"Happy Hour"

            Amber street lights cast moth-riddled cones, shining on the pavement like a spilled rum and coke. Outside, the flickering naked neon woman’s profile flashes on the mirrored car windows. Inside the Buick, a child waits. Her calm blue irises patiently reflect the orange OPEN sign as her hands twist an imaginary dream catcher’s pattern. Her world consists of few roads, each of them dingy with smoker’s breath and mapped by the red lines of eyes. Pushed pavement presses upcrops of tall mohito mint against the wheels of the car, and she feels like she’s growing roots in the gravel.
            She reaches into the glove compartment, the place she knows daddy keeps the cinnamon Altoids: treatment for him, treat for her. In her usual way, she presses two into each cheek, sucking the powdery schnapp tang until the tablet becomes porous and brittle, then moving them to her tongue and pressing them to the roof of her mouth until they dissolve.
            Glancing around, she sees a faded brochure corner pressing against the roof the car, trapped by the visor, in the way a glass rim is hidden by a wedge of lime, and pulls it out by one of its pages. The smell of printed paper and ink sinks into her tiny twitching nose, and the coarse manilla paper rubs between her finger pads. The top of the cover was emboldened with what she recognized as initials, and below them was a picture of a smiling group of people dressed in blue jeans, all of them different skin tones. Inside, she sought the pictures--- cartoon images of filled glasses with arms and eyes and menacing grins.
            She feels the bottom drop from her stomach, alerting her bladder as she quickly closes the flyer and stuffs it beneath her legs when she looked up, realizing he was returning with the usual bunched brown bag between his limp fingers, the flickering naked neon woman illuminating him, shading him in the olive green of an apple martini. She looked at the car’s digital dashboard and knew: it would always be five o’clock.