don't get involved with the barmaid

don't get involved with the barmaid

fiction
edward w pritchard

When you are young don't get involved with the bar maid. Even if they are fifteen years older than you and they just need someone to fix their car after work.

Your going to think their life is a mess and being young you are going to think something like their life could never befall someone like you. You are going to still think you have good prospects then.

When you do fix the car at 2:30am after the bar closes you will never get the money you advanced for parts back. Afterwards, your tuition money will suffer over and over if you loan it to a bar maid. It won't be a total loss however, for you will have a new friend and you will get paid interest in a couple of bacon lettuce and tomato sandwiches. You find out later it's the only thing they know how to cook.

You can't go anywhere together. You only get to talk to them at night or when they come into the hotel for their shift; maybe for a few minutes. She only calls you when she needs something and it's not till later you find out that's how everyone is. Oh yeah you help break up fights in the bar once in a while too.

The best part of knowing a bar maid is when they are scared. Usually a rainy night about 3AM. Then they wrap up in a blanket in the hotel lobby and lay on the couch and stare out the windows. From the back they look like a little girl but walking toward you they look like a playboy doll, but smaller. Strong too, through the shoulders. At least until they get sick. They are a lot smarter than you thought. They tell you-you remind them of someone.

Once they get sick and quit the bar at the hotel you won't get a call goodbye. Their ex-husband will stop by one day and tell you about how sick. He will be real sad.

Later, even though you are supposed to be a loner you might miss them once or twice although you never really had anything going. If some college students stop by the desk at the hotel where you work and ask about the woman who works in the bar who sometimes is a part time prostitute don't get mad, it's probably another part time bar maid.

Much later when you think of them they will always be thirty four years old and racing off into the early morning hours with the money you just loaned them. It's just as well they were gone long ago: who ever heard of a seventy five year old bar maid who can't cook and whose life is a mess and has a wreck for a car.