"Sal," he said. "Huh."

"You know him?" Phyllis asked.

"Everybody knows Sal. He drank here back when this was Mickey's place, before the remodel." Pablo set the rag down. "What's the problem?"

"My engine died a block away. Grinding, clunk, done."

"Sounds expensive. Tow truck?"

"Working on it," Phyllis said, and got out her phone again, and this time she had signal, so she settled onto a stool at the far end and started calling.

I sat two stools down and tried to be invisible. The back hallway was right there. The loading door was right there. Through it, if I leaned, I could maybe see the edge of a blanket pile. My heart was doing something I didn't appreciate.

"You want a drink?" Pablo asked. "On the house, since you're stranded."

"I'm good."

"He's fine," Phyllis said without looking up from her phone. "Give him a ginger ale, he gets dramatic when he's sober and worse when he's not."

Pablo chuckled and went back to whatever he was doing in the back. I could hear a mop. Somebody was mopping at midnight before an opening. That was Harley's rule, I'd bet money, her whole personality in one sound, and I hated that I knew that.

Phyllis hung up on her fourth call. "Okay, so here's the thing."

"Don't say it."

"There's a sinkhole."

"A what?"

"A sinkhole. On the main road, the east one, the one every tow truck in this city uses to get anywhere. It opened up this afternoon, they closed the whole street, and apparently every tow company in the metro is telling people tomorrow morning at the earliest." She put the phone face down on the bar. "I called six places. Six. One guy laughed at me."

"You're joking."

"I never joke about sinkholes, Sal. It's a serious geological phenomenon."

"So the brisket."

"The brisket sits in Pablo's walk-in until morning, or until Pablo drives me in his truck, if he's got one and if he's willing." She raised her voice. "Pablo, do you have a truck?"

"I have a truck," he called back from the back room, "but it's at my house and my wife has the other car and I've had four bourbons, so no. Morning. I'll come look at his engine in the morning, tell him that for free."

"You hear that?" Phyllis said. "Morning."

"Great."

"Great," she agreed, and then she swiveled her stool toward me and gave me the look. I'd seen that look maybe five times in five years and it had never once been wrong. "Now. Why are you here, Sal? Actually here. One block past the alley of your ex's bar, near midnight, the night before her opening, after fourteen months of being a lunatic about a jukebox."

"I told you. I was driving."

"Your phone's dark. No app on. No fare in the seat except me."

"It was on."

"Sal."

I looked at the bar top. There was a coaster there, soft from years of glasses. "Her jukebox is in the alley," I said. "Under blankets. By the loading door."

Phyllis didn't say anything. I kept going because I'd already started and there was no stopping.

"She bought a 1958. Restored it, paid actual money, posted a photo in October saying she