What`s Better Than Money?

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I had been playing the piano in Rusty’s bar for four months or so when I met Rima Marshall.

She came into the bar one wild night with the rain pounding down on the tin roof and thunder rumbling in the distance.

There were only two customers at the bar, both drunks. There was Rusty behind the bar, aimlessly polishing glasses. Across the way in a booth, Sam the negro waiter, was reading a racing sheet. There was me at the piano.

I was playing a nocturne by Chopin. My back was turned to the entrance. I didn’t see or hear her come in.

Later, Rusty told me she had come in out of the drowning rain around twenty minutes to nine. She was soaking wet, and she sat down in one of the booths to my right and behind me.

Rusty didn’t like having lone women in his bar. Usually he chased them out, but as the bar was practically empty and it was raining fit to drown a duck, he let her be.

She ordered a coke, and then lighting a cigarette, she rested her elbows on the table and stared broodingly at the two drunks at the bar.

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