Mary-Ana had worked at the tavern for the past five years. It wasn’t technically legal for minors to be behind the bar, but Jimmy and Ophelia, the old couple who owned the place, had taken pity on her at age fourteen when her father had fallen ill and left her without a means to survive on her own. Without an income, she couldn’t afford groceries, much less medical care for him. They had agreed to let her work so long as, should they be caught, she told the law she had lied about her age. Out of options, she had readily agreed.

  The tavern was a warm brown sort of place, lit by sunlight and lanterns and guarded by Jimmy and Ophelia’s twenty-year old son, David. He was in charge of throwing out overly drunken patrons who caused chaos, and he had been Mary-Ana’s sole love from the age of ten up until the present day. He was recently married, but she still couldn’t help stealing glimpses of him whenever she could, and she always found herself laughing like a fool when they were together. It was ridiculous, really; he had never looked at her the way she looked at him, and where they lived the very idea of an interracial romance was taboo. Though some states allowed it, in Tennessee, white people and black people couldn’t marry, and even if she and David had tried to date, they would have had to hide it. Besides, she was fairly certain he saw her as a younger sister or cousin always tagging along, though they were only a year apart. So her love for him remained unrequited, but nevertheless her heart could not seem to part with him. Suffice to say it broke every time her eye was drawn by the lantern light glinting off his wedding ring.

  The cacophony of half-drunk, slow voices around her composed itself into a melody of sorts. She hummed along as she worked, absently receiving and fulfilling orders as she heard them, more focused on her composition than anything else. She was distrustful of the world at large, and it was only in music and solitude she could find some semblance of peace. So, in making the whole world musical, she could create peace wherever she went, living in her own universe of song and concord. Nothing need ever disturb her from this eternal rest.

  As the voices grew louder and more rambunctious, her song built up and up, rising towards a great height, the symphony of tankards pounding on tables, bourbon flowing smoothly into rows of shot glasses, drinks sliding across the bar, men’s laughs turning with anger into hostile shouts, all crashing together perfectly to reach a peak worthy of the music masters of old, and precisely at the moment of crescendo-

  BAM! A man was thrown against the wall.

  “Liam!” A scream rang out.

  CRASH! Glasses shattered on the floor as David wrestled with the attacker.

  “That bastard!” Andy yelled as he struggled to break David’s grip. “That bastard fucked my wife!”

  The man Mary-Ana gathered was Liam stood up and dusted off his crisp white shirt. He shrugged, and he sounded like money when he said, “I didn’t know she was married. Hell, she told me that ring didn’t mean a thing.”

  His cool green eyes didn’t betray a care, and though he had a bruise forming on his cheek, he looked for all the world like he thought himself a king.

  The scorned husband threw all his weight against David and nearly freed himself. Mary-Ana jumped up and slid across the bar to reach them, never having seen David struggle so. But Andy was a particularly large man, and mostly muscle at that. She should know- his wife was her best friend, her only friend, and she had heard about his body in detail, much to her own dismay.

  “Andy, stop it!” she yelled, “I’ll tell Lily if you hurt David and you know she’d be pissed.”

  Andy laughed bitterly, “She’s the one who cheated, and damn if I’m not a hell of a lot more pissed than she’s ever been.”

  This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

  She knew, and she truly felt sorry for him. He had loved her, had been the first man to ever love Lily for more than just her body. Had been the first man to treat her like a woman rather than a dog. And for two happy years, Lily had stayed loyal. But then there was a baby. And then, as suddenly as lightning on a clear summer’s night, there wasn’t anymore.

  It was hard to tell precisely when Lily had changed, when something inside her had snapped. She had been a good mother. She had loved her daughter more than her own life. She once told Mary-Ana that having a baby was like holding your heart outside your chest, like a part of yourself had become a separate being. So most people thought her soul had left when her daughter’s did, that they were together in Heaven and had abandoned the poor remnants of Lily to wander the earthly plane as little more than a ghost. Mary-Ana despised the ones who thought this and longed to drive them out of town with a club in one hand and a shotgun in the other.

  Mary-Ana thought it was no one defining moment, just an accumulation of tragic circumstances that had led her back into old habits of drunkenness, sex, and isolation. After the child had died, Lily was distraught, bedridden for weeks. Andy wasn’t much better off. Rather than pushing them closer together in support of one another, the devastating grief had driven them apart, forming an unbridgeable rift through which ran a river of sadness deep enough to kill. They never were able to cobble their relationship back together. Andy couldn’t bring himself to be near the mother of his lost daughter, could hardly bring himself to speak to anyone for months. And Lily, in a desperate attempt to feel normal again, tried to drown her sorrows in liquor and men. Mary-Ana couldn’t dissuade her or console her. She was powerless to do anything but watch as the broken-hearted couple wasted away.

  “Andy, please. This isn’t going to make things better. Just leave,” Mary-Ana pleaded.

  He stilled, and David let him go. “I’m sorry, Andy. Let me take you home,” he offered.

  Andy only shook his head, “Hell if I’m going back there.” And he stormed out.

  David rubbed his forehead in some mixture of pity and exasperation, “Damn it, M.”

  “The hell did I do?” She raised her hands plaintively. “I’m innocent.”

  “No, just… those two make me feel so helpless.”

  “I know.”

  They both turned to Liam, who had been joined by Kenneth Fenimore, the son of some rich man who owned something important. His rich friends called him Ken, but there were few of those, since the wealthy were not plentiful here. Clearly, though, Liam was in the right tax bracket to have won the approval of Kenneth; the two were whispering together and throwing furtive glances around the room, particularly at David and Mary-Ana. She stalked forward, fury barely contained. It was hard to get mad at Lily nowadays, but she could channel all her pent-up anger with her friend’s situation to the lovers.

  “What kind of a man would you call yourself?” She asked coolly, a mere two paces away from Liam and the cloud of snobbery that enveloped him.

  Suddenly something in his demeanor changed. He leaned back against the wall he had just been thrown against and his voice took on an undertone of husky flirtation, “The kind of man who’d like to make you feel like a woman tonight.” He smirked in a way that probably would have turned Mary-Ana pink as bubble gum if she hadn’t already been tomato-red with anger. She slapped him hard across the face.

  “You whore,” she spat. “Is that the kind of jackshit that got Lily to sleep with you?“

  He cringed and rubbed his cheek where the hit had landed. “What can I say? I love women. Can you blame me for appreciating a beautiful woman and inviting her over for the night?”

  “She was married,” Mary-Ana said through gritted teeth. “She’s not in her right mind. You should have stayed away.”

  He shrugged. “Seemed in her right mind to me. Besides, she wanted it just as much as I did. I’m not the married one. If you’re so upset about it, tell her not to mess around on her husband.”

  At this, Mary-Ana could do nothing but groan and tip her head to the sky, begging God for patience. In truth she knew Lily was more in the wrong than this Liam, but she didn’t know how to help her, where to even start. It was easier to just blame all the men she slept with.

  David stepped forward and laid a hand on Mary-Ana’s shoulder, addressing Liam, “Listen, Lily is a friend. She’s having a bad time right now. We’d be much obliged if you didn’t mess around with her any more.”

  Kenneth scoffed, “He’ll get with who he wants to-“

  “Understood,” Liam nodded, glancing briefly at Mary-Ana. “Let’s go, Ken.”

  She watched as they strode past, out of the tavern, and faded into the deep blue night.