The Last Night

I wake up to the flickering vibration of my phone pulsating against my left cheek. With my eyes still closed, I try to find the snooze button on the alarm. Instead of silence, I hear a voice coming from the speakers of my phone.

“Hello, Liz?”

My eyes peel open from the thin layer of mucus knitting my eyelashes together.

“What do you want?”

“It’s Nadia. Wake up. Joe isn’t okay and the bar…well it’s a disaster.”

I hit the back of my head against the pillow. Why can’t the rehab just take him in for free?

“I’ll be there in five.”

I slide my dark-rimmed glasses over my freckled face and squeeze on a pair of L.L.Bean jeans. My foot gives way on the stairs, sending me into the banister as four crushed beer cans fall from underneath me. This only makes me worry, despite the cans being a common theme to the morning routine. The early spring morning chills my 1997 Volvo’s motor. I wait for a gentle purr and peel out of the driveway to Joe’s.

Nadia meets me at the front door of the bar with bare feet and her light wash jeans soaked at the hem. Her turtleneck has a small patch of liquid on her right shoulder with chunks of what seems like chicken.

“Come on, come in. He forgot to turn off the faucet and fell asleep at the bar. Go, get him up before people start walking by.”

Water pools into my sneakers and rushes into the street. Joe’s head is on the bar and his feet drag through the water-covered floors. Thank goodness we have tile.

I pick up his head and gag from the odor of his reeking breath: chicken, beer, and stomach acid. I hit his side to stir his slumber and walk against the bar to the back of the house. Vodka stings the bartender’s carpet and drips evenly into my station. Freaking perfect. Most people come to work and complain about prep not being finished or having to take out last night’s trash. I come into work and walk through the aftermath of a drunk’s fiesta inside of a kiddie pool. Oh, and the drunk, Joe? He’s is the owner. And he’s my father.

Joe was never this way. He was always a drunk but never a disaster. He always succeeded at being a functioning alcoholic until the bar started making money and late-night drinking began paying for itself. And the mother figure you are looking for? Non-existent. She left when I was a child, leaving me with only one memory. One faint thought of my dad being sober, smiling, with the woman who birthed me. But, as you know, I now call my dad Joe and that memory is dead.

Joe sits up and smiles like he just woke up in his comfortable bed and not on a bar stool.

“Hey, pumpkin! When did you get he'a? Gee, kinda is a mess from last night. I’ll pick it up though, don’t ya worry.” His thick Mainer accent slurs his words, probably because he is still drunk.

“You,” Joe looks to Nadia, “get me a freaking glass of wata’ while you’re at it, okay hun?” She rolls her eyes and goes to the back. Nadia has been working for Joe since I was in middle school. She only stays because she feels bad, although she would never admit it. It’s been two years of this mess of Joe, but Nadia and I have a plan. Once we make enough money to get Joe a bed at the local rehab, I will do the ordering and Nadia will keep running the bar.

Nadia and I are cleaning up the back closet, also known as the office, and I stumble upon a tower of mail. Past due checks, rent notices, electricity bills. I go through these once a week but with the amount of debt Joe has accumulated, I’m surprised the mail-woman doesn’t just deliver it in a wheelbarrow. I search for any notice from the Acacia House, the local rehab. I have been reaching out to them every Friday. Although the plan Nadia and I have is subpar, we have it all planned out in my small black notebook. The notebook holds the financing of Joe’s and our plan to handle the mess that Joe has made of his own bar.

I pick through the letters until I reach one addressed to myself. The thin envelope’s return address is smeared with water and liquor. My name is hardly legible. Carefully opening the side, I shake out a letter. A blue check slides out, dropping onto the pile of mail like a feather. The check is made out to me, from an unfamiliar name following “Inheritance Fund” from a bank in Germany. $20,000 follows my name. I look behind me to scream at Nadia for making this sick joke, but she has moved to the front and is scrubbing dried liquor off the bar.

Who would send me, an eighteen-year-old in Maine, twenty thousand dollars? Is Joe a part of a gang and put it under my name? I glance at the drunken state of the man who is supposed to be my father. Definitely not. I grab my phone and look up the name on Facebook. There are a million Glenda Rose’s, however, none of them are familiar. There is only one profile from Germany. Her eyes are chocolately brown with small pink lips curling up into a small, professional smile. Definitely, no one who would interact with Joe nor me.

Letters slip out from underneath the leaning tower of mail. As I scramble to save them from the puddles of water, I notice that the inheritance fund’s corporation is written across one of the other letters. Inside is a handwritten letter from the inheritance fund with a short description of my mum’s savings and what she left behind from her death.

My heart feels like it has split open and sputtered blood across the mossy-colored walls. My mother is dead? The woman who birthed me, who I barely remember, is dead? And left me $20,000? My mouth begins to taste like Joe’s breath and I puke in the corner. I open up my watering eyes to find myself kneeling in a puddle of water with vomit covering my jeans. Cute.

Nadia runs in with a mop, her face breaking into a smile when she notices my face.

“You just freaking puked?! Liz, did you do all of this last night? Is Joe just covering for you by spending the night at the bar? That’s low, girl.”

I hit her leg with my slimy hand.

“No, you idiot! My mom is dead.”

Saying the news out loud made my stomach launch into my spine. Stomach acid builds up into my throat as I throw up last night’s dinner along with eggs from the morning before. Nadia drops to the ground and rubs my back.

“Liz, I’m so sorry. Even though she was a b**ch to leave you, that stings. How can I help?”

I wipe the puke off my lip and look at her.

“Take over Joe’s.”

I open the black notebook that lives in my cubby, stored away from my internal damage that I just projected all over the room.

“We can do this. Please say you’re in.”

Nadia shakes her head while looking at our sketched-out plan. She holds onto the back binding of the journal tightly. “How can we do this? We have no money.”

I pull out the blue slip that holds my life for the next ten years.

“Yes, we can. I am going to cash this check at eight am today. By nine, you will have $10,000 to live off of and to support this bar. It’s yours, Nadia, if you will take it.”

“Liz! Did you rob a freaking bank?” Nadia yells until she looked at the Inheritance Fund title. She grabs my sleeve and holds me real close, vomit-covered pants and all.

“Thank you.”

I nod, walk out of the backroom to see Joe opening a Miller High Life.

“Honey, it’s not what it looks like. I just worked all night long and didn’t get a break. It’s my time to relax.” He says, tilting his head back with the glass bottle; no remorse.

I think about the time I need to relax. The time I lost being a child. The time I need to grow. I grab my dad’s hand and drag him into my Volvo. The red plush seat gives way to his beer belly and strong calves.

“Hun, where are we going?”

“I’m doing what I need to do for myself, Dad. And you are going to do what you have promised to do for the past two years.” I say without looking at him. I take the corner on High Street and drive for fifteen minutes in silence. The quiet drunk becomes alive with protest when he sees the Acacia House’s helping hands poster.

“Elizabeth,” His Mainer accent absent. “Don’t do this to me. I can get better, I promise I can get sober.”

I look into his dark brown eyes that resemble my own, his sad eyes, and his beer-stained shirt.

“I know you can, Joe. And you will.” Tears start flowing down my neck as my brain pulls familial memories of Joe raising me, bringing me to the bar to show off to everyone. Was I doing the right thing?

“I love you, Dad. It’s time to get sober. Let’s do this, together.”