You fall, and they catch you.
I don’t know a whole lot about parenting, being twelve years old and never even having kissed a girl, but I know that’s a big part of it (the catching, not the kissing). They wait at the end of the slide the first time you go down. They stand at the bottom of the stairs. They hold your hand as you teeter along the icy driveway. You’re going to fall. They know it. So they spend fifty-nine seconds of every minute watching, so that they can be there when your shoelaces trip you up, waiting to say, “I got you.”
Except when they don’t.
I learned to ride a bike at age eight. Later than both of my sisters. It was a matter of choice—at least that’s what I told myself. I liked to run, and my two spindly legs could take me anywhere I wanted to go. But the truth was, I was scared. It was only the frustration of watching my older sister zip around the block with no hands, mocking me with her stuck-out tongue, that persuaded me to learn. On a sun-drenched Saturday afternoon in the middle of June, while Cass was at art camp so she couldn’t make fun of me.
I learned on her old bike—salmon pink with purple flowers and a white plastic basket with Dora the Explorer on the front. That bike was the real motivator. The moment I could make it down our street and back without falling, Dad said he would take me to the store to pick out something a little more my speed, meaning the red-and-blue Spider-Man bike that I’d had my eyes on for weeks.
But first I had to learn to stay upright. And Mom had volunteered to be my teacher.
The same woman who insisted we keep those plastic baby-proofing plugs on the unoccupied outlets in our kitchen permanently because one of us could accidentally slip and jam a butter knife into it and electrocute ourselves—she was going to teach me to ride a bike.
So she stood behind me, one hand next to mine on the handlebar, the other on the seat, pushing me, steadying me, doing all the work for me, until I started to pedal faster than she could push. And even then she was running beside me, huffing words of encouragement, refusing to let go.
And because she wouldn’t let go, I never managed to pick up enough speed. I would wobble and panic and scream, and she would stop me before the bike tipped over. Time and time again.
“He just can’t seem to get his balance,” she said to my father, who had come out to check on my progress, which was effectively zero.
“Could have something to do with the knee pads you’re making him wear,” he joked. Then he offered to take over the lessons, suggesting that maybe my mother go read a book in the backyard or something.
“You don’t want me to watch,” she guessed.
“You don’t want to watch,” he insisted.
Three minutes later, I found myself at the top of our sharply slanted driveway, my knee and elbow pads in a pile in the grass, though my Spidey helmet (to match my future bike), was still snugly buckled to my noggin.
“Forty feet,” Dad said, thumping me playfully on the top of the helmet. “The driveway is forty feet long, then it spits straight out to the street. You don’t even have to turn. Just let gravity do the work, and when you hit the pavement, start to pedal. Easy peasy.”
My father thought organic chemistry was easy peasy.
“I’m scared,” I admitted. The driveway suddenly looked incredibly steep from atop Cass’s sparkly, training-wheel-less bike. A veritable Everest. A one-way ticket to a fractured skull.
“It’s all right,” Dad said. “Nothing terrible is going to happen to you. I promise.”
My father never promised anything he couldn’t live up to, at least not to me.
I took a deep, determined breath and nodded.
Dad let go.
The bike quickly gathered speed as it rolled down the driveway, my feet slipping off the pedals that started spinning too quickly, all my concentration on just keeping the handlebars straight and not veering into the grass. And for a moment, it felt like I was flying.
Then the bike bumped off the curb and out into the street. I glanced behind me to my father, who was still standing at the top of the driveway, making pedaling motions with his hands. My focus lost, I felt the handlebars twist and frantically yanked them the other way. One foot slipped off the pedal again, the bike began to wobble, and I went down. Hard.
My Spidey head bounced a little. Tiny pebbles pockmarked my palms. My knee was barely scraped, but the rash on my arm just below my elbow was raw and already starting to spot over with blood. It hurt like a hundred beestings.
Dad was beside me instantly, it seemed, untangling me from the bike and pulling me into his lap as I started to cry, cradling my bloody arm. Dad gave it a good look, then inspected the rest of me before unbuckling my helmet and setting it beside my bike with its still-spinning back tire.
“That was good,” he said.
Good? I thought. How in the world was that good? I’d barely made it those forty feet.
“You promised,” I sobbed at him.
“I promised nothing terrible would happen,” he corrected. “This isn’t terrible. This is a scratch. And scratches are just reminders of what to do differently next time.” He wiped my leaky nose with his sleeve and stood me up. “Come on. Let’s get something on that before your mom sees.”
He guided my bike—Cass’s bike—to the top of the driveway with one hand, guiding me with the other. We snuck into the bathroom and got the bloody elbow cleaned off. Then Dad led me back out front. “This time, don’t forget to keep pedaling. It’s easier to stay balanced when you are moving fast,” he said.
That didn’t make any sense at all. It was harder to do things fast. Coloring. Using scissors. Solving Rubik’s cubes. I shook my head. The man was crazy.
“You can do this, Rion.” He patted the bicycle seat. I considered refusing, kicking the bike over, and running to my room, but I didn’t. Partly because I wanted to learn. Partly because I wanted that Spider-Man bike.
But mostly because he said I could.
“Second time’s the charm.” Dad held the bike steady as I climbed back on. He made sure my helmet was buckled tight, and then he let go again.
He was wrong.
Second time was not the charm. Third neither. I fell four more times that day, in fact, though none of the others was as bloody as the first, and after each fall, I just grew more determined not to fall again. Until I made it forty feet and forty feet more. Until I heard him cheering me on.
When Mom saw the dirty bandage two hours later, she still insisted on dousing my entire arm in hydrogen peroxide, which made me grimace, because I really couldn’t stand the smell of the stuff.
It stank all the way to Walmart, so I just stuck my head out the window, smiling the whole trip.
They catch you or they don’t. Sometimes it’s on purpose. I guess because they know it’s only going to be a scratch—nothing that a Band-Aid and a cookie won’t fix. But sometimes they don’t catch you because they can’t, because they don’t get there in time, or they had no idea that you were about to crash.
Or maybe because they were falling themselves.
I was a mess.
I had blood on one sleeve of my shirt from an oak tree’s ragged claws, and a matching spot of strawberry ice cream on the other sleeve. I also had a mark where Cass had jabbed me too hard with a stick the other morning, and a bit of a bruise where she had punched me even harder. My nails were still caked with dirt, despite my shower, and my hair was going haywire. But I didn’t care. I was running on two thousand calories of ice cream (estimated), and the rush that comes from tracking your dead grandfather through the streets of his hometown.
“‘Look for me in the bottom of the bottle,’” Lyra repeated, still holding the jumble that she’d unscrambled.
“Sounds like the lyrics to a bad country song,” Cass said.
“Name a good country song,” I challenged.
Cass opened her mouth and then closed it. She only knew show tunes. And the Biebs. Nobody in my family had any taste in music.
Dad was quiet. He leaned against the Tank, arms crossed, looking across the parking lot at kids still spinning on the roundabout. They were different kids at this point, but they were going through the same motions, taking turns pushing each other, leaning over the edge, just far enough so they could imagine falling off. I wondered what thoughts were spinning inside his head. If he was thinking about Papa Kwirk or Grandma Shelley or about me falling out of that tree on top of him. Or maybe he was just trying to figure out where to go next.
“South Koreans sometimes turn their dead into decorative beads and then stick them in a bottle,” Lyra informed us. “But that’s mostly because they’re running out of room to bury people.”
“I think that’s enough from National Geographic for now, Ly,” my mother said.
“Actually, I read about that one in one of Dad’s science magazines.”
The dangers of keeping your reading material in the bathroom where your ten-year-old daughter can get to them.
“You don’t really think Aunt Gertie put Papa Kwirk in a bottle, do you?” Cass asked. “I mean, wouldn’t that be weird?”
“Yeah,” I said, “that would be weird.”
“‘Willow and Main.’ Is that a corner here in town?” Mom looked at Dad, who just frowned back at her. He had the same look on his face as this morning, when he’d heard about the computer hacking at Kaslan’s.
“I know where it is,” he said. He looked at the book in his hands, the story he’d never had a chance to finish. “I’ve been there before.”
The area around Willow and Main Street was nothing like the picturesque blocks of downtown Greenburg. There were no cobblestone paths. No old-fashioned streetlamps. No fancy signs with gilded lettering telling you how long buildings had been around. Instead, the streets were potholed, the sidewalks littered with trash. We passed a series of chain restaurants and strip malls where every second building was a nail salon and every third building was for rent. We passed three different tire stores. I suspected the potholes kept them all in business.
The intersection itself had a drugstore, a jewelry store, and a bank. It seemed like a curious combination, just begging to be on the local news. You could buy a pair of pantyhose from the one to use as a mask while you robbed the other two.
And to work up the courage for your crime spree, you could first have a drink at Bailey’s Pub, right across the street.
That’s where we were headed, Dad said. I nodded. Seemed like as good a place as any to find an empty bottle.
He pulled the Tank into the pub’s parking lot and stared at the front entrance for a solid minute, almost as if he was waiting on Papa Kwirk to come strolling through. The neon writing on the darkened windows advertised half off cocktails during happy hour and karaoke every Thursday night. The sign said they were open from noon to midnight. According to the clock on the dash, it was well after four. We’d spent the entire afternoon chasing after Papa Kwirk, and we ended up at a bar, of all places.
“I think I’ve heard of this place,” Cass said.
I thought I had to. At least heard of an Old Man Bailey. I remember once Papa Kwirk telling me that he wouldn’t still be around if it weren’t for Old Man Bailey, or, as he put it, “that old coot saw me through some pretty hard times.” Of course, Tasha’s Dad said the same kinds of things about Papa Kwirk. Maybe that’s just how people talked in Greenburg.
“Home away from home,” Dad mumbled, more to himself, I think, than to us. I had to lean forward from the back seat to hear. “Two or three nights a week, I’d hear your grandfather leave. He probably thought I was asleep. Heard the click of the front door and the car starting in the driveway. I’d get up and watch out my bedroom window as he turned at the end of our block. Some nights it would take me hours to fall back asleep. In the mornings, I’d ask him where he’d been, like he was some teenager breaking curfew. He’d just say, ‘I was at Bailey’s,’ and that would be the end of it. He’d shuffle off to bed and be snoring before he hit the sheets.”
I shot Cass a did-you-know-about-this look. She shrugged a news-to-me shrug. I knew that Dad had spent a lot of time alone after Grandma died, but I guess I never stopped to think about what that meant, outside of him knowing so many theme songs from hours of watching cartoons.
Now I knew: he was alone in the house because Papa Kwirk had been here instead.
I tried to imagine what it would be like, having your one parent—your only parent—leave you by yourself in the middle of the night to come to a place like this. No one to stay up and wait with you till that parent returned. Nobody to teach you how to play poker with Goldfish crackers. Nobody to slip off your shoes and tuck you in.
The Tank’s engine continued to purr; Dad’s hands still rested on the wheel. For a moment, I thought he was going to throw it in reverse and drive us back to Aunt Gertie’s, but then he turned the key and unbuckled his seat belt.
“All right. Let’s go.”
“I’m not sure the kids are allowed,” Mom said.
“It’s the middle of the afternoon,” Dad countered. “And there’s no sign on the door saying otherwise. Besides, it’s not like we’re going in there to drink.”
Our parents never opened a bottle of wine with dinner. When New Year’s Eve rolled around and we had people over to watch the ball drop, my parents would take an obligatory sip of champagne and leave the rest in the glass while my sisters and I drank sparkling grape juice out of plastic cups. I’d never seen Papa Kwirk drink anything but coffee and ginger ale either, though. Of course, he and Aunt Gertie always left before New Year’s.
I’d been in restaurants with bars before, but I’d never been any place that called itself a pub. I expected old, dark wood, gouged and stained. Cigarette burns in the seat fabric. Peanut shells and the smell of stale sweat, a dartboard missing half its darts, and maybe a pool table with a long, jagged scratch down the middle where a fight had broken out and a chip in the wood where someone had forcibly lost a tooth.
Instead, we basically walked into an Applebee’s.
The fluorescent lighting was bright and warm, showing off clean tables and floors. An odd assortment of decorations hung from the walls, everything from old board-game boxes to airplane propellers to rowboat oars. There were three times as many booths as barstools, and the whole place smelled like steak sauce rather than BO. Instead of flashing neon advertisements for Budweiser, there was a giant chalkboard that said New IPAs. The same chalkboard said the soup of the day was tomato bisque. “What the heck is bisque?” I asked Lyra, but even she didn’t know.
As soon as we stepped in, the bartender, a young woman with short spikey blue hair, waved to us. “Hi there. Welcome to Bailey’s,” she said, obviously thinking nothing of a family of five showing up at her door at four in the afternoon. “Dining in or carrying out?”
The thought of eating anything made my stomach clench. Eight scoops of ice cream were still taking a very rocky road through my plumbing.
“Neither,” Dad said, shuffling up to the bar so he wouldn’t have to shout to be heard. There were a dozen or so people in the pub already, scattered at different tables, perhaps enjoying the half-off cocktails. Nobody was paying any attention to us. “This may sound strange, but I’m actually here looking for my father, Frank Kwirk.”
“Kwirk?” The bartender repeated. “All right. Hang on a second.” She banged an empty mug on the bar. “Excuse me. Is there a Kwirk in the house?”
A handful of strange faces looked over at us. A few shook their heads.
“Ah,” Dad said quickly, reaching for the bartender’s wrist, maybe to stop her from banging again. “Sorry. I guess I wasn’t clear. He’s not, like, here here. And if he is here, I’m pretty sure he’s not going to answer you.” Dad half laughed to himself. “You see, he’s dead.”
The bartender yanked her hand away. “Okay. Seriously creepy.”
Dad put his hands up defensively. “No, not like that. I don’t mean like his ghost is haunting the place or anything. I mean his actual dead body could be here somewhere.”
“Good job, Dad,” I whispered. “That’s much better.”
The bartender with the blue hair took several more steps back. “Riiiight,” she said, stretching the word as long as it would go. “Let me just go get my manager.” She raised a finger before disappearing around the corner of the bar and down a hallway. I figured she was calling the police. Or she’d gone to get a baseball bat or a gun. I’m not sure what it was about this town that made me think everybody owned a firearm. Maybe I’d inherited some of my mother’s paranoia.
Dad didn’t seem fazed, though. He looked around at the tacky decorations and the digital kiosks on each of the tables. “It’s not quite how I remembered it,” he said, but before he could elaborate, the bartender with the blue hair returned, along with an older man dressed in a button-down shirt and jeans. He looked plenty big enough to throw us out without having to resort to using a baseball bat. The top two buttons of his shirt were undone, showing off a broad chest with lots of hair, just like Papa Kwirk. A pointed goatee framed his smile. He looked oddly familiar.
“Fletcher Kwirk?” he boomed. “Hi. Isaac Alvero. We met yesterday at the memorial service?”
Dad shook his head as he shook the man’s hand. “I’m sorry, I’m afraid I don’t remember. There was . . .” Dad struggled. “There was a lot going on.”
“You’re telling me. That marching band was somethin’ else, wasn’t it? Your aunt Gertrude really knows how to make an impression.”
“She does at that,” Mom agreed.
Mr. Alvero gestured to the closest booth and asked us all to sit. Lyra and Cass somehow managed to squeeze me between them, while the manager of Bailey’s Pub pulled up a chair at the edge. “So, what can I do for you all today?”
The way he said it was peculiar, like all my teachers who already know the answer but don’t know if you know it and are tired of just feeding it to you. I’m not sure if Dad picked up on it, though. He was too busy taking everything in. “This place sure is different,” he said.
“That’s how it goes. You gotta change with the times. We cater to a younger crowd now,” the big man with the goatee explained. “Locally sourced lettuce on your free-range grilled chicken sandwich and all that.”
“And how long have you worked here, Mr. Alvero?” Mom asked, probably just making conversation. Or maybe she was getting at something.
“Well, I’ve only been the manager here for five years, but before that I was a bartender for almost twenty. Back then this place was a real hole-in-the-wall. That’s probably the Bailey’s you remember,” he said, looking directly at my father.
Dad shrugged. “I’d only been here once or twice,” he said. “Frank was the regular.”
“That he was,” Isaac said.
“Wait, so you knew Papa Kwirk?” Cass asked.
The manager looked at us three Kwirk kids scrunched together on one side. “You kidding? I got to know your granddad pretty good over the years. We talked all the time.” The word “granddad” struck me as funny. Papa Kwirk was no granddad. Granddads drove Buicks; Papa Kwirk rode a Harley.
The front door opened, and a young couple came in and took seats at the bar. Mr. Alvero waved to them and they waved back. I tried to picture Papa Kwirk, about my father’s age, sitting on one of those stools, telling jokes to a twenty-five-year-old Isaac Alvero behind the bar, both of them with their top two buttons undone. I wondered what all they talked about. Baseball? Money problems? The price of gas? If I had to guess, I’d venture that Isaac had heard Papa Kwirk’s old war stories as many times as we had. Maybe more.
“Doesn’t surprise me,” Dad said. “He spent a lot of time here. Over a lot of years.”
“You could say that,” the manager said after a moment.
“Stayed right up until closing time most nights, didn’t he?”
I could sense something sour seeping into Dad’s voice. Like the aftertaste of New Year’s sparkling grape juice.
Mr. Alvero stopped smiling. “Most nights. Yeah.”
Dad nodded. He looked like one of those TV lawyers, pressuring a witness. He leaned across the table. “So let’s be honest, because there’s really no point in hiding it. What are we talking? Fifteen? Twenty hours a week? Just how much time was my father here?”
Isaac Alvero scratched his goatee, though he didn’t flinch from my father’s stare. “Couldn’t tell you for certain,” he said with a shrug. “Though we’ve probably got it written down somewhere, if you really want to know.”
Dad laughed a strangled kind of laugh. “Did you hear that, kids? They kept track of how many hours your grandfather spent here. Now what does that tell you?”
I wasn’t sure, but Isaac was quick with a response. “Don’t know what it tells you, but it told us how much to pay him.”
Dad’s laughing stopped, his face pinching like he’d bitten into a spoiled-milk-flavored jelly bean.
Mom shook her head. “Wait. Did you say pay him? For what, exactly?”
“Busing tables, mostly,” Isaac said with a shrug. “Sweeping and mopping. Tossin’ out troublemakers. Occasionally he’d have to fill in on the grill, but he was a lousy cook. Man couldn’t make a bowl of pretzels if you helped him open the bag. But you probably know that, being his son and all.” The manager of Bailey’s fixed my father with an amused look.
The image in my head suddenly shifted. No longer was Papa Kwirk huddled over an empty beer glass with his elbows on the bar. Instead he had his arms in suds up to those elbows, scrubbing out shot glasses.
Dad leaned back and shook his head. “No. I’m sorry, Mr. Alvero. My father didn’t work here. He was a repairman all his life. He worked for the same heating and air-conditioning company for twenty-eight years. He just retired, what was it, three years ago?” He looked to Mom for confirmation. “I know. We sent him a card.”
It was true. I remembered signing it. We were invited to the retirement party, of course, but we didn’t go because Dad had to work overtime in the lab that weekend. Aunt Gertie called and told us all about it, though. They gave Papa Kwirk a plaque to commemorate his years of service, plus free heating and air-conditioning tune-ups for life. Sort of like giving Michelangelo free art lessons as a thank-you for painting the Sistine Chapel.
“Well, sure, that was his day job,” Isaac explained. “But then he was also here a few nights a week. I should know. I was here right along with him. Ol’ Frank, he was good at cleaning house. Come three o’clock in the a.m., he’d start to herd the regulars through the door, but always in such a way that you didn’t feel like you were being thrown out, you know what I mean?”
Dad shook his head. “No. You’re wrong. I’m sorry, but you’re wrong. Frank left me home alone after Mom died. He snuck out in the middle of the night and came home reeking, barely able to stand.”
“I’m telling you, Mr. Kwirk, your father was an employee,” Mr. Alvero insisted.
“And I’m telling you my father was a drunk!”
Dad’s voice was suddenly loud enough that a few of the pub’s patrons glanced our way. I sensed Cass tense up next to me, but she didn’t make a sound. This was one of those sit-quietly-and-soak-it-in kinds of conversations. Dad gritted his teeth as the other customers went back to their own conversations.
Mom gave Mr. Alvero a sympathetic glance, but the pub’s manager seemed to shrug and nod at the same time. “I can’t say you’re wrong,” he admitted. “In fact, there were some nights I ended up kicking him out. But there came a point in Frank’s life when I think he saw the road he was walking, and he knew he had to change. And it was about that same time that Old Man Bailey offered him a job. A chance to straighten himself out, and a little more money to give his son what he wanted.”
“What I wanted?” Dad said, clearly trying to control his voice. “The only thing I ever wanted was to—”
“Get the hell outa Greenburg,” Mr. Alvero said, snatching the words from the tip of Dad’s tongue. “That’s how Frank used to put it. ‘Gotta save for college,’ he’d say. ‘Get my boy into a good school and away from his old man.’” Isaac Alvero shook his head. “He was always bragging on you, about how smart you were. Fletcher Kwirk. Science whiz. Figured you’d go somewhere with a great reputation. Definitely out of state. All the way to—where’d you go to college again?”
“Columbia University,” Lyra piped up proudly, apparently not feeling the sit-quietly vibe that Cass and I were giving off. Dad didn’t look proud, though. He looked like someone had punched him right in the heart.
“Columbia,” Isaac repeated. “That’s right. New York City. Nice school.”
I knew “nice” meant pricey. Hard for a single father to afford only working one job as a repairman. Dad continued to shake his head.
“Kids are expensive,” Isaac continued, looking over at my mother. “You know that, Mrs. Kwirk. I got two girls of my own. Between the clothes and the car insurance and the ‘Can I have a few bucks for this?’ and ‘Can you give me twenty dollars for that?’ And don’t even get me started on college. My oldest wants to go to Oxford. Oxford. In England. Look at me. I manage this place. You think I got the money for Oxford?” Isaac Alvero laughed again. He had a husky kind of laugh.
The door opened, letting in the sounds of the street outside, and Dad started doing that thing with his fingers, the itsy-bitsy spider motions he’d made the night we found out about Papa Kwirk. “I knew he saved money . . . ,” he said, looking down at his hands. “Between what he’d saved and the scholarships . . . but he never said anything about working here.”
Isaac shrugged. “Wiping up whisky and scrubbing out urinals ain’t anyone’s dream job, Mr. Kwirk. Maybe he thought you’d think less of him if you knew.”
“Think less of him?” Dad looked up. “Less than believing he was sneaking out of the house to get drunk?”
“Sometimes we don’t want people to know how tough things are, ’cause when they do, they feel like they owe us something. And that can be a hard feeling to live with.”
I pictured Papa Kwirk again, this time stumbling through the door at four in the morning, wobbly from exhaustion, desperate to kick off the work boots that he’d worn for twenty hours straight. No wonder he was still out cold when Dad woke up. Young Fletcher, fixing his own breakfast, packing his own lunch, seeing himself to the bus stop. Coming home to an empty house.
Starting to hate his own dad.
How does something like that slip by you? If either Mom or Dad had a second job, wouldn’t I notice?
But this was Fletcher Kwirk. The scientist. For him, the simplest solution is usually the right one. And the simplest explanation was this: Papa Kwirk was an alcoholic. He went to the bar. He came home nursing a headache and smelling of beer. It was a good hypothesis, except Dad never bothered to test it. He’d just always assumed he was right.
“I’m not saying Frank wasn’t what you say he was.” Mr. Alvero looked my father square in the eyes. “I’m just saying that’s not all he was.”
The manager of Bailey’s Pub said he had something he wanted to show us. Something he’d been hanging on to. It was back in the office—he just had to run and get it.
Dad was obviously shaken. I tried to think of something I could say to him, but all I could come up with was some sarcastic comment about me not wanting to go to Oxford. “I think I need some water,” he said, and stood up to go talk to the blue-haired girl who probably still thought he was crazy. Mom got up to follow him.
“Sit tight,” she said, leaving me smooshed between my sisters, too tight already.
“Papa Kwirk was an alcoholic?” Cass whispered when she was sure our parents were out of earshot. “How come Dad never told us?”
I tried to imagine how that particular dinner conversation would have gone. “Made a new jelly bean at work today. Tasted terrible. Had to drink three cups of water to get the taste out of my mouth. Hey, speaking of drinking and terrible things, did you know your grandpa is an alcoholic?”
Of course, it wouldn’t have been any worse than a singing clown showing up at our door to tell us Papa Kwirk was gone.
“Maybe Dad didn’t want us to think less of him either,” I said. I’m not sure anything anybody could say about Papa Kwirk would surprise me, but I did feel a tug of disappointment. Mostly it hurt to see the look on Dad’s face. I thought about all the Christmases spent together, the two of them almost always in separate rooms, both of them acting as if they were still hundreds of miles apart.
“Dipsomaniac,” Lyra said.
“What?”
“That’s what they used to call people who drank too much. It was on my word-a-day calendar.” The calendar had been my Christmas present to her last year. The same thing I’d gotten her for the last three years, which I guess meant I partly had myself to blame for how she turned out.
“Great. So our grandfather was a maniac,” I said.
“A dipsomaniac,” Lyra corrected.
“It must have been hard on him,” Cass said, though I wasn’t sure whether she meant Dad or Papa Kwirk.
While Mom and Dad continued to talk by the bar, two more guys came through the door and were told by the bartender to find a seat wherever. They moved to the corner on the opposite side of the room. Cass stared after them. “Huh,” she said.
“What?”
“Nothing,” Cass said. “Just, I’m pretty sure I saw those same two guys at the park this afternoon.”
I gave them a second glance, then a third. The taller of the two had a mongo mustache, big enough to completely cover his lips, top and bottom. The shorter one had bright orange hair like Chuckles, and clusters of freckles scattered over his face.
“You mean Freckles and Broomstache?” I asked.
“Broomstache.” Lyra giggled. “That’s a good one.”
I couldn’t be sure, but I thought I’d seen them before too. Maybe at the memorial service. Or maybe I’d also just caught a glimpse of them at the park. Honestly, there was too much going on to keep track of the parade of strangers who populated the town of Greenburg.
“Don’t stare. They’re looking at us,” Cass warned, talking behind her hand and banging her knee against mine. Sure enough, Freckles looked at me and smiled. Then he turned his attention to his phone just as Mom and Dad squeezed back into our booth. Isaac Alvero followed behind them, holding an empty bottle with a white label. Jim Beam bourbon. He set it on the table with a pronounced thunk.
“This was Frank’s favorite,” Isaac said, admiring the bottle. “Same drink. Every night. He drank it neat. No ice. Two fingers a glass.” Isaac demonstrated Papa Kwirk’s preferred serving with one hand, keeping the other wrapped around the bottom of the bottle as if he were afraid to let go of it. “He drank this particular bottle of bourbon in one sitting. You know what night that was.”
Dad nodded. I had a guess, but I wasn’t sure. Not until Mr. Alvero started talking again. The manager turned his head and nodded toward the bar. “He sat right there and emptied the whole bottle without saying a word. I even let him pour himself, even though his hands trembled so much by the end he could hardly lift the bottle.”
That Elvis song snuck into my head. The one from the service the day before.
Well, my hands are shaking and my knees are weak. . . .
“And after he emptied this one, he asked for another. The bar was practically empty by that point. I was about to give it to him when Old Man Bailey comes over. He was still running the place then. Bailey took your dad’s empty glass away. Told him to go home. Said he’d had enough. Course, Frank started cussing and carrying on about how he was a paying customer and could do whatever he pleased and didn’t we know what had happened to him, what he was going through? And Old Man Bailey looked him square in the eyes and asked, what would Shelley say if she walked through the door and saw him like this? Because she could, you know. She was watching him, waiting on him to come home. And that shut Frank right up. He still sat there for another hour, though. Not drinking. Just sitting. As if he couldn’t bear to walk out that door.”
Can’t seem to stand on my own two feet . . .
“That was the night,” Isaac Alvero continued. “There were others after it—plenty of them—but that was the worst. After we called your father a cab, Old Bailey told me to keep this empty bottle on the shelf as a reminder for your dad and me both that there’s nothing at the bottom worth getting at.”
From the bar, the blue-haired girl told Isaac he had a phone call.
“That’s probably him now,” Isaac said. “Ol’ Bailey retired a while back, but he has to call every afternoon to make sure I haven’t burned the place down.” The manager looked at the bottle still in his hand. “I’ll just leave this here for you.” He stood up and carefully put his chair back at the table where it belonged before heading to the bar, leaving us with the bourbon that Papa Kwirk had drained in one sitting, thirty years ago.
“Look,” Lyra said, pointing.
It had been hard to tell at first because of the way Isaac had been holding it, but now you could clearly see a scrap of paper resting in the bottom. Much like the one that had been waiting for us in Papa Kwirk’s coffin.
Dad took the bottle in both hands and tilted it upside down. The paper dropped toward the neck but stopped, trapped. It must have been rolled up in order to slide it through the neck, but it had unfurled since. Dad tried reaching in with his pinky but couldn’t get ahold. He shook it, swung it, and banged the bottom of it repeatedly with his palm before setting it back on the table with a grunt. “It’s stuck,” he said.
“Maybe we can still read it?” Mom suggested.
“Let me try.” I started spinning the bottle around, slowly, trying to get the right angle to capture the light from overhead so I could, but the way it was still half rolled up, it was impossible. I felt the bottle pulled from my hand. I tried to snatch it back, but Cass held it up over her head. She had six inches on me and longer arms.
“Come on, people,” she said with a huff. “Book Two of the Vendar Chronicles? The scene where Elsalore is surrounded in Dargol’s tavern by a dozen Anthrokian bounty hunters and has no way to defend herself? I swear you all need to read more.”
My big sister slid out of the booth and positioned herself where Isaac had been sitting only moments before, planting her feet and turning the bottle upside down, gripping it by the neck with both hands. She licked her lips. “I’ve always wanted to do this,” she said.
“Cassiopeia Elizabeth Quirk, what on earth do you think you’re—”
But Mom didn’t get to finish her sentence.
I cringed and pushed back against Lyra, flattening her against the side of the booth as the bottle came down, violently striking the edge of the wood table, a percussive crash followed by the melody of shattering glass. Sharp shards skittered across the table, catching the light. The bulk of the bottle clattered to the floor in three jagged pieces, leaving only the neck, a wicked-looking glass dagger, in my sister’s hands, perfect for gouging an Anthrokian bounty hunter’s eyes out. Cass looked at it with a gleeful smile.
“Cool,” Lyra said.
Everybody in the pub was staring at us now. A family of four. The couple at the bar. Freckles and Broomstache. I guess none of them had ever read Book Two of the Vendar Chronicles either.
Mom flashed Cass the Look of Ultimate Parental Disapproval, complete with Eyebrows of Extreme Archedness, and my sister gently set the deadly glass weapon she’d made on the table.
“Sorry,” she said. She turned and waved to the people who had been quietly enjoying their half-priced margaritas and mozzarella sticks. “Sorry to bother you.”
She sort of melted back into the booth, hands in her lap, but not before gingerly picking up a sliver of glass that she nearly sat on. There was usually applause whenever Cass finished a performance. This time she was just met with silence . . . until my mother started in again.
“Seriously, Cass, what were you thinking? You could have blinded us! You could have sliced your hand open! You could have lost a finger! Two fingers! Isn’t that right, Fletcher? Fletcher?”
But Dad wasn’t listening. He was on the floor by the table, on his hands and knees, in the midst of the mess that had once been his father’s bourbon bottle, carefully pulling the slip of paper free from the heap of jagged glass.
The broom and dustpan given to us by the blue-haired bartender came with a dirty look.
“Here,” she said, thrusting them into my father’s hands. “And make sure you get all the little invisible pieces.” I wanted to ask her how we would know whether we got them or not, but I was sort of afraid she might take the broom back and beat me with it. Instead, Dad gave the broom to Cass, who tried to give it to me, but I shook my head. I wasn’t the one who just went Wild West in the middle of a wannabee Applebee’s. Not that it hadn’t been kind of awesome. Just that it wasn’t my job to clean it up.
While Cass swept up the pieces she could see, the rest of us puzzled through what was written on the slip of paper Dad had recovered. Papa Kwirk’s next clue.
WHEN YOU GET TO BE MY AGE, THERE’S ONLY ONE PLACE THEY CAN PUT YOU.
“Only one place they can put you?” Dad muttered. “The place I would have put him was the one place he wasn’t.”
I assumed he meant the casket. Except right now, old Mrs. Danfield was probably in there. Unless she had pulled a Papa Kwirk and made her family go hunting for her corpse as well. The Danfields were probably nothing like the Kwirks, though. Nobody was.
“Does he mean, like, a nursing home?” Mom pondered.
“Florida,” I suggested. “Isn’t that where they ship all the old people to?” Florida would have been loads better than Greenburg, Illinois.
“Duh.” Lyra was shaking her head at all of us. “Obviously it’s a museum. Papa Kwirk used to say this all the time. ‘I’m so old, they’re going to have to put me in a museum.’” Lyra tried to imitate our grandfather’s raspy voice, but of course hers was too high and not phlegmy enough, so it came out sounding funny, like Mickey Mouse hitting puberty.
I couldn’t remember the museum thing specifically, but Papa Kwirk did have a lot of sayings. Like being hungry enough to eat a horse. Or feeling like a one-legged man in a butt-kicking contest. Or not having the sense to pour piss out of a boot if the instructions were written on the heel. That was probably my favorite. They were a lot more fun than Dad’s sayings, which were teacher-poster-type things like every journey starts with a single step and if opportunity doesn’t knock, build a door.
“Is there even a museum here in Greenburg?” Mom asked, looking at Dad, the man who’d lived here for half of his life, but he shrugged.
Taking advantage of her being on her hands and knees under the table, I swiped Cass’s phone from her back pocket and typed in the password that I’d secretly watched her key in a half dozen times: elflove4ever. Google soon informed me that the little town of Greenburg had not one but two museums.
“The Museum of Modern Warfare and the Kopfoben Wig Museum,” I said.
“Wig museum?” Dad questioned. Maybe it opened after he went off to college. You couldn’t grow up with a wig museum in your hometown and not know about it.
“Says here they have over four hundred wigs from all across the world. They apparently have a wig worn by Beyoncé and King Louis the Fourteenth.”
“Like, the same wig?” Mom wanted to know.
I would have answered her, but Cass had finished her sweeping and snatched her phone back, giving me a dirty look.
“Well, I think it’s pretty obvious where we should start looking,” Dad said.
Papa Kwirk was a war veteran. And he clearly had a fondness for weapons, judging by the Christmas gifts I had stashed up in the attic. Plus, he’d never worn a hairpiece in his life.
“Except the Museum of Modern Warfare closes at five, and it is now . . .” Cass checked her phone. “Four fifty-seven.”
Three minutes. The only way we would get there in time was if it was right across the street. We could wait till morning when the museum reopened, of course. That’s what people in their right minds would have done.
Which, of course, meant it wasn’t even an option for us.
“We’ll find a way,” Dad said.
He could sense it. I could too. We were close. There was something about this last clue. Only one place they can put you. We would find him there. Or what was left of him, anyway. Then, finally, we could say goodbye and go back home.
“We’re coming, Papa Kwirk,” Lyra said to no one in particular as we pushed our way through the door of Bailey’s Pub, leaving our mess on the table, along with a ten-dollar bill that my dad dropped for the disturbance we’d caused, even though we didn’t even order anything.
My grandfather used to leave a five-dollar tip wherever he went, no matter what he got.
Leave it to Dad to one-up him.