The Piano Bar

No one knew how long May had been playing. When she took her cup of coffee and glass of water without ice from the cigarette burned piano top over to the single table in the corner only Norman, the Thursday regular and the tired blond on holiday, lingered.

The blond looked nervously around the musty paneled room, wondering who might walk in as she sipped her rum “mystery” in silence.

“May will start up again in about 10 minutes.”

Norman spoke with a thick Irish brogue as he smiled across the piano at the blond, “Don’t worry.”

‘How odd,’ she thought that he suspects my nervousness.

She worked hard at the “image” of the islands. A dark, flowered, braless dress skimmed her bare shoulders, slightly burned from the tropical sun. The styled perm had lost it’s body between the ocean breeze and unforgiving sun.

Arriving only a week ago, she had been determined to forget everything and committed to a good time. Tomorrow she would return home telling friends of her island vacation, regaling them with her fantasies, glossed in half truths of liaisons unrealized.

She smiled self-consciously at Norman.

“Do you have a favorite, darlin’?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Sorry, darlin’, I said, do you have a favorite tune? May know’s ’em all, she does.”

Norman lifted his glass, toasting May in the shadows at her corner table.

The blond looked over her left shoulder to see May take a long drag on her cigarette….