“If you weren’t such a lazy dolt, you’d come downtown once in a while where you don’t need hazmat gear to sit at a bar.”
Nolan didn’t bother stating the obvious: he had never lived “in the neighborhood.” He’d only been exposed to it because of his grandparents, who’d lived next door to Will and had refused to move even after Nolan’s father created a multimillion dollar political strategy firm responsible for electing including six senators and two presidents.
Nolan’s mother, a Boston blue blood, would have drowned herself in the harbor before living in Southie. She’d accepted the Burke family background only because it made for a compelling narrative in political circles: Nolan’s father a rags-to-riches Boston success story, the six-hundred million dollar trust he’d left behind a vehicle for Nolan’s mother to continue playing socialite when her own family’s money had dried up. Of course, that had been before she married Harrison Adams, a former Senator with a pedigree — and bank account — that matched her own.
“Nothing wrong with The Chipp,” Will said as they walked. “You should be grateful.”
“Grateful?” Nolan found himself adopting the neighborhood posture out of habit: shoulders slumped, head down as if he were fighting a headwind, eyes watchful. It was mostly unnecessary these days. The neighborhood was being gentrified by affluent Millennials looking for a bargain within commuting distance of the city.
“Yeah, if it weren’t for me, you’d probably never come back,” Will said. “Then you’d become one of those rich fucks with a stick up their ass.”
“I thought I already was a rich fuck with a stick up my ass.”
“It would be worse,” Will said.
Nolan laughed. This was part of their routine. For all of Will’s repartee, he was no idiot. He hadn’t attended college, preferring instead to stay on with Seamus O’Brien’s outfit after the fall of Raneiro Donati’s Syndicate, but he was well-read, forgoing a TV in favor of the books that covered every inch of the dingy apartment he’d occupied since right after high school. He wasn’t broke either: he’d amassed his own nest egg from his illegal earnings.
They came to The Chipp, an old building with a crumbling brick facade and no windows. Will walked in and a chorus of greetings rose from the interior, so dim Nolan couldn’t make out the figures in the back.
The smell hit him all at once — dust and old linoleum and the yeasty smell of Guinness. It was where he’d taken his first drink, where he’d made his first pickup for the Syndicate, where he’d gotten blackout drunk after Bridget Monaghan broke up with him.
The name immediately conjured her image — her creamy skin, almost translucent, her golden hair, threads of copper only visible when the sun hit it just right, the way she fit perfectly into the crook of his arm.
He pushed the memories away and took a seat at the bar. He’d spent too many hours wondering what had happened, why Bridget had cast aside what had felt sacred to him even when he’d been a punk kid trying to prove something to his dead father, to the guys in the neighborhood, to himself.
At first he’d thought it was because he’d dropped out of law school, because he’d postponed his plans for the future to run around the neighborhood with Will. Both of those things had been fixable. Instead, she’d made the one argument he couldn’t counter: she didn’t love him anymore.
What more was there to say?
He looked up as Derry Higgins approached them from behind the bar. “Hey, boys. How’s it hangin?”
“It’s hanging, and that’s better than the alternative, am I right?” Will asked.
“Never been more right, lad. Never been more right.”
It was an oft-repeated greeting between Will and Derry, the rotund and jovial bartender at The Chipp. Neither of them seemed to tire of it. Nolan just played along.
They ordered two beers and Nolan settled in, letting his gaze travel the bar like something might have changed when he already knew it hadn’t, when he already knew it never would. Someday hover cars would fill the air outside and the customers at the bar would all be robots and The Chipp would still have dirty, scuffed linoleum and a juke box that only sometimes worked and multicolored Christmas lights behind the bar, the fat old kind, not the new LEDs that were tiny and too bright.
“You okay?”
Nolan turned his head to look at Will. “You going to ask me what I’m thinking now?”
Will laughed and shook his head. “Fuck you.”
Nolan took a slug of his beer. “Back at you.”
A moment of silence stretched between them. “I saw her the other day,” Will finally said.
“Saw who?” Nolan asked even though he knew who Will was talking about. If nothing else, it bought him time. Time to compose his face into a mask of nonchalance and to steady his voice for the conversation to come, a conversation Nolan intended to shut down as quickly as fucking possible.
“You know who.” Will took a slug of his beer. “Don’t be a dick.”
“Just being myself.”
“Don’t,” Will said. “You suck at lying and you suck when you try to pretend you don’t care about her anymore.”
“Didn’t say I don’t care,” Nolan said. “It just doesn’t matter.”