Page 8 of Your Chorus
Monroe steps aside to let me pour myself an espresso shot. Somehow, she always looks taller when she’s behind the bar, but standing side by side like this, I’ve almost got a full foot on her. She’s pretty dressed up for a Sunday shift: heeled black sandals and a navy blue dress that hugs her curvy body. She’s even got lipstick on.
I wait for the last few drops to drain from the espresso machine before slamming the caffeine back like it’s tequila. I let out a groan of appreciation as I lower the now nearly empty mug.
“You seem...tense,” Monroe observes.
“Who, me?” I joke.
She continues to observe me like a science project. “This doesn’t have anything to do with a certain Cole Byrne, does it?”
Damn that man. Damn him and his atmospheric presence to hell. Just hearing his name feels like conjuring up some kind of ominous sex demon. That single syllable is thunder ripping through the air, and I know if I closed my eyes, I’d see lightening streak the backs of my lids.
It’s pathetic. My hands are almost shaking as I bring my mug back to my lips. I take a few unnecessarily aggressive sips to cover it up. Monroe smiles and shakes her head like she knows exactly what’s going on.
“He called me,” I admit. “It didn’t go well.”
I rinse my mug out in the sink and fill it up with water, taking a few sips as I circle back to the other side of the bar. I reclaim my stool so Monroe can continue doing whatever it is she was doing before I barged in. She pulls out a binder and grabs the pen from behind her ear, scanning over some kind of checklist as she keeps our conversation going.
“Did he actually want something this time?”
“That’s the worst part,” I begin. “Thatmaudit cavedidn’t—”
I’m interrupted from explaining the tour situation when DeeDee breezes in with a typical loud and profane exclamation. She nestles her huge sunglasses into her pink hair and slides onto the barstool next to mine.
“Salut, bitches.Qu’est-ce que tu fais ici,Roxanne?”
“Catching up with Monroe while you handle the bar.”
I answer DeeDee’s question about why I’m here in French, and we switch languages for a while. DeeDee is Francophone like me and speaks passable English. Her job mostly consists of convincing partying students that they need to buy more shots, which doesn’t take a lot of linguistic expertise. She started working at Taverne Toulouse a year after I did. Unlike me, she’s been here ever since.
Monroe, on the other hand, is an Anglophone who speaks passable French. She’s the reason I have such good English. When I first came to Montreal, I was sixteen years old and had spent my whole life living so far up in northern Quebec that I considered Saguenay to be part of ‘the South’.
They don’t teach you much English up there. Nobody really needs it because nobody really leaves.
I spent my first year in Montreal crashing on Monroe’s couch. She’s an old friend of Cole’s, and since I was too young to sign a lease, he appealed to her Good Samaritan nature and got her to take me in. She found me a dishwashing job here at Taverne Toulouse to pay for most of my rent and let me make up the deficit with a daily language exchange. She spoke to me in French, and I answered her in English. I told her which French TV shows were the best, and she let me borrow her English books.
That’s what motivated me most—the books. I’d never read a book that wasn’t for a school assignment. Mymamandidn’t even own a bookcase. I didn’t know books like the ones Monroe had existed. She read everything from Scandinavian sagas to urban fantasy romances, and once I started, I wanted to read everything too.
“Your hair looksgénial.” DeeDee reaches over and twirls a strand of my overgrown bob around her finger. “I did a good job.”
DeeDee is a master of home dye jobs. A few months ago, I had her lighten my dark hair a few shades to a chestnut brown with a hint of red in it.
“Merci,” I answer DeeDee, “and you’re right, you did. You should be a hairstylist.”
She shakes her head. “Nah, they have to get up in the morning. Although thatputainover there did make me come in for an early staff meeting today.”
DeeDee and Monroe have the kind of relationship where she can casually call her manager a ‘whore.’
“Noon is not early for a staff meeting,” Monroe retorts.
“Staff meeting, huh? That explains the fancy outfit,” I comment, eye-balling Monroe’s dress again.
“What aboutyourfancy outfit?” DeeDee tugs on the belt of my palazzo pants and fiddles with the green silk tank top I have tucked into them.
“That’s just Foxy Roxy’s style,” Monroe teases. “She always dresses like she’s the love interest in some black and white French film, walking along the Seine with her baguette...”
“Tais-toi,” I grumble, smiling through my complaint as I tell her to shut it.
She’s not exactly wrong. I grew up in a place where camo and ball caps with the logos of energy drink companies on them were considered the height of cool; fashion was not in my lexicon when I arrived in Montreal, but it took about five seconds for me to fall in love with the way people dress here. It’s the only city where you can find someone strolling around in a floor-length, Technicolor crochet robe, somehow managing to look elegant. In Montreal, people dress like they have stories to tell.
