Authors: Richard Russo
“Murdick’s can get a little rough.”
“It’s pretty quiet on Sundays,” Noonan said. “I’ve only had to eighty-six one guy. He called me a name, but then passed out before I could punch him.”
“Well, when you get tired serving beers and bumps to rummies, let me know. I could use a night off every now and then. Sunday would work as well as any other damn day, if that’s the only one you can work.”
“Now that football season’s over, I’m a little more flexible.”
“I could teach you how to make a cocktail. Give you a skill. Bartenders don’t starve in America,” she said, “of course they don’t get rich either.”
“Thanks. I’ll think about it,” Noonan told her.
“That’s the second time you’ve said that,” Maxine remarked.
And when she smiled, Noonan was surprised. For a woman with such a hard face, her smile was soft and warm. “Tell my old man I said thanks for the beer,” he said, sliding off his stool. But then he heard the door to the men’s room swing open. When he turned and saw his father returning, he could only stare. In the time it had taken him to empty his bladder, he’d aged ten years.
“What?” his father said.
“Nothing,” he said, squinting at him. “You look different.”
“Different from what?”
Noonan was about to say
From how you always look,
but stopped. Was it possible that his father was right, that somehow he wasn’t paying attention? If the old man suddenly looked a decade older, did that mean that it had been a decade since Noonan had really looked at him? Was this how he’d managed not to see him at all those football games, or failed to recognize him that afternoon, when he was leaning against Dec’s bike?
“I’ll be back in a minute,” his father told Maxine. “My son’s a little slow putting two and two together, so I need to bring him up to speed.”
Outside, they walked over to the motorcycle. Noonan swung a leg over the saddle and waited for whatever his father wanted to say, so he could leave, but for some reason he seemed reluctant. “Look, I should’ve met my friends by now,” he told him. “If you want to tell me something, shoot.”
His father nodded thoughtfully, as if searching for the right words. “It’s not something I want to tell you, exactly. I just thought you might like to meet Max.”
Noonan blinked at this and was on the verge of asking why on earth he’d want to do that when he understood. “That’s
her,
” Noonan said.
This
was the woman his father had been involved with all these years?
“Careful,” his father said, as if he was about to say the one thing that could provoke hostilities between them. “I just thought you might like to know she’s not a bad person. She’s had a pretty rough time of it, actually.”
“As rough as Mom?”
“Plus, she wanted to meet you.”
“Why?”
“She thought it’d do you good. We’ve been kind of having an argument about you. She said the day would come when you’d wake up and wonder who the hell your old man really was.”
“You disagreed.”
“Well, it wouldn’t have been much of an argument otherwise. But so far, I’m winning.”
“That’s true, you are,” Noonan said, turning the key in the ignition.
“She’s stubborn, though,” his father shouted over the engine roar. “Like somebody else I could name. Have a good time with your friends.”
Noonan watched him disappear back into the restaurant, wondering what the hell this feeling was. Guilt? Come on. But he continued to sit, the bike rumbling beneath him, until finally he laughed, as much to hear his own voice as anything, then shifted into gear. Only when he was out on the highway did he notice his left saddlebag flapping in the breeze. Pulling into the parking lot of the old tannery, he discovered that it contained his father’s leftover prime rib. Had Maxine put it there? No, he was pretty sure she hadn’t left the bar. The boy, Willie? He didn’t think so. Which meant his father must’ve done it when he went to the restroom or just now when they came out of Nell’s together. Had he been holding a doggie bag? One thing was for sure, Noonan thought. He was going to have to start being more observant where his father was concerned.
What he should do, of course, was toss the meat into the weeds, thus making the lie he’d told true or at least consistent. But now, with only himself to lie to, the temptation was too great, and he wolfed down every morsel in the doggie bag, wondering if he’d ever tasted anything so delicious. When he was finished, though, he was as hungry as when he started—and angry. At his father? At himself? How could you tell?
B
Y THE TIME
he arrived at Angelo’s, his friends had already left. “You just missed them,” Jerry said from behind the counter. “They said to tell you they’d—”
“Be at Ikey Lubin’s,” Noonan told him. Suddenly the predictability of this, something he usually found comforting, dispirited him. Having been treated to a series of unwelcome surprises at Nell’s, there was something demoralizing about returning to these old routines, and he found himself wanting to skip the next six months and wake up in the middle of whatever and wherever came next. By this time next year all of Thomaston would fit neatly in the small rectangle of a rearview mirror.
But for now, there was nothing to do but join his friends at Ikey’s. They were seated around the small table where the old geezers had their coffee in the mornings, drinking free sodas, Nan and Lucy arguing about what to name their children, a running gag that had originated in honors back in September when Mr. Berg, immediately recognizing how conventional and conservative both were by nature, had jokingly suggested they get married and start breeding. As the semester wore on he’d continued to treat them as a couple, taking every opportunity to suggest how intellectually and emotionally compatible they were, even speculating, after they’d realized they were soul mates and that their destinies were linked, what their children would be like. It was a laughable notion, and as such easy to embrace. There was something in it for each of them. Nan, who’d been unable, even in jest, to conceal her horror at the idea of one day marrying Lucy Lynch and having his children, discovered that by playing along she could appear less superficial without actually becoming so. Or at least that was Noonan’s take on it. She’d had lots of boyfriends, but never a boy for a friend, which made this a whole new kind of experience. Lucy wasn’t interested in her romantically, now that he had Sarah, and that had been mildly disconcerting to Nan at first, but then she realized this meant she could trust him and be at ease with him. For his part Lucy was proud to be linked in the popular imagination, albeit comically, with the prettiest girl in the school, who not so long ago had struck him mute with terror. And of course Mr. Berg was right. They did have far more in common than either of them knew even now.
Though Noonan played along, the whole what-will-we-name-our-kids riff made him uncomfortable, perhaps because Sarah’s father’s jokes always trailed an undercurrent of cruelty. He supposed it was good that Lucy had loosened up enough to laugh at himself, at the shy, skittish boy he’d been most of his life, though Noonan was far from certain his friend understood that he and not Nan was the butt of this particular joke. The idea that a girl like Nan would ever give her heart to a boy like Lucy was what made it funny. And their mock arguments over names implied her willingness to have sex with him, something nobody could picture without bursting into laughter. Noonan hated that Lucy mistook this as a sign of his growing popularity. But maybe Noonan was the one who was wrong. Maybe the time was right for his old friend to adopt a new public persona. Kids still called him Lucy, but affectionately now, and many seemed to have forgotten that the original intent had been to hurt his feelings. Possibly Lucy himself had forgotten. Maybe his popularity now, like his father’s, was the just result of his genuine good nature. Sarah, after all, had never given any indication that she shared Noonan’s misgivings or seemed at all embarrassed on his behalf, and Noonan was sure she’d never knowingly condone any joke whose purpose, stated or suggested, was the humiliation of her boyfriend.
And why did Noonan himself play along? His primary reason, he had to admit, was selfish. When Lucy and Nan pretended to be a couple, it made an actual couple of him and Sarah. Whereas the two of them bickered over babies’ names, he and Sarah would find no shortage of real things to talk about. At Angelo’s, or even at Ikey’s, Noonan and Lucy always sat opposite each other, which meant you couldn’t tell, just by looking, which boy was with which girl. Instead of distinct couples, they became a foursome, easy and relaxed. Back in September, when they first started going places together, they’d configured things differently, and it hadn’t worked out nearly as well. With Lucy at Noonan’s right, Nan at his left, and Sarah across the table, it had been abundantly clear who was with whom, while now the pretense that Nan and Lucy would end up together resulted in a more complex, though unspoken, truth—that the joke couples made as much sense as the real ones. At the end of the evening Nan and Noonan came back together, as did Lucy and Sarah, but only after they’d spent much of the evening enjoying the opposite symmetry. Was Noonan the only one who recognized this? He suspected that Sarah did, too, but of course there was no way of asking.
At any rate, when he stumbled into this at Ikey’s, his already grumpy mood darkened further. If Sarah hadn’t broken into one of her radiant smiles, he might’ve turned around and left. What he really wanted to do was march over and ask Lucy’s girlfriend if she wanted to go someplace, just the two of them. In fact, the impulse was so strong that he was grateful when Dec Lynch, fresh from the shower and smelling of cheap cologne that confirmed he’d spend Saturday night as usual, prowling the Gut, intercepted him in the entryway.
“Why don’t you just take this?” he said, handing Noonan his wallet, still obviously sore about the outcome of the game. “Apparently you won’t be satisfied until it’s yours, along with everything in it.”
“I tried telling you,” Noonan said in his own defense.
“Yeah, well, you didn’t try hard enough. And do you want to know what really makes me crazy?”
“No.”
“What
really
makes me crazy is I know just as sure as God made little green apples that you’re going to wreck my motorcycle.” Noonan had parked it right in front of the store, behind the Beverly Caddy, and Dec stood there regarding it sadly. “I can see the twisted pile of metal in my mind’s eye just as clear as I see you standing there.”
“Cheer up,” Noonan said. “Maybe I’ll get killed. Blood on the highway.”
Hearing this, Nan cried out “Bob
beeee
!” aghast to hear him even joke about such a thing.
“No, he’d just walk away without a scratch,” Dec assured her, as if he considered this yet another dimension of the tragedy. “I can see that, too. I’ll be the only victim, as usual.”
Despite his facetious tone, Dec’s mood seemed every bit as foul as his own, for reasons that ran deeper than a lost bet. The way he stood there in the entryway suggested to Noonan that he couldn’t decide whether to stay or leave and never come back. Then Tessa Lynch, who’d been in the back, working in the tiny cubicle they’d recently set up for her there under a bare, hanging lightbulb, came in.
Dec regarded her for a long beat before turning to her husband. “Biggy,” he said. “I’ve got a question for you.”
Tessa must have sensed unpleasantness in this innocuous statement, because she said, “Don’t start.”
“No, really,” Dec went on, still looking at his brother. “Why don’t you close this place up for the night? Take your wife out someplace.”
“I can’t just close the store when it’s supposed to be open,” Big Lou told him.
“Why not? You own it.”
“Close the store just because I feel like it?”
“But you
don’t
feel like it,” Dec said. “Don’t tell me you do, because we both know better.”
Noonan noticed that Lucy and the others had gone quiet. This wasn’t the usual, good-natured Lynch bickering. The lone customer at the register also felt the tension in the air, since after pocketing his change he grabbed his six-pack and was out the door before Big Lou could insist on putting the beer in a paper sack.
“When was the last time you took Tessa anyplace?” Dec demanded.
Big Lou shrugged sheepishly. “That ain’t what I’m sayin’—”
“Dec,” Tessa said, and there was steel in her voice that Noonan would’ve paid attention to.
Dec did not. “I tell you what,” he continued. “I’ll stay home tonight and sell your beer for you. I can’t afford to go out anyway. You and Tessa go out.”
It was a genuine offer, Noonan could tell, but Dec’s motive for making it had nothing to do with kindness. Had something happened before he arrived, or was the cause of this dispute more remote? Dec was clearly pissed about something.
“And where would we go, Murdick’s?” Tessa scoffed.
“How the hell should I know?” Dec said, still looking at Big Lou. “Go someplace out of town. You know you aren’t going to fall off the end of the earth if you cross the county line, right?”
“Dec,” Tessa said. “
You’re
the one who wants to go out tonight. So go.”
Still refusing to look at her, Dec threw up his hands. “Fine,” he said. “But you know what, Biggy? When it happens, it’s going to serve you right.”