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“You know what the worst part about all this is?”
Hancock grinned, feeling warm and fuzzy from the food, chems, and company. “Hit me.”
Tallahassee took a long, slow slip from her Gwinnett. “I didn’t even want kids.”
Hancock barked out of a laugh, grinning madly until he saw that Tallahassee had fixed her eyes on that certain part of the counter again. “Wait–you serious, Red?”
“Mhmm.” She took another sip. If Hancock had known that she planned on opening up, he would’ve brought more chems to help take the edge off. “Just never really saw myself as the mothering type. If it happened, it happened, but otherwise?” She wiggled her hand. “Wasn’t keen on the idea. Besides, it takes a village, and I didn’t have the best support system. My family didn’t like one another, and to Nate’s entire family, I was the girl from the wrong side of the tracks.”
“You? Naw.” Sure, Tallahassee was a bit rough and tumble around the edges, but underneath all that was practiced perfection only found in the few magazines and those big old billboards that survived the bombs. “I can’t see it, Red.”
“It’s true,” she insisted. “Nate’s family came from good stock. Had this house, this mansion almost, further up the coast. A summer home down south. My family came from the poor side of town, I shared a room with my kid brothers while Ma faded in and out on her medications and Dad wandered in and out of our lives. The fact that he picked me, out of all of the eligible beauty queens and daddy’s girls, didn’t make sense to them.”
Even though they had been dead for at least two centuries, Hancock wanted to punch them. Maybe he could track down their graves if they were buried in Boston and accidentally take a piss on Tallahassee’s in-law’s final resting place. Anyone stupid enough to not see the treasure she was was either blind or stupid.
“How’d you two meet?”
“Well, I actually knew his sister.” Tallahassee wrinkled her nose. “This dumb bitch who thought she was the princess at every party–and she was. We went to the same school–”
“They had all this money, but your families went to the same school?”
“Yeah. Our town was small enough and unfortunately, money still couldn’t get Charlotte into some of the fancier schools in Boston. So we had the same science class.”
Hancock couldn’t picture Tallahassee as a teenager, but he tried--while he couldn’t age her back, he could picture the attitude, the look. Long skirt, crisp white shirt, kerchief around her neck, and hair was done up all pretty. Maybe a smudge of lipstick. Tallahassee was a looker now–probably was back then, too. Maybe she was more hopeful back then, a bit brighter. Hancock imagined a dazzling smile with her perfect, white teeth; maybe it was the chems or the booze, but it made his stomach flip-flop.
“I saw Nate occasionally when there were family events at the school. Real sweet, real shy.”
“Awww. High school sweethearts?” prompted Hancock. Tallahassee shook her head.
“No. After graduating, I had to hustle to put myself through college and law school. As soon as I had my high school diploma, I stuffed everything I owned into a bag and left for Boston.” She huffed. “Honestly, I had forgotten about the Williams entirely.”
“Then when’d you meet him?”
“At the All American Lounge.” She glanced his way to see if he had heard of it. Hancock hadn’t.
“Waitressing there, then?” he asked. His mind wandered–Tallahassee was now in a cute miniskirt, maybe roller skates. Focus, man.
It was Tallahassee’s turn to laugh. She laughed so loud and bright that Hancock forgot how to breathe for a moment.
“Oh, no. Honey, no. The All American Lounge was a…cabaret, of sorts.”
Hancock put the pieces together and raised a brow. “You–?”
“I was a performer.” She had the decency to act a little coy. “Pretty good, too. Had a routine where I sang and did a little dance–really popular with some of the regulars.” She leaned in, almost conspiratorially, towards Hancock. “All us girls had stage names, too. Wanna know what mine was?”
Hancock nodded, his imagination running too wild for this conversation. It was supposed to be serious, but his brain couldn’t help but picture Tallahassee up on stage, scantily clad, singing something slow and sultry. Hancock had to quickly think of anything unappealing, like Super Mutant dicks or centaurs or anything to get his head back in the game.
“Miss Tallahassee.” She waited for him to react.
“Wait–so you’re telling me this whole time we’ve been callin’ you by your stripper name?!”
She shrugged lazily. “No one questioned it, Mayor John Hancock. ” She drew his name out so teasingly Hancock was sure he wouldn’t make it. “Besides…” She trailed off and readjusted the bottle in her hands. “When I was up on stage, using a different name, I felt–invincible, almost. Like no one could touch me because I was Miss Tallahassee. And when I finally got off the stage, then I could go back to just being me.”
Hancock nodded at this, slowly but surely. “I get it.”
“I thought you would.” She gave him a pinched smile. “But yeah–I met Nate there again, I want to say about…six, seven years later after I graduated. Some of his buddies thought it’d be funny to take him out on a jaunt before they deployed, but soon they left him high and dry, uncomfortable as hell. After a set, sometimes the ladies would go and work the crowd, so I stopped at his table since it was empty and seemed safe. I didn’t know who he was–we figured out we had met before in passing much later–but when I sat down and talked with him, his eyes lit up like someone had jung the moon for him, and I was…well, it was nice to meet a guy who actually seemed interested in what I had to say. Instead of…” She gestured to herself. Hancock politely made sure to keep eye contact, not follow the hand past her chest and beyond.
“He came back a lot after that, and when he got deployed for the first time, we kept in contact. Wrote a lot.”
Hancock could picture it–Tallahassee checking her mailbox daily for a letter, unsure if he was safe or coming home. Maybe starting to send little tokens of affection, gifts, care packages.
“Then, he got back–had to be hospitalized for a bit, out on the west coast. I couldn’t visit, I didn’t have enough money at the time, but when he got out, he showed up outside my apartment.” She had a fond, distant smile. “On a motorcycle, no less, with a bouquet of flowers. The flower got ruined on the drive over, and he looked so–upset and bashful about it but I couldn’t help but find it to be so sweet. We were married a year later.”
She tapped her cigarette into the ashtray, her smile fading. Her gaze hardened, her jaw set, and Hancock spied pure fury carefully contained under a calm exterior.
“His family didn’t even come to the wedding. That hurt him, y’know? More than he admitted. Then he went on another tour, and I became a junior partner at the firm I was working for, and the idea of being a parent was pushed from my mind. We talked about it, of course, but Nate came back from his second tour…different, and I figured it wasn’t ever going to happen. When I found out I was pregnant, I wasn’t sure what to do. I waited forever to tell him. He noticed, I think–but he was so busy with therapy, I think he thought it was best not to push.”
“Well, you gotta decide what’s right for you,” Hancock replied. Tallahassee had mentioned in passing that Nate struggled with…something when he came back. That’s why she was so patient with folks completely out of their minds–she had loads of practice. “Sometimes, a kid ain’t it, sometimes it is.”
Tallahassee hummed in agreement. She had polished off her beer some time ago, and now she just watched the bottle and took another drag from her cigarette. “When I finally told him, though, he asked me what I wanted to do. Even though I knew how important it was to him.” She threw up her free hand, cigarette veering dangerously close to Hancock’s face. “So I went, “Fuck it!” and the rest is history.” She worried her lower lip, gaze still miles away. “It just seemed so…important to Nate, that we have a kid of our own. Maybe he just wanted to prove to his family that he did make the right choice, that I was the right choice.”
“It was,” Hancock said. “You were the right choice.” He gestured at the nearly empty barroom of the Third Rail, but the gesture wasn’t towards the room itself–it was to everything, all around them. “You woke up two centuries later after losing your husband and showed up with guns blazing. You're going after your kid like the scariest mama yao guai. You, Red, were built to survive–it’s just what Shaun needs. And sure, the kid’s a little older now, but you’re still his mother. You’ll protect him out there like you’ve protected everyone you’ve come across in this god-forsaken place.”
Tallahassee stared at him with wide eyes, like a radstag in the floodlights. Hancock’s gaze softened. “I’m sure Nate saw that when he looked at you. Not that–y’know, he knew all this would happen, but–he looked at you and thought, ‘Damn. That’s the woman who’s going to be the mother of our kid. What a gal. No matter what happens, I know we’ll be okay.’ Because you showed it to him every damn day, Red, and you’re showing everyone you meet even now.”
Tallahassee was silent. Hancock wondered if he had gone too far, but he kept pushing. He bore all of his ugly secrets to her–she should be able to do the same to him–but he also wasn’t going to stand by for slander. He reached out and put a hand on hers. Not as a move, god no, but as a comfort. He hoped he still knew how to comfort. His wrinkly hands next to her near-perfect ones, he gave them a gentle squeeze.
She turned her hand over and held it for a moment. She gave him a watery smile–a real one, a genuine one, the first he was sure he’d ever seen–and then it was gone. “Thank you.”
Hancock’s heart warmed. “Sure thing, Red.” He paused for a beat, unsure how long it was acceptable to keep his hand out, but she gently pulled away. “Lemme walk you home.”
“What a gentleman,” she replied, sliding from the barstool and taking his arm once he offered it.
The walk back to the Rexford was quiet. It was well past three in the morning, according to Tallahassee’s Pip-Boy, and most sensible folk had tucked in for the night, either in the state house or on the various mattresses and sleeping bags under stoops and built-up shacks. Hancock led her up to the door and opened it, doing a grandiose flourish and removing his hat. “After you!”
Tallahassee hid another one of those half smiles behind an eye roll but stepped in. He didn’t follow, but she paused in the doorway and looked back. “Thank you, John. For tonight.”
“ ‘Course, Red. Anytime. I mean it.” He kept his hat over his chest, hoping to hide his pounding heart. “See you tomorrow?”
She smiled again, properly. “See you tomorrow, John.”