“That’s too bad.”

“Yeah, and the fact I may or may not have acted like I was smacked in the face with a bag of bricks when I saw her sure as shit didn’t sit well with Salem.”

“Gotta be hard for Salem. She has you now but she thinks your sister still has a piece of you from back then. That’s a pretty twisted tapestry of history, present and future, she’s looking at.”

“Poppy doesn’t have any piece of me other than sympathy and maybe a big chunk of regret. Seeing her today made that really clear. I was shocked to see her and worried that she was all black and blue, but that was it. The way Salem works me up, the way she just understands me . . . I never had any of that with Poppy. Salem was always the one that I gravitated to, I was just too young and too scared to understand what it meant back then.”

Asa made a noise of understanding and then pushed off the bar as one of the guys in the group picked up a pool stick and swung it at the head of one of his friends. The other guy drunkenly ducked and lunged at the attacker’s legs. In a split second they were rolling around on the floor in a tangle of arms and legs as fake fighting turned into real fighting really fast.

Asa moved in the direction of the brawl with a determined gait and I quickly followed. The boys were rolling around on the floor, fists were flying, and blood was pouring out of mouths as swearwords and garbled threats punctuated heavy punches. Asa got ahold of the kid that had started the entire mess and tried to pull him off his buddy. One of the other kids in the group moved toward Asa and I just shook my head and told him, “You don’t want to do that, friend.”

The kid looked at me like he was considering his chances of taking me on, when I got distracted by Asa dropping a long string of swearwords. The kid he had pulled off the obvious loser of the boozy tussle had turned his rage onto Asa and was giving my friend a hard time. Asa had the kid by the back of the neck and one of his arms cranked up between his shoulder blades, but whatever the kid had been drinking had numbed the pain and he was giving it his all to get loose. He threw his head back and tried to head-butt Asa and threw his legs back trying to kick the much taller and much more sober man.

“Knock it off, you little shit.” Asa gave the kid a shake and looked at me as I bent down to see how the other one was faring. Not too great if his snoring and bloody face was any indication. “All of you are done here. Everyone move toward the front door.”

The kid he was wrestling with broke free by throwing his body forward and surprising Asa enough that he let him go and the young punk fell face-first on the floor. The guy rolled over on his back and looked up at us with baleful eyes.

“Fuck you. I can buy and sell this bar a hundred times over.”

Asa looked at me and then looked back at the mouthy kid who had worked his way up to his knees.

“Well, until your name is on the deed, you and your friends can get your happy asses outta my bar.”

A couple of his cohorts walked up behind the kid and helped haul him to his feet.

“You gonna make me, Opie? You put your hands on me and I’ll sue you, I’ll sue him.” The kid pointed at me as I lifted an eyebrow at him. “I’ll sue every single motherfucker in this place and I’ll have you arrested for assault. I know my rights.”

I grunted as Asa took a step forward. “Watch yourself.” I wasn’t sure the warning was to the kid or to Asa, either way I could see this situation going even more into the toilet any second.

“I’ve been to jail, you little shit. More than once. So what else do you got?”

By now a couple of the other guys in the group started to see some reason and a couple of the regulars had made their way over to see what the ruckus was about. The odds were a little more even now, but the kid in the center of it all was glaring at Asa like he was his own personal archnemesis.

“I got this.” The kid grabbed his crotch and Asa took a threatening step forward, so I held out an arm to keep him back.

“You want me to call the cops?” I thought it was a fair question to ask considering the circumstances, but both Asa and the kid glared daggers at me. I held up my hands in a gesture of surrender and took a step back.

“Get. The. Fuck. Out.” Plain and simple; there was no mistaking that it was the last warning the blond southerner was going to give the group.

The guy’s friends were urging him to just let it go and telling him there was a bunch of different bars they could go to but the guy was in a deadlock with Asa and neither one of them wanted to give in. Finally the kid shook his friends off and pointed a finger at my friend.

“This isn’t over, ass**le.” He looked at his crew and barked, “Let’s roll,” like it had been his idea to vacate the property all along. He made sure he spit a mouthful of blood on the floor and knocked over a table on his way out.

Asa was practically vibrating with rage and his normally easygoing demeanor was lit up like an inferno. His eyes were glowing in his face and his hands were curled into iron fists. He looked like he was going to put his hand through a wall.

One of the regulars muttered, “I woulda punched him in the mouth,” as he meandered back to the bar and Asa let out a heavy sigh.

“Remember when I said doing the right thing is f**king hard? Prime example.” He reached up a hand and rubbed it across his face. “A while back I woulda just kicked the shit out of him, taken whatever he had in his wallet and probably his girl, and gone about my way. Or even more likely I woulda found someone to do the dirty work for me and had two sets of ass**les out for my blood when it was all over. Now I gotta think that if I do that kind of stuff Rome might get sued, I might go to jail or end up in a body bag, and that sucks.”

I agreed with him, so I didn’t say anything and just followed him back to the bar so I could pay for my beer and finally head home to take a shower.

“Well, sometimes the right thing is the wrong thing because if anyone deserves a punch in the face, it’s that guy.” And whoever it was that had used Poppy as a punching bag. I tossed a few bills down on the bar and slapped my hat back on my head. “I’ll catch you later, man.”

“Yeah and, Rowdy . . .” I stopped and looked back at him. “Your girl just needs to know that now she’s the one. Maybe you were confused when you were younger, maybe you were scared and locked on to the safe bet, but now you’re taking the chance and she just needs to know it’s on her. Nothing wrong with her being the one after as long as she’s the last one.”