The bar was called the Blue Note. It wasn't blue and it wasn't a note. It was just a bar that had been called the Blue Note thirty years ago when someone with a sense of irony owned it, and the name had stuck the way everything sticks in a town that's trying to forget itself.

I was sitting at the piano, which was out of tune and had three keys that stuck when you pressed them, and I was playing because not playing meant sitting still, and sitting still meant thinking, and thinking meant remembering Rachel's face this morning when she left, and I didn't want to remember that.

She was singing in the corner, or trying to. There were four people at the bar, two of them regulars who came for the cheap beer and stayed for nobody's music, and one who was clearly drunk enough that his head was nodding in a rhythm that had nothing to do with what Rachel was singing.

Rachel Cooper. They called her Red because of her hair, which was the colour of rust and stayed that way even when she was tired, which was always. She was thirty, maybe thirty-one, and she had a scar across her forehead from a fight in a parking lot behind a bar on 8th Street, some drunk guy who'd been bothering her and she'd swung a bottle and it had connected with his head and he'd swung back and connected with hers.

She didn't talk about it. Nobody talked about it. That's how things work in a town like this. You take what happens and you don't make a story out of it because stories cost money and neither of us had money.

---

I used to work at the plant. Ford, on the east side. I was a line worker, which means I stood in one place for eight hours and did the same thing over and over—tighten a bolt, move a part, tighten another bolt. The pay was twenty-eight cents an hour, which was enough for rent and beer and sometimes food if I was careful.

I'm not proud of that. I'm not ashamed of it either. It was work. I did work. That's what you do.

The plant closed in '13. Not gradually—closed. One day it was there, humming and vibrating and ten thousand people showing up to make cars, and the next day the gates were locked and a sign on the door said COMING SOON TO A MALL NEAR YOU in letters that were already peeling from the weather.

Ten thousand people. I was one of them. Then I wasn't.

I tried other things. Warehouse work. Security at a shopping centre that had more vacant stores than occupied ones. A brief, disastrous attempt at driving a delivery truck that ended when I backed into a fire hydrant and the water ruined the dashboard and I couldn't afford to replace it.

Rachel used to say, "You're not cut out for this kind of work, Mark."

"What kind?"

"The kind where you have to want it. You tighten bolts like you're apologizing to them."

I'd laugh. She'd smile. And then she'd leave and I'd sit in my motel room and drink a beer and the silence would get loud.

---

The motel was called the Sunny Side. The sun didn't shine there. The side was facing north. But the name was Sunny Side and that was what the sign said, and the sign had been there since before I was born and would probably be there after I was gone, which is a kind of permanence in a town where nothing else lasts.

Room 14. Second floor. The stairs creaked on the third step and you had to step over it or the owner, Mrs. Gable, would come up and complain. I always stepped over it. Not because I cared about Mrs. Gable, but because the act of stepping over was something I could control, and control was something I didn't have much of.

Rachel came to see me sometimes. Not every week—maybe once a month. She'd show up at the door with a paper bag that contained either food or beer or both, and we'd sit on the bed and talk about nothing.

"How's the singing?" I'd ask.

"Same. How's the piano?"

"Out of tune."

"Everything's out of tune."

"That's true."

We'd drink the beer. She'd eat the food. We'd talk about the weather or the closing of another store on Main Street or how Mrs. Gable had painted the hallway a colour that was neither yellow nor orange but something in between that made the corridor feel like the inside of an orange.

Once, about six months after the plant closed, she asked me, "Do you have any plans, Mark?"

"Plans?"

"Like. For the future. Do you think about it?"

"I think about tomorrow. Sometimes I think about next week. The future is a long way off."

"That's the problem," she said. But she didn't elaborate. She never elaborated. That's how things work in a town like this. You say what you need to say and you don't add to it because adding is hoping, and hoping is expensive.

---

The winter of '15 was the worst. Not the coldest—Cleveland winters are all pretty much the same temperature, somewhere between "brutal" and "absolutely futile." The worst in the sense that it laid bare everything that had been hidden under the snow and the ice and the desperate, half-hearted attempts at normalcy.

The plant was still closed. The town was still dying. My money was gone—actually gone, not just low, but gone, which means I had seventeen dollars in my pocket and a motel room that cost eighty a week.

Rachel came on a Tuesday. It was snowing, the kind of snow that doesn't fall so much as hangs in the air, grey and heavy, coating everything in a layer of wet white that melts as soon as it touches anything warm.

She came in without knocking, which she sometimes did, and shook the snow off her coat and sat on the bed next to me and took the bottle of whiskey out of her bag and took a drink and passed it to me.

We sat in silence for a while. The whiskey was cheap—something you could buy at any liquor store for twelve dollars that tasted like it had been distilled in a gas station. It was perfect.

"Mark," she said.

"Yeah."

"I'm not going to ask you if you're okay, because you're not. And I'm not going to tell you that it'll get better, because I don't know that it will."

"I know."

"I'm just saying that I'm here. I'm sitting on this bed in your motel room in a town that nobody wants to live in, drinking whiskey that tastes like regret, and I'm here."

She looked at me then, and her eyes were red from the cold and maybe from something else, and I saw the scar on her forehead clearly in the dim light of the single bulb that hung from the ceiling.

"I know," I said. And that was all. That was everything.

---

Spring came. It always does, even in Cleveland. The snow melted, the streets turned grey instead of white, and the city revealed itself again in all its cracked and rusted and stubbornly persistent glory.

I went back to the Blue Note. The piano was still out of tune. The three sticky keys were still sticky. The regulars were still there, drinking beer that was colder than their prospects.

Rachel was there too, sitting in the corner, listening. She didn't sing that night. She just listened, and when I finished, she nodded, just once, and that was enough.

I played the last song—a simple progression, three chords repeated with small variations, like breathing. When I finished, I looked up and saw her standing by the door, her coat on, her bag over her shoulder.

"Going home?" I asked.

"Yeah."

"Want me to walk you?"

She shook her head. "It's not far. And I like walking alone. It gives me time to think."

"About what?"

She smiled, small and real. "About how you play that last song. It's the same every time. Three chords. Same notes. Same ending. But it's good. It's honest."

"Nothing else is."

"Maybe that's enough."

She opened the door and stepped out into the street. The sun was setting, casting long shadows across the parking lot, and for a moment she was silhouetted against the light, and then she was gone.

I sat at the piano and played the same three chords again. Same notes. Same ending. But this time, when I finished, I didn't feel the absence. I felt the music.

And that, I think, is all any of us can ask for in a town like this. Not salvation. Not a miracle. Just the music. The honest, imperfect, out-of-tune music that says, in the only language that matters: I was here. I played. I tried.

That's the whole story. Nothing more. Nothing less. Just two people in a broken bar in a broken city, trying to make something that sounds true.

OTMES v2: DRD-2015-CLE-STRG-4ACT-1250W-NO-SUP-PER-1PL-LIM