The Second Wife

"Desiree."

I shook my head in disbelief. "No really, what's your name?"

"Desiree McCoy." She smiled and threw back her head as if to laugh in afternoon light, but she didn't laugh. She took in a deep breath instead, sucking in the atmosphere of the little yacht club bar, curiously empty on a weekday afternoon. It seemed like it was a comic effect but it was just an affectation. One of many I would learn, and love, and loathe over the next few days.

She shook her head and now she laughed. Her hair, her perfect raven black razor cut hair swayed with the laugh and and caught the afternoon sun reflecting off the lapping water outside. It was a slight laugh, hardly there. It was only there for her, not for me. Like the joke of her name?

"Desiree McCoy." I laughed this time. "Well Miss McCoy can I top off your drink?"

"Mrs." She said that as her answer but she also pushed the heavy glass in my direction across the hammered brown scuffed leather bar top in my direction. She was a striking woman in her late twenties. She looked like someone I knew or wanted to know? She had a distinct quality that made her stand out in the room, maybe she was an actress, not a leading woman, I would remember her for that but there was something... but this was southern California, beautiful people populated this area in this inexplicable way. She had the slight nose, distinct chin that she used to make her points when she needed. Like now she used the chin to call my attention back to her drink. Her motion and a slight nod - a telling nod, and I poured a bit more into the lonely glass of Makers on a dwindling Wednesday afternoon in near empty yacht club bar.

I poured it and went back to polishing another glass back from the kitchen. Every glass got its wipe down. It should be clean. It should shine. It shouldn't have residue from the last sloppy drinker who spent too much time leaving their marks on it, or the broken down outdated dishwasher that spent too little time trying to eradicate the traces of the members and guests drinking away their memories. If it was for a well drink glass - it went up to the shelf, if it was a beer mug - into the cooler to be ready for filling from the local 805 brewery of the month.

There were procedures. There were patterns.

I liked that about the job. I had taken the job after it was described to me, the patterns, the expectations. It was a locals only place. It was the watering hole of regulars the members and their guests.

So what was she a regular or a...

"Wait, McCoy, like Horace McCoy?" I asked. He was the club president, a cantankerous lout, a lawyer not to be redundant, I thought I remembered meeting him last week. "What are you like his daughter?"

This time the laugh was for me or at me?

"The wife. The second wife. As Horace likes to call me. The first for practice. The second to end the practice." The line delivery was perfect practiced. I thought about her being an actress again. This time I gave her the laugh she was looking for.

She was twirling the Makers in her glass this time watching me watching her.

"You're new here? I haven't seen you before?"

"Yeah, on both counts. I started last week."

She took a sip of her drink. I watched as she savored it in her mouth, the smoky liquor stayed there, played there, until she swallowed it whole. Like a shark with its prey.

I took another glass to wipe clean.

"You've done that one already," she put her hand out to take mine and stopped me...

With that delicate pointed chin she pointed to another from the stack, she noticed that I had lost count of my routine. That wasn't something liked. I liked my routine as I said.

Her hands were butter soft but the grip ice tight on mine. I could feel her strength from the grip and should have known then I was being held and tested. She was measuring me like her drink.

If I wasn't careful she would take me down whole too.

She held it a breath longer squeezed and then let it go. Like I did with my last breath as a free man.

I didn't know that yet. But I could feel something shift in the bar scene around me.

"Chip! Where's the crowd?" Tom Moller, the piano guy, called to me as he breezed into the bar. He pulled out the large mock brandy snifter from under the piano and place it on top. In a similar swift movement he grabbed a handful of singles out of his pocket and peppered the glass, baited the regulars to hint that while the music was free the piano was drinking.

Tom, was suave black dude around his mid-twenties, maybe more. He had a sandlewoody thing going on that was more than a bit annoying, but it was subtle enough for the room. Tom was subtle at times. If he needed to be... He was pretty good at his trade from what I had seen. He played the expected standards and spiced it up with a few surprises to keep the stiffs guessing. "Hey Mrs. McCoy! see you met Chip."

Desiree nodded to Tom. She looked him over and measured him in her way. She took a glance around the place and seemed to take it all in - storing what she needed and discarding the rest.

Tom took his place behind the piano did his best Gershwin flourish, followed it up with a bit of cliched Joel, then a bit of rolling boogie-woogie. All of this in a minute to give us the overture of the evening ahead. He smiled and then launched into the first number of the evening and a few of the barflies drew to him like he was a bigger shit than he was.

"Chip?" She looked at me measuring me up and down gathering insights and new information. "Like off the old block?" With a certain soft elegance she reached out her hand.

I reached my hand out and shook hers. "Chip Finn... like Chip Finn." To myself I thought, 'Chip away at the stone.' I kept that to myself. I had become good at keeping things to myself. We smiled at each other and held the hand lock while Tom played into the first of the afternoon covers of Sheryl Crow.

We were a long way from Santa Monica Boulevard. We were in tucked into a little corner of Mandalay Shores or Oxnard Shores as it had been known as. The locals were trying desperately to rebrand the Oxnard name to match their little hideaway collection of seaside mini-mansions on the Pacific shore.

The place was on the lonely outskirts of abject poverty but they were trying to ignore that and set themselves up as little kings and this was their little kingdom.

And I was the help.

"Never forget that."

Moller would remind me of that later, but by then it was too late...