“You ignite, and you RISE!”
Ranko waved to the crowd as they cheered, turning around and giving Shinji a high-five. Over the last six months, since Crash and Shinji wrote the music to pair with her lyrics, they’d been performing the song just about every night. The bar patrons seemed to love it, and it was a little bit like the Dragonfire craft cocktail – you could only get it at the Phoenix.
Mei continued to fiddle with the audio equipment as Ranko hopped down off the stage, heading to the service bar, where there was a glass of soda waiting for her. “Thanks, Izzi! Hey, did you get those boilermakers done for eighteen yet?”
The middle of the five siblings of the Phoenix’ little sisterhood gave Ranko a smile and nodded, adjusting her weight on the stool she occupied behind the dishwasher. “I took them out to the table for ya.”
Ranko shook her head with a smirk. “Oh? And did you check with my niece about that?”
With a blush, Izumi moved her hand to her abdomen. “She’s cooperating for the time being, but I promise I’ll slow down if I need to.”
The redhead swung around the service bar with a warm smile, giving Izumi’s belly a gentle poke. “Hey, you in there, don’t go giving your mom a hard time, okay? That’s Auntie Ranko’s job!”
Izumi threw a bar towel at her youngest sister with a giggle. “Get out of here, you. I’ve got work to do.”
Ranko slipped through the blue saloon doors into the back room, giving her adoptive mother a hug around the shoulders as Hana flipped a cheeseburger on the flat top. “You holding up okay back here, mama?”
The taller woman nodded. “Busy, but good. How’s things up front?”
Ranko hopped up, sitting on an empty spot on the countertop behind her mother. “Oh, the usual. The bar’s four deep right now, but Izzi’s helping us catch up, and now that my set’s over, Mei can pitch in too.”
Hana smiled. “I’m gonna need you to do me a favor and have two birthdays this year, so we can start teaching you to tend bar too.”
With a giggle, Ranko popped a fried pickle in her mouth. “Aww, am I not growing up fast enough for ya, Mom? I mean, I only just got my own place this morning.”
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“Speaking of which, how is it?” Hana dropped a slice of cheese on the burger she was cooking with a smile.
“It’s great! Needs a little work, but nothing we can’t handle. Now that my walk to work isn’t just a flight of stairs, I might have to start thinking about flat shoes more often, though.” Ranko blushed a bit. She had given Izzi an inch in terms of her costuming choices, and her sister had taken a mile.
Hana nodded. “That, or just keep the cute ones here and change when you get here. Do you girls have everything you need? Did Akane have enough kitchen stuff, things like that?”
With a smirk, Ranko hopped back down off the counter. “Yeah, Akane’s… not so much with the whole kitchen thing. There’s a reason I’ve been asking for lessons since we started dating. But we’re not anything close to unpacked, so I don’t really know what we’re missing yet.”
“Well, let me know. Between all of us, we probably have some spares of most things you could need somewhere,” Hana said, finishing the plating of the cheeseburger she’d been cooking with a pile of onion rings.
Ranko scooped up the plate. “Will do! Let me know if you need a break back here, okay? I can’t do all of it yet, but I can hold the fort if you need a few minutes.”
The elder woman shook her head. “You’re serving, you’re singing, you’re moving, and now you’re wanting to cook, too? Baby, slow down. You’re gonna wear yourself out.”
Bumping the saloon door open with her butt, she smiled up at the staircase that led to the little upstairs apartment that had been her home these past ten months. “I thought you wanted me to tend bar too? Besides, there’s nothing I won’t do for this place, or for you and the girls. You know that.”
Yui leaned over to Mei, who was still working with her audio gear. “Hey, what’s going on? We need you on the floor. Did something break?”
Mei jumped as if she was startled. Once she had processed that it had been Yui that spoke and not someone else, she pulled a cassette tape out of one of the pieces of her equipment, putting it in her pocket with a smirk. “You saw nothing.”
With a sigh and a shrug, Yui turned back for the bar. “Whatever, just wrap it up already! We’re dying out here!”
In the alley behind the bar, Crash and Shinji lit their cigarettes, leaning on the exterior wall of the bar behind the dumpster. Shinji groaned. “We gotta play something else, man. I mean, every night with this.”
His fellow guitarist sighed. “It’s called having a hit, bro. Writing songs that people wanna hear every day is like, the whole point.”
Shinji gave a little smirk, flicking the spent ash from the end of his cigarette. “Don’t people who do that tend to get, ya know, paid?”
“One thing at a time, Shin.”