7PM
THE LOST-AND-FOUND BOX IS out on top of the bar. A guy is looking for his hoodie. He’s not a regular here but he’s a barfly. I run into him here and there around town. If I recall correctly, he works as a delivery guy, not a UPS guy—he doesn’t wear a uniform—more like a guy who moves medical equipment for some no-name company that operates in New York and New Jersey. He has bought me a drink before but I don’t remember his name.
He digs through the box. I can see from where I’m sitting: there’s no hoodie in there. Amelia knows this. So why pull out the box at all?
Finally, the guy announces, “My hoodie’s not in here.”
Amelia nods, leaving the box on the bar. The guy fishes around a little more.
Cal says, “Take something else to replace it, if you want.”
The regulars collectively look down into their drinks, watching the guy peripherally. He pulls out a pair of cheap, black plastic sunglasses and inspects them. He puts them back. The box also holds men’s black leather gloves, a red-and-yellow polka-dot umbrella, a single hoop earring, and several other items that aren’t worth claiming.
The guy tries on one of the gloves. He puts it back in the box and returns to his beer.
Amelia says, “Go ahead—take it if you want it.”
He reaches back into the box and takes both gloves this time, holding them up in front of his face. “What if someone comes for them?”
“It’s hot as hell out there,” Cal says. “No one’s gonna come lookin’ for gloves this time of year.”
The guy catches my eye.
Suddenly, I feel bad for him, maybe because he bought me that drink a while back, but more likely because I can see he’s a nice guy. It’s not a complicated analysis—I don’t know anything about him—he just has a nice-guy disposition: sunny, a little distant, the opposite of exacting. He’s one of those people who doesn’t recycle, doesn’t vote, doesn’t buy local, doesn’t care if produce is non-GMO, and he’s also not an asshole. There’s a correlation there, I’m sure.
I shake my head: No. I try to do it subtly, but Cal sees me. The guy drops the gloves back in the box and says, “I’m good; thanks, though.”
“Fuck, Em. Why’d you have to ruin it?”
“That’s entrapment,” I say. “You wanna put the box out, fine, but you can’t keep telling him to take something.”
“That’s the test—the Willy Wonka test,” Cal says. “Gotta be able to say no to temptation.”
“If I remember correctly, Willy Wonka didn’t run around insisting the kids steal the Gobstopper. You gotta just put out the box and see what happens.”
If you pass the test, it doesn’t make you a regular. Regulars are people who come by two or more nights a week, every week, for at least three drinks. It takes time and money to become a regular. And beyond time and money, the guys have to like you. I came in through the back door because of Lucas, but it doesn’t work that way for everyone. And if you fail the test, there are no consequences. You catch hell for about ten minutes for being a no-good thief, and maybe, if you look like you have the money, you are goaded into buying a round. Then everyone forgets the thing ever happened. The test doesn’t work, anyway. All the good items are taken before they make it to the box, like those Tom Ford aviators I left behind six months ago that I’m still bitter about.
The guys decide they need to plant some better items in the box to raise the stakes. I agree that’s reasonable. They tell me to bring in some “female items.” I’ll never get around to it.
WHEN LUCAS AND I got married, my father insisted on speaking at the wedding. He was picking up the tab so it was his moral right. Against my better judgment, I allowed it. This was my only concession. I had not permitted him to bring his girlfriend—the woman with whom he had cheated on my mother. Something about saying no to the first request softened me to the second.
Our wedding was rustic, a euphemism for paying a ton of money to recreate a down-home atmosphere with a veneer of elitism apparent in the quality of the solid wood cross-back chairs and top-shelf liquor. The soirée unironically involved a Catholic priest and a country church, a restored hundred-year-old barn and a whole hog, cake and pie, pictures of our dog even though the dog wasn’t present because she’d have eaten the pig, a hayrack ride to nowhere, a DJ in a skinny tie with a torso-length beard, mint juleps, gin and tonics, whiskey neat or on the rocks, kegs of Bud Light (townies prefer beer that tastes like piss), and a slew of family dysfunction that we choked down with the pork like a side of corn bread.
Dad’s speech started with the smell of our town.
“When the wind blows from the northeast, there is an unmistakable stink of manure in this country town. I smelled it immediately upon my arrival.”
My father was a great speaker, his vocal and physical delivery: impeccable. He used no notes. He didn’t merely gaze around the audience, as a lighthouse presenter rotates systematically around the room. He made eye contact with individuals in the crowd, our guests, lingering on the important ones—my mother, my in-laws, Lucas, our best friends whom he’d met earlier in the night. His style of elocution was flawless. His voice rose and fell, volume creating suspense. He was also the best-dressed man in Upstate New York, which alone commanded a certain authority.
Dad paused for a second, a perfected technique, and I thought maybe he’d reflect on the smells of his childhood, floating across his hilltop town—smells of olive oil production and burning wood.
“It took me back in time in a powerful way, and I was with my little girl again. She liked to arrange my pens and pencils in my briefcase and listen to me on the phone on Saturday mornings, when I took care of odds and ends from the kitchen table.
“She asked me, ‘Daddy, what is a manure?’ She drew out the end of the word into distinct syllables, ooo-er. I had no idea what she was talking about. I racked my brain. I repeated a manure aloud. Then I realized she had been listening intently to my conversation from earlier that morning. I couldn’t help but laugh to myself. I told her Daddy was an entrepreneur and explained that meant building something from nothing. I told her with initiative and hard work, she could be one too someday. Then she would be somebody special.”
Why this memory? I thought. Why not talk about the only trip we ever took together, just the two of us? A father-daughter journey to the homeland to meet my grandfather. I was so young; the details were fuzzy. The TWA flight attendant gave me a little pair of wings and led me by the hand to the cockpit, where I met the pilots. The plane seemed enormous, four seats in the middle and three on either side. The trip was long—we had to fly to Rome, rent a car, and drive to the toe of the boot. I wanted to remember my grandfather; I wanted to know if his eyes were my father’s eyes, my eyes. I wanted to understand what his life was like in the old country: ancient, rural, and slow. I wanted to ask him about my grandmother, who died when my dad was just a child, not so much older than I was at the time. I was too young for these questions—these wants—but my father wasn’t. He must have remembered that trip like it was yesterday, and I couldn’t figure out why a story about manure was more important to him.
Then he delivered his punch line: “And here we are. My little entrepreneur now lives in a town that smells like manure.”
Dad had made a mistake, a cardinal sin. He’d forgotten the fundamental principle of communication: know your audience. Had my father forgotten where he came from? He, of all people, should have remembered small-town pride. He spent his adolescence in a town in Albany County, New York, population 792, at a time when people still put on their finest for church and took their kids to the town center to watch the parade on the Fourth of July. But then, he was the kid who left the place he came from, who never set foot in that hick town again, and, for the life of him, he couldn’t fathom why anyone with a modicum of talent would stay.
Head tilted back, he chuckled at his own story. Then he looked at me. He must have noticed my dropped jaw, my mind fixed on the question he asked me when I told him my plan to live upstate and teach: Why?
Of course, there was no mention of Lucas in this story. A family drywall business was far removed from my dad’s definition of entrepreneurship, from what he deemed worthy of his time. I wasn’t entirely sure whether my father knew what Lucas did for a living. I’d never spoken to him about it because he’d never asked, and he’d shown no interest in spending time with Lucas.
He rambled on. I heard the words “She had a lot of spunk.”
I thought, I’ll show you spunk. I wanted to interrupt with a few choice words about how I’d found a man who was nothing like my father. But neither Lucas nor I had enough money in our name at the time to even cover the bar tab.
It made sense that he would tell a story that occurred when I was a child. He probably had the image of a third grader burned into his mind because that was the only time he knew me. Back then, we talked. I wanted a briefcase and a gold watch and a suit that smelled of cigar smoke. I wanted people to call me on Saturday morning because whatever it was couldn’t wait ’til Monday. I wanted to be important so I would be important to him.
Eventually, he began spending Saturday mornings at his condo in Manhattan rather than at home in Wilton. I figured out I couldn’t impress him if he wasn’t there, so I stopped trying.
When he concluded his remarks, some of our friends offered a subdued, polite applause. Others remained notably, understandably, silent. I froze in shame. Lucas’s father took the mic after him. His hair stuck straight up in the humidity. His black suit hung loose on his body, the shoulders just off, the sleeves half an inch too long—a funeral suit—and his shirt had come untucked. He cursed several times as he told a story about Lucas falling off a stepladder on a drywall job. He made fun of the way I drank beer, using my tongue to regulate the flow of liquid into my mouth, joking that every time he caught me sticking my tongue in my glass he wondered how a smart person could look so retarded. When I looked around, only Samantha registered any offense at his vulgarity. Everyone else was too busy laughing, or crying because the subtext was so full of love.
My father cornered me before he left our wedding reception, and I could see by the way he looked at me that he wanted me to thank him.
“I’ll take my upstate manure over your city shit any day,” I said.
And then, as if it were a serious comparison, he said, “Yes, you would.”
Dad reached into his lapel pocket. He pulled out an envelope and a set of two keys attached to an I 
NY key chain.
“Dad, I don’t have any pockets.”
“Just open the envelope,” he said.
It contained a slip of paper with an address in Brooklyn scribbled in his handwriting—all caps.
“It’s yours,” he said. “Well, technically it’s the trust’s. In fifteen years, you can do whatever you want with it.” The trust was just a rich-person way to circumvent estate tax. I’d spent enough time around my father to know that.
The gift caught me completely off guard. My dad usually went out of his way to avoid giving me anything because he worried a free lunch would thwart his only child’s ambition.
“Think of it as an investment,” he said. “A town house in Cobble Hill. You’ll need a place to land when this country quiet gets under your skin. And it’ll be worth a fortune should you ever sell it.”
I think he expected me to throw my arms around his neck and thank him but I was stunned.
As if he could read my mind, he said, “You should appoint it to your taste so you and Lucas have a place to stay when you come to the city.”
“We really don’t come down to the city that much, Dad,” I said. “Maybe you should rent the place out.”
“There’s a small yard for the dog in the back.”
“For Addie? You just said it was an investment property.”
“That doesn’t mean you can’t live in it,” he said.
“We live here.”
“Lucas can hang drywall in the city.”
“So you do know what Lucas does for a living!”
“Of course I know. He’s my son-in-law.”
“I just assumed you didn’t care.”
Loving my father never felt like a choice. He was a good dad, insofar as that distinction only required his presence and not being verbally or physically abusive. In other words, if you’re a man, all you have to do is not do a few things and Congratulations! Dad of the year! Being a good mom requires perfection, in public and in private, without end.
“What are you going to do when you get bored with teaching?” Dad asked.
“Let’s not do this now,” I said. “Thank you for the town house.”
I had a sudden urge to unload the I NY key ring into Lucas’s pocket. My slinky silk gown was not designed to hold much of anything. He was across the dance floor talking to the DJ, his buddy from high school with a penchant for funk.
Then my dad said something that struck me, even on that happy occasion, as an omen of what was to come. “Think of it as a contingency. If things don’t work out as you expect, you’ll have a place to go, and down the road, if you need to, you can sell it.” Maybe the notion of it—a contingency on my wedding day—should have pissed me off. But he was so sincere—the look in his eyes so paternal—I understood, maybe for the first time, what fatherhood meant to him.
JIMMY GRABS HIS BEER and heads back to the pool table on the other side of the bar.
Another thing about The Final Final: it’s a sound tunnel. If you aren’t focusing on your own thing, you can hear every word of someone else’s thing. A couple of young girls who came in pretty frequently spoke on more than one occasion about Amelia’s body. They noticed when she gained five pounds and lost five pounds. They thought they could tell if she’d been working out. They always huddled together and whispered. Amelia never said anything. She continued to serve the girls their drinks. Only her eyes, piercing as she shot soda water into their vodkas, showed that these conversations affected her. Finally, one of the girls loud-whispered, “Saggy boobs: strapless is not for everyone.” I leaned over and said, “You realize everyone in the fucking bar can hear you, right?” They were mortified. Maybe they figured Amelia had been slowly poisoning their drinks. They never came back.
That’s a long way of explaining that even though Jimmy and Yag are in the back, Amelia and I can hear every word of their conversation.
“Dude, I had this dream last night,” Jimmy says. Yag misses his shot. “We were getting hammered at the bar.” They both laugh. Jimmy is unusually spirited tonight, a departure for a guy who almost always has bags under his eyes from early mornings at the diner.
“Remember when you clocked in for an entire week at Bageltown and didn’t serve a single customer?” Yag laughs. “How the fuck did you manage that?”
Lucas also worked at the bagel shop back in the day. Apparently, at one time or another, the manager hired every sixteen-year-old dumbass in town. For some period of time, these young guys all worked there together, until, one by one, they were all fired. One guy, for standing in the parking lot throwing bagels at anyone riding by on a bike, until a woman fell and broke her wrist; one guy, for making sandwiches so slowly that a customer complained she watched another worker make five before hers was complete, each lettuce leaf placed with craftsmanlike precision; Jimmy, for smoking weed in the supply closet.
“I hid out in the supply closet,” Jimmy says. “Krista knew where I was but she had the hots for me.” Krista was the manager. Jimmy sinks a shot and looks over at the bar. “Speaking of girls, what happened over there?”
“Who, Caroline? She’s young,” Yag says. “Doesn’t understand that evolved men can have female friends.”
“Girls are weird about their boyfriends sleeping with other girls—sometimes you just gotta listen to them.”
“Sometimes I think it’d be easier to just have sex with myself.” Yag gestures with his hand, making a loose fist, pulling up and down. He grabs the cue and squares up to take a shot. “Tonight is not my night.”
HANGING OUT AT THE bar one night, trying to mind our own business, Lucas and I overheard Yag break up with his girlfriend of one year. Most of Martin’s girls only stuck around for a matter of weeks, a few months tops, so this girl was the exception.
Tears streaming down her face, she asked why he wanted to break it off. He told her she wasn’t attractive to him because she had put on weight. She asked why he called her beautiful so many times. He told her he only said those things because that’s what good boyfriends did; he didn’t really mean them. The girl believed him.
I knew how Yag’s crazy mind worked, how it played tricks, and I was quite certain he did find her beautiful at one time, but, as a result of years of watching porn and jerking off, perception was fickle and he couldn’t hold on to one idea for very long, so his mind turned on him and somehow morphed this beautiful thing into an ugly thing, and the only way he could rationalize it was to insist the beauty never existed in the first place. The girl didn’t know any of this, though. She just thought she was unattractive. He added that she was perfect from the waist up but he was a “hips-and-ass guy.” He paused like he wanted to suggest something but knew he shouldn’t. Finally, he said maybe it was something she could work on. That’s when she told him she was pregnant.
He told her to get an abortion. Then he swiveled around on his stool, stood up, and walked out of the bar.
Lucas turned to the girl and said, “He’s crazy, you know—you are beautiful,” which was exactly what she needed to hear at the time.
From that point on, Martin Yagla was no longer welcome in our house. I couldn’t stand the sight of him. When Lucas hosted a poker night, Yag showed up with Jimmy and a couple of other guys. I stood on the front porch and pointed, my finger inches from his chest, and said, “Not him.” Lucas looked at me, surprised, and then at Yag and then back at me, and then said to him, “Sorry, man; she’s serious.” And Yag said, “It’s your house too.” Lucas put his arm around him and walked him down the front path to the sidewalk. I don’t know what he said to him. Yag didn’t come back for as long as I lived there.
Lucas was always softer than I was, kinder, and I know he found my stance overly harsh. On his own, he would have given him a pass, but living with me, I think he agreed that understanding Yag’s behavior and excusing it were two very different things.
As much as I dislike Yag, he probably hates me more. I took more away from him than he ever took from me. When he spoke of me to Lucas, he always referred to me as The Mrs., even before we were married.
I’m sure he thinks I ought to be embarrassed by the ways Lucas changed after he met me, the fact that he gave up cigarettes and stopped texting some girl who had been in love with him for years. Somehow, knowing Yag believes this makes me self-conscious. I never wanted to be that woman, the woman Yag sees me as, but I had to be that woman because Lucas was better off. Still, something about Yag makes me feel ashamed about myself, as if commitment is for losers—conventionality, a sucker’s burden. I am weirdly intimidated by him, though I can’t say exactly why.
Lucas told me once, unprompted, that he was glad Martin Yagla was not prominently in his life anymore, which was his way of admitting that I had been right. That should have been the end of it. We should have all moved on with our lives. But it’s a small town, and that’s not what happened.
A GUY APPROACHES THE pool table and asks if they want to play Cut Throat when they finish their game. Jimmy says, “Sure, man, put down your quarters.”
“Man, we never do crazy shit anymore,” Yag says. “Like the pumpkin.”
I’ve heard the pumpkin story at least five times, but I’m about to hear Yagla retell it for the benefit of the new guy.
Jimmy racks the balls for their game of Cut Throat. Yag breaks because he won last.
“We stole this pumpkin from the ShopRite. That’s how it started. It was, like, a week before Halloween so we wanted a pumpkin. And then I remembered I had a bunch of illegal fireworks in my trunk. The kind that really explode.” At a young age, Yag had a propensity for pyrotechnics. “Whose idea was the bowling alley?”
In high school, the guys referred to nights like this one as “High Quality Nights,” a euphemism for nights when they didn’t drink. On these nights, they occupied themselves in other ways.
“The bowling alley had those automatic doors, so we figured we could wait until someone walked through, triggering them to open, then we’d roll in the pumpkin.” Their adolescent plan was to fill the pumpkin with lit fireworks before rolling it into the bowling alley. “After the pumpkin exploded we were gonna floor it outa there. I drove the getaway car,” Yag says.
Mind you, this happened in the nineties, pre-9/11. These were the halcyon days of pranks. Still, these kids had no idea what kind of firepower they were packing into this pumpkin, and I can see by Jimmy’s body language, the way he shakes his head and looks at the floor, that he now understands how reckless they were back then.
Yag continues. “I was behind the wheel. Jimmy was in the passenger seat cutting that pumpkin open with my hunting knife and packing it full. Our boy Lucas was in the back seat doing nothing, along for the ride. It’s so typical that Lucas would take the back seat. He’s a classic accomplice, sittin’ back there smoking American Spirits.”
“It’s not like he tried to stop us.”
“Hell, no. Lucas wanted us to do it. What the fuck else was he gonna do on a Friday night?”
The best part of the story is coming up. Depending on who’s telling it, you either get what happened up front, like one of those movies that starts where the sequence ends, usually with a bunch of dead bodies, and jumps back to the beginning, or you have to wait to find out what happens, sometimes for a long time, while the storyteller describes the rising action—the stealing of the pumpkin, the loading of explosives, the chugging engine of Yag’s Chevy Lumina, dubbed, affectionately, Luminus Maximus—as well as a hefty backstory, where Yag got the illegal fireworks (New Hampshire—Live Free or Die), the fact that the car was on empty because Yag’s mom canceled his gas card for reasons that escape me now.
There’s no right way to tell a story. I teach my students that the content and an understanding of the audience should dictate these choices. I have to admit Martin Yagla is good at telling stories. I want to know what is going to happen with the exploding pumpkin. In fact, I already know what happened because I’ve heard the story before, and I still want to hear it again.
He continues. “We idled in front. There was about twenty feet of sidewalk between the car and the door. And the door stayed open for about thirty seconds after a person cleared the motion sensor. I did a quick calculation in my head. We figured that was enough time to light it and roll it in.”
“You calculated how long it would take the pumpkin to roll in through the door,” Jimmy says. “Not how long it would take the pumpkin to explode.”
“We just assumed—”
“Bad assumption—”
Yagla laughs. “Boom! The car filled with smoke. Pumpkin seeds went everywhere. Who would’ve thought it would explode immediately? We rolled all the windows down. I hit the gas just as soon as I could see out the windshield.”
“That thick pumpkin skin saved my life,” Jimmy says.
“Well, it saved your eyebrows, at least—maybe a couple fingers. I was picking pumpkin guts off the ceiling of Luminus Maximus for months. Seeds were stuck everywhere—”
Yag has a million stories like this one. He continues to talk, loudly and condescendingly, even as the details become more and more embarrassing. Martin Yagla: King of the Bar! I shake my head, though no one is looking at me.
The game drags on, and I can tell the new guy has had enough. He might as well be from another planet—an outsider looking in. He doesn’t share their constitution.
They finally finish their game. By their body language, I can tell the outsider won. Yag asks him if he wants to play again. He says not tonight, puts his cue on the rack, and walks out the back door.
There are two types of people in the world: people who are glad high school is behind them, seen only through a tiny rearview mirror, and those who want to relive it as a state of constant present, glory days remembered as if they were only yesterday. Yag falls squarely in the latter camp.
Nostalgia makes me want to bury the hatchet with him. Nostalgia: memory’s rosy-cheeked sister. If memory is a state of fractional loss, a slipping away, nostalgia is a state of fictional gain, an imaginative expansion. I allow it to take hold, partly because all the whiskey has softened me but also because, without Lucas around, Yag’s impishness doesn’t matter anymore. He’s someone else’s problem.
I ask Amelia for three house shots. The Final Final house shot is something called the blood orange, at least when Amelia’s bartending. She invented it. It doesn’t taste like orange but it is reddish orange in color. I have no idea what’s in it, but it’s quite boozy and it goes down easy. The college girls love it.
I bring the shots over to the pool table. Yag appears delighted by the gesture. He says, “You’re not so bad, Em,” then, pulling the glass toward his lips, he looks at Jimmy and says, “Here’s to being free men.” He shoots it down.
At first I think he’s referring to the girl he said goodbye to earlier in the night, but he gives me a sly smile and pulls a cigarette out of the pack and puts it behind his ear. I realize he’s talking about Lucas.
“Woohoo,” I say. “Congratulations, Martin, no one cares about you. You cheat on your girlfriend. You owe ten grand to some over-the-hill wrestler, who may or may not collect the debt from your mother, scaring the life out of her for no other reason than her loser grown son still lives at home. Go ahead. Smoke your lungs out.”
“You know what I can’t figure out?” Yag says. Spit flies out of his mouth onto my face. “Why do you come here? Look around, Emma. You don’t belong. No one wants you here. You are a sad, uptight bitch. You think you’re better than us because you don’t smoke and your daddy has money. You think we’re a bunch of loser drunks. News flash, Emma—you’re a drunk too! Three years ago, you were hot. We let you hang around with us because Lucas is our friend, but then you walked out on him. No one said anything because we all felt bad for you. No one had the balls. Well, I’ll say it now. I’ll be the asshole. Find your own fucking bar. Find your own fucking town. Why the fuck do you stay here?”
Jimmy ushers Yag out back for another smoke, sparing me a retort. I return to my bar stool, the spell of nostalgia now broken. My hands are shaking, all the rage manifest in my extremities.
Cal touches my right shoulder. He mumbles, “Don’t listen to him. You belong here as much as any of us.” He rambles on about friendship. He says something kind. I’m not really listening, though. I can’t shake Yag’s question: Why the fuck do you stay? The answer is obvious, isn’t it? I stay to live in the past, the before.
“LUCAS,” I SAID. “I’M sorry but I have to confess something to you.”
Lucas was behind the stove, making pasta sauce. Since he took out the wall between the kitchen and the living room, he could stand over the stove, watch TV, and talk to me, all at the same time. He had several balls in the air, but he managed everything gracefully: chopping, sautéing, cleaning. Somehow he found time to pour himself a whiskey.
“Something serious?”
“Serious as a heart attack.”
Addie was up on the back of the couch. I leaned back and rested my head on her warm, furry body and crossed my legs on the coffee table.
“Only a sociopath could make a confession and appear so relaxed,” Lucas said.
“I was raised Catholic,” I said. “Confessing is a part-time job.”
“Lay it on me, baby,” he said.
“I think maybe I love Addie more than you.” She perked up at the sound of her name. When Lucas cooked, Addie was ultra-attuned to any clue that a food scrap had been accidentally dropped or a piece of gristle was there for the taking.
“Why do you think that?”
“Well, it’s just that she occupies most of my idle thought.”
He opened a can of tomatoes and added the contents to the sauce, while turning down the flame with his other hand.
“It’s not you,” I said. “It’s Addie. She’s too cute. I love her dog body. I love when she opens her mouth just a little and her tongue pokes out.”
“So, let’s say our house is burning down—”
“The ol’ house-is-on-fire scenario.”
“You wake up and realize you only have time to save one of us.”
I got up from the couch and joined him behind the stove. Addie followed. The sauce simmered and the water was just coming to a boil. I had dallied on the couch just long enough—there was very little left to do. The cutting board and knife needed washing. I turned on the faucet. “Well,” I said. “The three of us sleep in the same bed. So how would I only have time to save one of you?”
“Let’s say I’m passed out cold.”
“Too many whiskeys?”
“Yeah, let’s say I had too many whiskeys and I passed out.”
“Want me to make a salad?” We had a bag of super greens in the keeper that I had purchased at the farmer’s market. Kale and chard were the kinds of greens we forced ourselves to choke down because I insisted on a nutrient-rich diet while we were trying to get pregnant. “I’d just throw you over my shoulder and run out. Addie follows us wherever we go.”
“You do know I weigh more than a sack of potatoes, right?” He shook his head. “Sometimes I wonder how I ever fell for you in the first place.”
I crouched down next to him. Addie stood next to me, ready to play. I bent his body over my shoulder. The front half of Addie’s body bounced up and down. She positioned her face as close to mine as possible and then inched closer, trying to steal a lick. Lifting Lucas’s feet about two inches off the floor, I attempted to stand upright from my squatting position so I could make a move for the door. “Damn, Lucas, packing on some extra pounds, eh? Well, I’d have adrenaline pumping through me. Or! Addie and I could roll you out together.”
“Down the stairs?”
“Bruises beat death.” For salad dressing, I mixed mustard, fresh lemon, and a little bit of olive oil in a jar.
“Let’s just say you are forced to choose,” he said. “Me or Addie. Who will it be?”
“Furry love bug or chiseled hunk?”
“You just said I put on some pounds.”
“Yeah, pounds of muscle.” I squeezed his arm. He grabbed my ass.
“I’d have a moral obligation to save you,” I said.
“Classic speciesism,” he said.
Our whole house smelled of olive oil, onions, and garlic. It was the smell of hygge. “Also, Addie can’t cook. Point, Lucas,” I said.
“But she can lick the dishes,” he said.
“True. She definitely does her part cleaning dishes.”
“But she sheds everywhere.”
“That’s why I need you both.” I pointed at her and then at him. “She sheds and you love to vacuum.”
“I do not love to vacuum.” He poured salt into the boiling water and added the noodles. Lucas would have just winged it, waiting about as long as he thought the noodles would take and then scooping one out with a spoon to test its consistency, but I read the package and set the timer on the oven: eight minutes.
“Then why are you always vacuuming?”
Lucas had this enormous, industrial Shop-Vac with a long nozzle. He stuck it in nooks and crevices and sucked up dog hair.
“Okay, I’ll admit I find it satisfying.”
“I’m going to tell everyone at the bar,” I said. “You’ll catch hell.”
Making fun of the guys at the bar was Lucas’s favorite pastime. Most times the jokes were spontaneous but I suspected they planned the particularly biting repartee in advance.
“Maybe I love vacuuming more than I love you.”
“It’s me or the vacuum. You have to choose.”
“The vacuum doesn’t put out.”
“You could try putting your dick in the nozzle?”
“Suction, no friction,” he said.
“Gross,” I said. “Point, Addie. She can’t talk.”
We had a case of red wine in the dining room, left over from the wedding. I took out a bottle, opened it, and poured two glasses. This was my primary responsibility for the evening. Lucas still had whiskey left in his glass, but he took a sip of wine anyway.
“Take it easy, man,” I said. “You can let it breathe for a minute.” I took a huge swig from my glass. “How’d the fire start, anyway?”
“What’s that got to do with anything?”
“I just need to know if it was your fault or Addie’s. Was it your faulty electrical wiring? Or did Addie turn on the gas stove with her paw when she tried to reach an old pizza box so she could lick it?”
“My wiring is not faulty,” he protested.
“I’m pretty sure it’s illegal to do it yourself, though. Maybe I should call the inspector.”
“No one calls the inspector on themselves,” Lucas said.
I can’t remember what the pasta tasted like. When I imagine this night, my mind inserts a facsimile of taste but I am aware it is an amalgamation of all the pasta that has touched my lips over many years—Uncle Nic’s spaghetti, Antolini’s fettuccini, the sauces Lucas and I made together, and some he made on his own. This bothers me—the fact that I cannot remember the specific pasta that Lucas made on this specific occasion. I recall the exact way he cut the onion: starting with the knife pointed toward the root, using the top knuckle on his left middle finger to guide it, slicing, then rotating the onion and dicing. I can close my eyes and smell the aroma in the house. But I cannot taste the true flavor in my mouth, try as I might. This inability to taste my memory is the thing that always tips me off to its falseness, the idea that I may have made some of it up, that my reporting of the words that passed between us may not be entirely accurate, that the way he looked at me might have been less passionate and more world-weary, that Addie might not have put her nose to my face as I stooped down to lift Lucas from the floor. Knowing this act of remembering is, at the same time, an act of misremembering is the reason every time I imagine this moment, I experience loss—not a single loss but an infinite series of fractional losses, invisible in their minuteness but known entirely to me—a side effect of my addiction to these memories, my need to relive them. Each time I return, I rub away a bit more, but I still must return, again and again, out of fear that losing them is losing everything.
If memory serves, the conversation ended like this:
“I’ll wait ’til we break up, and I’m a jilted lover. That’s how I’ll get back at you. I’ll call the town and tell them you put in faulty wiring.”
“We’re married,” he said. “You can’t break up with me.”
CAL IS RUMMAGING THROUGH his wallet. He’s only a few feet away from me, and I can see he’s carrying a big wad of cash, maybe a thousand bucks, by the looks of it.
He hands me a new business card: FINGER LAKES CONSTRUCTION. Under his name his title reads GENERAL CONTRACTOR, followed by his cell phone number.
“Can I keep this?” I ask.
“Today I did some work for Veronica Lewis,” Cal says.
“Old Lady Lewis?” Jimmy says. Veronica Lewis is a widow in her seventies.
When Cal isn’t pulling in fifty or sixty K for a kitchen remodel or home addition, he moonlights as a handyman, helping out people around town whenever he can. If he knows the person is hard up and can’t pay, he does work for free. Most of the time, people throw him cash. There are a couple of old ladies in town who enjoy his friendship in addition to his handiwork, and I have it on good authority that on multiple occasions he’s been offered a hundred dollars for an hour of light work.
“Whooeee, I bet she wanted some of this.” Short Pete reaches out and tugs Cal’s beard.
“Don’t touch my beard, man. If you must know, her hot water wasn’t working. She asked me to take a look.” He strokes his beard into place with his thumb and forefinger. He can’t think of a snappy comeback. Everything’s a competition of no consequence for these guys—who can get in the sharper dig? Who is right? Most important, who’s funnier?
“Lemme guess,” Yag says. “The pilot light was out.”
Cal tilts his head and smiles. “No, guy. The control panel was melted out. I replaced it. Then I hung a mirror for her.”
“You hung a mirror for her?”
“A heavy mirror.”
“Did you charge her for that?”
“She tips real well but I don’t need the money. That’s not why I do it. She lives alone. Needs the help.”
Just about everyone in town has been on the receiving end of Cal’s kindheartedness at one time or another. He’d spend half a day helping any regular at this bar move furniture for a six-pack of beer. Before he left Veronica’s house, she probably offered him something to eat, and regardless of whether he was hungry, I have no doubt he sat with her for a while and asked her how she was getting along.
I’m glad to have his business card.
“You really know how to hang a mirror,” Short Pete says.
“Cal sure can hang,” Fancy Pete says.
“That’s why the old ladies pay him the big bucks,” Yag says. “Did ya hammer the nail in the wall with your big dick?”
Cal turns his back and walks to the front to check on Summer. His rain jacket hangs over the chair across from her—the only other seat at the table—as if he’s reserving it, though I doubt he will sit down. He slides his bulky wallet into the pocket of the jacket before rubbing foreheads with Summer. She rotates gleefully, keeping her head pressed against him—a kiss and an embrace all at once. It strikes me as so personal, so joyous.
Cal is still nursing the same Bud Light. He has to drive Summer home by ten. By then he won’t be drunk but he won’t be entirely sober either. He’ll be just sober enough that no one here, including me, will think he’s a piece of shit for getting behind the wheel with his little girl in the car.
“My dick joke would’ve gotten a laugh three years ago,” Yag says. He drops his head and tilts his glass toward his eye to observe the bubbles, disappointed in us all.
Once, sitting outside in the garden at the bakery with Samantha—our entire friendship centers around the bakery (there’s only one), the juice bar / broth bar (juice in summer, broth in winter), and the salad place (a chain called Leaf for obvious reasons: Who said the corporate yuppies didn’t get their grubby little fingers this far upstate?)—lattes and almond croissants laid before us, Samantha’s baby sleeping, snug in her bassinet, I mentioned that Cal brought Summer to the bar. I made some mistake of phrasing, a comparison implicit, something like, “It’s cool that you can just bring the kid along.” Samantha’s nose crinkled and her upper lip turned up: disgust evident. “What kind of parent would bring a child to a bar?” she said. “That’s so… sad.”
MY DAD WAS THE second person I profiled in The Breakout Effect, after Pamela Randolph Walsh. His name was the reason the book sold in the first place. I have no delusions about that.
Growing up, I heard bits and pieces of his story. His father, my grandfather, was a tailor from a hilltop town in southern Italy. When my grandmother fell ill, he used all of his savings and all of his time to care for her, and when she died, there was nothing left. Along with my grandmother, their town had slowly begun to die too—the shops closed one by one, first the cobbler, then the baker, then the tailor. The younger generation moved to Rome; the old lived on government subsistence. My father, then only twelve, and his brother, Nico, were sent to live in America. Dad chose to believe the reasons were economic, but based on old pictures, I think he was sent away because he looked so much like his mother.
He was taken in by his aunt and uncle who owned land near Albany, where he was made to work the farm and rarely permitted to attend school. He might have suffered other abuse, though he never spoke of it. It was on that farm that he started dreaming of city skyscrapers, beautiful women, and Italian suits—suits made of the finest wool and silk, materials his father once admired.
At the beginning of his career, my dad purchased a business with warehouse space in New York City’s Garment District. To do this, he borrowed money from wealthy investors. Upon consolidating the business, introducing automation, and laying off well over half the workforce, he realized he had something very valuable: space.
My father’s foray into real estate was not especially interesting. The thing that captivated me was how an Italian immigrant from outside of Albany with no college degree convinced a cohort of wealthy investors to back him in the first place. This, I came to learn, had everything to do with a hilltop town in Italy and a love of fine Italian suits.
The warehouse space was converted into residential lofts and sold off at a fantastic premium. The investors were over the moon. They took my dad and all the wives out to celebrate. According to my mom, when one of the investors was good and drunk, he leaned back in his chair and said cheerfully, “Hell, I can’t even remember why we agreed to give you the money in the first place.”
And the other guy said, “You couldn’t figure out how this kid from Albany got his hands on a nicer suit than yours.”
And the first guy laughed and said, “I figured it was a Mafia thing.”
Then my mom told them my dad’s story, about his father, the tailor from Calabria who sent him to live with his aunt in America.
And one of the investors said, “Well, I’ll be. Son of a tailor spins gold in the Garment District.”
Dad never wanted for capital again. He quickly transitioned from buying buildings, renovating, and managing them, to investing in other people who did all that. Investing in things was a much better gig than actually doing things. He didn’t have to get his hands dirty (no more gloves-off fights with general contractors and tenants). And the best part: the benevolent IRS taxed his income at capital gains rates, so while every other loser punched the clock and shelled out their earnings at much higher ordinary income rates, guys like my dad, who had the money to make money, amassed enormous wealth. This was how the son of a tailor became a private equity mogul. God bless America.
I wanted to know how he had acquired that beautiful suit, perfectly tailored, the best suit in Manhattan. When I called to ask him about it, he said, “What do you remember about your grandfather?”
“He was a short man with small shoes. He wore a tweed coat. His eyes filled with tears when he saw me—I couldn’t have been older than six. He sat with you in the lobby of our hotel while I played by the fireplace. He spoke mostly Italian, and you, mostly English.” That was all I had. “Why didn’t Mom go with us on that trip?” I asked.
“She was in one of her blue periods,” he said. “She couldn’t care for you at the time. I spent our last dollar on airfare for the two of us.”
“I wish I could remember more,” I said. “My grandfather—”
“I asked him to make me a suit,” my dad interrupted. “Before we made the trip to see him, he went to Naples to get the material, the finest in the world. He traded his labor, sewing for a much younger man who had more work than he could handle, making suits for Swiss bankers and German executives, French actors and Italian musicians. Your grandfather worked three months for three meters of material. He’d touched nothing like it before: a luxurious vicuña blend, invented by a French cloth maker. I still say that cheap Napoletano got the better trade. A quarter year of labor from one of the best tailors in Italy. Younger men don’t stitch with the same skill. But the old man returned with the material he needed. Mine was the last suit he ever made. In all my years, I’ve never found another that fits to such perfection.”
Picturing my father and grandfather in that hotel lobby, I realized there must have been an intimacy between them that I could not understand as a small child. The old man would have pulled out his tape measure and recorded my father’s every dimension. The process probably took a long time. I could only imagine the care he put into every stitch.
There was a question on the tip of my tongue, the only question that mattered, the question I could not ask: Did we go to Italy so your father, mio nonno, could meet his only grandchild before he died, or did we travel all that way to pick up a suit?
My father transitioned the conversation back to me.
“What do you want to write a book for, anyway?” His tone was gruff.
“Because that’s what I want to do, write and teach.”
“Your little teaching job has been a nice break from the real world.” I pictured him in a fine suit as he spoke these words.
“In what way is it little?”
“I’m sorry, your current teaching job.”
“Because it pays little?”
“Well, yes, for one thing.” He wasn’t speaking into the receiver when he said this. His voice began to trail off.
“Because it carries little status?”
“You used to be so ambitious.” When he said these words, he spoke directly into the phone, loud, abrupt, with a certain righteousness, which came across almost like anger. There were many things my father said to me over the years that annoyed or offended me, which I have long since forgotten, but these words stayed with me. They were with me when I read my first negative review; they were with me when I moved into my one-bedroom, garden-level apartment; they are with me here, at The Final Final. You used to be so ambitious.
“This is ambitious, Dad,” I said. “This is the most ambitious thing I’ve ever done.”
“It’s not too late to go back to finance. Use those degrees I paid for.”
That’s what it always came back to with him: a transaction. He’d invested in me and I wasn’t paying off.
Dad didn’t bother to read the book until it became a best seller. Then he told me it wasn’t half-bad.
I HAVE THIS OLD picture of my parents in their twenties: my dad with his carefree coif of thick, black hair, skinny with tan legs, and my mom in a bathing suit and big sunglasses. I use it as a bookmark for whatever I happen to be reading. From time to time, I examine the photo and try to imagine how they were back then. The picture was taken on their honeymoon, before they had any money. They are standing in front of a tiny, rustic cabin, which apparently had no electricity or running water. For a full week, they washed by swimming in the lake. The people in the photo aren’t touching but there is an energy between them, apparent in the way they look at the camera while maintaining awareness of each other, and they are at ease with themselves and the world, which anyone would notice in the looseness of their bodies, the way they appear to dance even when still. They look like completely different people—different from the people I know now and different from the people who raised me. I don’t recognize these happy people, so to imagine them as they were is a completely speculative act, a construction based partially on the anecdotes of my youth but mostly on pure fantasy. If I could not distinguish my dad’s watery, calabresi eyes, or my mom’s small, celestial nose—features I see in the mirror—it would be easier to assume these people were not my parents at all. Knowing who they are now creates cognitive dissonance that, try as I might, I cannot reconcile. How did the happiness of youth, and, beyond happiness, the characteristics of the self, existing in relation to another human being and to the world, undergo this titanic shift, such that the landscape of being is fundamentally altered and essentially unrecognizable but for a couple of lingering, ancestral features?
In my adolescence, my parents presented a certain reality to me: they were right and I was wrong. That reality is like old skin. It itches a little. It flakes. Yet it still offers a layer of protection from the world. Even with miles between us, I find that skin difficult to shed. Still, I cut the cord a long time ago, which is more than I can say for Lucas.
We argued about this, shortly after we married.
We were in bed by midnight—it was definitely no earlier than eleven thirty—and Lucas’s cell rang. The sound jolted me. I could tell who it was immediately by the way he shot up and turned his back to me. I could tell who it was even before he said, “Mom.”
My first thought was that something bad had happened, like maybe his dad suddenly fell ill. She had never called at this hour before. Lucas spoke calmly and didn’t ask about the old man. He grabbed paper and pen on the nightstand and started jotting something down as she spoke to him. I crawled over to his side of the bed to look over his shoulder. Either my eyes deceived me, or it was exactly what I feared it would be: a grocery list. They had this weird practice of ordering basic grocery items in bulk quantities. She was telling him to order lentils and couscous. He eventually told her he loved her and hung up the phone.
There is something in the water in this town. A mysterious chemical that keeps grown men attached, a castration of independence. Lucas’s childhood bedroom was perfectly preserved in his parents’ house. We slept there once when the kitchen renovation made our house temporarily unlivable. On the dresser, there was an old Wheaties box from the nineties, featuring the Yankees as the American League Champs. The cereal was still in it.
Really, though, who am I to say what is a healthy relationship and what is not? Most people tell themselves the healthy ones are those that last, but we all know that’s not true.
“Lucas,” I said. “Your mom cannot call here at this hour.”
“We weren’t asleep.”
“I’d like to be asleep.”
“I can’t tell her not to call. What if something happens?”
“Does her giving you a grocery list constitute something happening?”
“You know what I mean.”
“No, Lucas. Well, yes, I know what you mean, but I completely disagree.”
“Fine. I’ll tell her not to call so late,” he said.
“Why are you ordering her bulk groceries anyway? Seems like she’s perfectly capable of using the telephone.”
“I’m helping out my mom, Emma. Would you like anything from the health food store?”
“What century are we living in? Can’t you just set up a recurring shipment on Amazon? Or would all that cardboard disrupt Joan’s vastu shastra?”
“Can we just go to bed?”
“You need to cut the cord. You’re a grown man. How does it go again? ‘A man shall leave his father and his mother and hold on to his wife.’ Something like that?”
He didn’t respond. He was on his stomach with his head turned away from me.
“You aren’t listening,” I said.
“I was listening. For the longest time,” he said, and he shoved his face down into the pillow.
Joan told me once that I should meditate. Every morning she sat cross-legged on the floor and stared at the wall for fifteen minutes. She called it mindfulness. I told her that every morning I hit snooze and stared at the ceiling for fifteen minutes. I called it lethargy.
“I can’t do dinner with your parents this weekend, Lucas.”
“Why?”
“I have to work on the book. Sorry,” I said.
He was still on his stomach but his head was turned toward me, half-sunk into the pillow. From this position, he could look at me with only his left eye. A cyclops dagger.
“You can take a break for dinner,” he said.
“It always takes, like, three hours. That’s too much time,” I said.
“We were at the bar last night for six.”
“That’s different.”
“Time is time,” Lucas said.
“Friday night: I needed a drink.”
“You can have a drink at my folks’ house.”
“Your mom judges me.”
“Dad drinks beer in the morning, Em. No one is judging you.”
“Sorry. Just tell her I’m not feeling well this week.”
“I’d prefer it if you just come with me,” he said.
I told him I didn’t want to eat gluten-free, non-GMO casseroles fortified with flax. I told him I could taste the flax and I didn’t like it. I told him I knew his mother made his lunch most days because I saw the Tupperware in the sink. I told him a man in his thirties should make his own lunch.
I told him, “I gave up everything to live in this town; the least you could do is give up your mother’s teat.”
JIMMY WEDGES HIS BODY next to me at the bar. He orders another stein of beer for himself and tells Amelia to put my next drink on his tab. He’s either apologizing for Yag’s behavior or paying a debt. Lucas was the same way when people bought him drinks. He never left the bar without returning the favor.
He looks tired now, less spirited. A day of hard drinking and cigarettes and greasy food is finally catching up with him. Amelia pours his beer and he’s gone, back at the pool table with Yag.
When Jimmy’s sister died, Lucas didn’t know what to say to him. For weeks, he fretted about this. He stopped calling. Jimmy had taken a break from the bar—he dabbled with AA for a bit—so they were virtually cut off. Out of the blue, Lucas received a text message from Jimmy that read, Nostalgia comes from the Greek: nostos, homecoming, and algos, pain. Most people wouldn’t know how to respond but Lucas understood what Jimmy was after immediately. What’s the best way to respond to a fact? More facts. Lucas knew the origin of the word nostalgia already. He’d read about it somewhere. He wrote, Defined as a “cerebral disease of demonic cause that originated from continuous vibrations of animal spirits.” They riffed off this for a while. And with that, they found their way back in.
I’ll never forget this exchange for two reasons. First, the idea of the portmanteau, homecoming and pain, is so precisely relevant to Jimmy. His return to our town, his homecoming, made him a witness to pain, and his continual presence here is the enactment of pain. And second, animal spirits is a term that has been co-opted by economists and investors to describe psychological factors that drive certain market outcomes, and the fact that it is conceptually connected to pain is, ultimately, what The Breakout Effect is about.
A SPARROW IS IN the bar, flying into walls: a bat in the belfry.
Amelia appears from the cellar door, wielding a broom. She points to Fancy Pete. “Hold ’er open!”
The sparrow drops to the floor and begins to hop. Amelia coaxes the bird toward the front door. I think it’s working.
As regulars, we believe our presence here is an inalienable right of higher order than the natural world. The bird has no claim to this place. She is an interloper, infringing on our interests, which are to drink, and occasionally to talk, and, in rare instances, to make peace with our lots.
I’ve decided the bird is female: a she. I’m not sure why; I know nothing about birds.
She panics, takes flight again. A few patrons duck down on the bar, like school children playing heads down, thumbs up.
A series of loud, sharp chirps rap, one after another, in quick, uneven intervals. The song has no rhythm; the lyrics are chaos. It isn’t the frenetic movement of the sparrow but this unyielding noise, a combination of strange vocalization and flapping wings, that makes her presence alarming. We are under siege.
Because we are still relatively sober—not sober, exactly, but still mindful—both individually and collectively, nothing escapes our notice, no friend or foe, pleasure or annoyance. Everything either adds to or detracts from a great, invisible basin of grievances to which each of us contributed, one by one, upon walking through the front door. Behind the bar, a few photos of bartenders and regulars are tacked up. Among them, there is a single tarot card depicting Lady Justice and her scales. I imagine our basin of grievances rests on one side of the scale, and as the night progresses, it is counterbalanced by inebriation on the other side. The sweet spot is when we are collectively drunk enough to balance the burden but not so drunk that we have tipped the scale in the other direction.
The bird flies directly into the mirror behind the bar: smack! She drops into a line of bottles. Glass shatters on the floor. I cross my arms over my face. She takes flight again, this time in the direction of the pool table.
Somehow this bird, large as sparrows go but small for a creature of the earth, has us all subdued. How many times have I seen a sparrow in a tree outside my window? A little brown friend, about the size of my hand. A welcome guest in my yard. When the bird leaves the tree and enters the bar, she is suddenly different: predatory. Outside she is light and gentle, in search of grain and seeds. Inside, she works herself into a frenzy. The bird hasn’t changed; the place has changed. To her, the bar must seem oppressively small, a cage, or alternatively, dangerously large, a labyrinth. Removed from her natural habitat, she is lost and alone, a threat to herself and others. Take away the habitat and the creature scarcely has a chance.
The Final Final is my natural habitat, but it wasn’t always. I’m like an animal inured to captivity. I can no longer survive in the wild.
“Call animal control,” someone says, but we all know that will take too long.
Cal takes the broom from Amelia, tells her that she’s scaring the bird and that she should hit the lights.
“Turn them off?”
“Yep. Do it.”
Amelia trusts Cal.
The front and back doors are propped open with bar stools. Amelia hits the lights, and the place turns into a tunnel, black in the middle, light at the ends. This is the first time I’ve been in The Final Final with all the lights out. I’m surprised by how little light makes its way in. The front window is tinted black, partially covered by a low-hanging awning and a couple of fluorescent beer signs, hung from the outside. There are no back windows and there are solid brick walls on either side of the bar. One side abuts the alley, and the other separates the bar from a late-night take-out spot, called China Star.
The bird’s instinct will take it toward the streetlight. This is our collective expectation, as if we are churchgoers awaiting a reckoning.
The darkness lends a special quality to the bar, a false expansiveness: a beautiful emptiness. No one speaks. No one moves. The TV audio is off. The jukebox does not have a queue. Stillness hijacks the room.
The bird is quiet now too. She is resting on the floor in the middle of the bar. Her tiny bird head turns to the back door and then to the front. She decides between the two ends of the tunnel. It occurs to me that the expression The light at the end of the tunnel carries with it a false idea of forward progress. In fact, there is light at both ends of the tunnel, which can be reached either by forward movement or by turning back to the place from whence one came.
Four TVs are mounted above, two directly over the bar, and two at either end. The faces of the patrons, men bellied up, are illuminated by their glow and the beer signs hanging behind the bar. Some combination of sunlight from outdoor work, cigarettes, and hard drinking has deepened the lines on their faces, which are exaggerated by the bluish light. To my left, Cal, Short Pete, and Fancy Pete sit, one, two, three.
I want to hold on to this moment a little bit longer.
I think about all those black birds, dead on the shoulder of the 101 near San Francisco. Maybe The Final Final is about to have an earthquake. Or maybe I’ve just had too many whiskeys already and I need to go home and go to bed.
The bird hops, rotating toward the front door. She flaps her wings a couple of times. She pushes off. Halfway to the door her feet tuck in, like landing gear retracting into the belly of the plane. Then she is gone.