Two Cokes on a Friday
Part One: Fish Night
Gil froze behind the bar with a dish towel in his hand.
It was a quarter past five on a Friday in early March. Fish night. The early crowd was already in. Retired men from the paper mill at the end of the bar, working through their first plate of perch. Couples in the booths along the wall. Two tables of bowlers from the Thursday league who always came in on Fridays to argue about Thursday.
The jukebox was playing Patsy Cline.
Then it wasn’t. Somebody must have pulled the plug, or the song just ended, and nobody put in another quarter.
The tables behind us went quiet, one at a time.
I could feel it happen. Like a wave going out. First the booth closest to us. Then the bowlers. Then the couples by the window.
The men at the end of the bar stopped eating. They set down their forks.
They stared.
My grandmother sat on a barstool at the center of the bar. Right in front of the taps. Right where Gil couldn’t look anywhere else.
She was eighty-six years old.
She was wearing her royal blue wool coat. The good one. The one she wears to funerals and to Christmas Eve Mass and to absolutely nothing else. Pearl earrings that my grandfather gave her for their fortieth anniversary. Her white curls set that morning at the beauty shop on Main Street, the way they’ve been set every Friday since 1961.
Two glass bottles of Coca-Cola sat on the bar in front of her. The old-fashioned kind, with the bottle caps already popped off. Sweating a little in the warmth of the bar.
I stood beside her in my camel coat with my hand on her back.
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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