Dennis Lehane - Since We Fell

Rachel took the photograph to her bathroom mirror. She held it up beside her head. His eyes were her eyes — same color, same shape.

“Well, shit,” she said. “Hi, Dad.”

She’d assumed the bar was long gone, but when she Googled Milo’s East Baltimore, it popped right up on her screen, replete with pictures. It had changed some — three large windows had been hung in the brick wall facing the street, the lighting was softer, the cash register was computerized, and the stools now had backs and ornate arms — but the same mirror hung behind the bar and the bottles were placed in the same hierarchy. The Baltimore Colts pennant on the wall had been replaced with one for the Baltimore Ravens.

She called and asked for the owner.

When he got on the phone, he said, “This is Ronnie.”

She explained that she was a reporter for Channel 6. She didn’t say which Channel 6 and she didn’t say she was working on any particular story. Usually, identifying herself as a reporter immediately opened a door or immediately slammed it shut; either scenario tended to avoid time wasted on further explanations.

“Ronnie, I’m trying to track down a bartender who worked at Milo’s in 1979. And I wondered if you’d have employment records from that era you’d be willing to share.”

“Bartender back in seventy-nine?” he said. “Well, that was probably Lee, but let me check with my father.”

“Lee?” she said, but he’d put the phone down. For a few minutes she heard very little, maybe a conversation being held somewhere far away from the receiver, hard to tell, but then she heard footsteps approach the phone and the scrape of it being lifted off the bar.

“This is Milo.” A scratchy voice, followed by the huff of breath being expelled through the nostrils.

“ The Milo?”

“Yeah, yeah. What’s this you need?”

“I was looking to get in touch with a man who tended bar there almost thirty-two years ago. Your son mentioned a Lee?”

“He worked for us back then.”

“And you remember him?”

“Well, yeah, he worked here at least twenty-five years. Left about eight years ago.”

“And he was the only bartender who worked there back then?”

“No, but he was the main one. I worked the bar some, my late wife, and old Harold, who was going senile right around then. That clear it up for you?”

“Do you know where I could find Lee?”

“Why don’t you tell me why you’re asking, Miss...?”

“Childs.”

“Miss Childs. Why don’t you tell me why you’re asking about Lee?”

She couldn’t think of a single reason to lie, so she told him. “It’s possible he knew my mother.”

“Lee knew a lot of women.”

She took the plunge. “It’s possible he was my father.”

There was nothing but the sound of him breathing through his nostrils for so long she almost spoke again out of sheer anxiousness.

“How old are you?” he said eventually.

“Thirty-one.”

“Well,” Milo said slowly, “he was a good-looking son of a bitch back then. Dated a few — ten — women, I seem to remember. Even a penny can shine, I guess, when it’s newly minted.” More breathing.

She thought he was going to say more but after a while realized he wouldn’t be doing so. “I’d like to reach out to him. If you’d feel okay helping me, that would—”

“He’s dead.”

Two small hands grasped the sides of her heart and pushed inward. Ice water surged up the back of her neck and flooded her skull.

“He’s dead?” It came out louder than she’d intended.

“’Bout six years now, yeah. He left us, went to work for another bar in Elkton. A couple years after that, he died.”

“How?”

“Heart attack.”

“He would’ve been young.”

“Fifty-three?” Milo said. “Maybe fifty-four. Yeah, he was young.”

“What was his full name?”

“Well, miss, I don’t know you. I don’t know if you could lodge some paternity thing against the people he left behind. I don’t know enough about such things. But again, I don’t know you, that’s the problem.”

“Would it help if you did know me?”

“Absolutely.”

She took the train to Baltimore the next morning from Back Bay station. She innocently met the eyes of a college-age girl she passed on the platform, and the girl’s eyes bulged with sudden recognition. Rachel walked to the end of the platform with her head down. She took a spot near an older gentleman in a gray suit. He flashed her a sad smile and went back to reading Bloomberg Markets . She couldn’t tell if the sadness in his smile stemmed from pity for her or if he just possessed a sad smile.

She got on the train without further incident and found a seat near the rear of a half-empty car. With every mile the train covered, she felt she escaped her newfound identity as a public basket case just a bit more; by the time she passed through Rhode Island, she felt nearly relaxed. She wondered if some of her ease stemmed from the knowledge that she was returning, if not home, at least to her genesis. She also took strange comfort that she was following in reverse part of the journey her mother and Jeremy James had taken to western Massachusetts in the spring of 1979. Now it was mid-November, more than three decades later. The cities and towns she passed were caught between late fall and early winter. Some municipal parking lots had already shored up road salt and sand. Most trees were bare, and the sky was sunless, as bare as the trees.

“This is him here.” Milo placed a framed photograph on the bar in front of her, his stubby index finger positioned beside the face of a lean man of advancing hairline and advancing age. He had a high forehead, sunken cheeks, and her eyes.

Milo was about eighty and breathed with the aid of a liquid-oxygen canister perched in a hip pack nestled at the small of his back. The clear silicone tubing ran up his back and then hooked over his ears before draping down his cheekbones to where the nasal cannulas entered his nostrils. He’d been living with emphysema since his early seventies, he told Rachel. Lately the hypoxia had been progressing but not so fast it kept him from sneaking eight or ten cigarettes a day.

“Good genes,” Milo said as he placed an unframed photo down in front of her. “I got ’em. Lee didn’t.”

The unframed shot was a bit more candid than the first, which was a staff photo in which everyone was posing. This unframed photograph was from decades back. Lee had a full head of lanky dark brown hair, and his eyes were set farther up in his face. He was smiling at something a customer had said. While several of the other patrons laughed with their heads thrown back, Lee’s was a small smile, a withholding one; it wasn’t an invitation, it was a moat. He looked to be no more than twenty-seven or twenty-eight, and she could immediately see what her mother had been drawn to. That small smile was all coiled vitality and inflamed reticence. It promised too much and too little at the same time. Lee looked like the worst boyfriend and greatest fuck of all time.

She could see why her mother had described him as smelling like “lightning.” And she suspected that if she herself had walked into this bar in 1979 and this man had been standing behind it, she would have stayed for more than one drink. He fit the look of the profligate poet, the drug-addled painter-genius, the musician who’d die in a car crash the day after he signed his big record contract.

The tour of Lee’s life she received from Milo in photos, however, was of a journey confined mostly to the very bar where she now sat. She could feel his world and his options and his opportunities for casual sex with vibrant women decrease with every photo. Soon the world beyond the bar wasn’t something to dream of, it was something to hide from. The women who once pursued him turned into women who had to be pursued. They then became women who had to be lubricated with the proper amounts of humor and alcohol. Finally, one day, they’d be repulsed or amused to discover he thought of them sexually.