He worked in silence. First, he rinsed the glass with the rum and let it coat the inside like a ghost. Then he placed the rosemary at the bottom, not as a garnish but as a root. He added the salt—not for flavor, but for grit. Finally, he poured a measure of plain, room-temperature water from a ceramic carafe that never touched the tap.
The hardest part of the repack was always the mental defragmentation. He had to take the insults from the drunk regular, the overtipped smile from the woman trying to get a free round, and the sheer exhaustion of being on his feet for ten hours, and he had to compress them. He had to pack them down into a small, dense box in the back of his mind, burying them deep so that tomorrow, when the sign flickered back to "Open," his face would be a fresh slate.
