Dennis Lehane - Since We Fell

But as Lee’s sexual voltage decreased, year by year, his smiles grew wider. By the time he’d reached her middle-school years and still wore the black vest over a white shirt that Milo required of his bartenders, his skin had mottled, his face had sunk, and his smile had yellowed and picked up two gaps in the back rows. But with every photo, he looked looser, less burdened by the weight of whatever had been behind that fuck-you smile, that fuck-you sexual charisma. The soul seemed to flower as the body declined.

Milo next produced a stack of photographs from the annual Independence Day friends-’n’-family softball game and picnic. There were two women who appeared and reappeared in the photos alongside Lee. One woman was thin and brunette and possessed a face tight with strain and anxiety; the other was blowsy and blond and usually had a drink in one hand and a cigarette in the other.

“That was Ellen,” Milo said of the dark-haired woman. “She was angry. No one ever knew why. Kinda woman could suck the life out of a birthday party, a wedding, a Thanksgiving — and I seen her kill all three. She left Lee around eighty-six, I want to say. Eighty-seven? No later. Other one was his second wife. That’s Maddy. Last I heard she was still alive. Living in Elkton. She and Lee had a few good years and then sort of drifted apart.”

“Did he have any kids?” Rachel asked.

“Not with these women.” Milo watched her carefully across the bar for a moment as he reached behind his back to adjust something on his oxygen dispenser. “You think you’re his, huh?”

“I’m pretty sure of it,” Rachel said.

“You got his eyes,” Milo said, “that’s for sure. Pretend I said something funny.”

“What?”

“Laugh,” he said.

“Ha ha,” she said.

“No, for real.”

She looked around the bar. It was empty. She chuckled out a version of her laugh. She was surprised how authentic it sounded.

“That’s his laugh,” Milo said.

“Then it’s settled,” she said.

He smiled. “When I was young, people said I looked like Warren Oates. You know who that is?”

She shook her head.

“Movie actor. Was in a lot of westerns. Was in The Wild Bunch .”

She gave him an embarrassed shrug.

“Anyway, I did look like Warren Oates. Now people say I look like Wilford Brimley. Know who that is?”

She nodded. “The Quaker Oats guy.”

He said, “That’s him.”

“You do look like him.”

“I do.” He held up a finger. “And yet, best of my knowledge, I’m not related to him. Or to Warren Oates.” He held his thumb and index a hairbreadth apart. “Not even a little bit.”

She acknowledged his point with a slight tip of her head. Arrayed across the bar top was a man’s life in photographs, just as her life had been arrayed before her and Jeremy James two summers back. A collage, yet again, that said everything and said nothing. A person could be photographed every day of his life, she suspected, and still hide the truth of himself — the essence — from all who came along in pursuit of it. Her mother had stood in front of her every day for twenty years and she knew her only as much as Elizabeth had deemed fit to show. And now here was her father, staring back out at her from 4 × 6s and 5 × 7s and 8 × 10s, in focus, out of focus, oversaturated, and underlit. But in all cases, he was ultimately unknowable. She could see his face, but not behind it.

“He had a couple of stepkids,” Milo told her. “Ellen had a son when he met her, Maddy had a daughter. Don’t know that he formally adopted either of them. Never got a feeling one way or the other whether he liked them or they liked him back or if it went the other way. Or somewhere in between.” He shrugged, looked down at the collage. “He knew a lot about whiskey, had a couple motorcycles over the years he was fond of, had a dog for a while that got cancer so he never got another.”

“And he worked here for twenty-five years?”

“’Bout that.”

“Did he have any ambitions beyond being a bartender?”

Milo looked off for a bit, trying to remember. “When he was really into motorcycles, he talked with another guy for a while about opening a garage together where they’d fix ’em, maybe customize ’em. When the dog died, he read up a lot on veterinary schools. But nothing ever came of any of it.” He shrugged. “If he had any other dreams, he kept ’em tucked on a high shelf.”

“Why did he stop working here?”

“Didn’t like taking orders from Ronnie, probably. Hard to take orders from a man you watched grow up. Got tired of the commute maybe too. He lived in Elkton. Traffic between here and there gets worse every year.”

He looked at her in such a way that she knew he was sizing her up, making a decision. “You wear nice clothes, look like you got a good life.”

She nodded.

“He didn’t have no money. You know that? What little he had the exes took.”

Again she nodded.

“Grayson.”

The small hands caressed her heart this time, coldly, but lighter than a whisper.

“Leeland David Grayson,” Milo said. “That was the man’s full name.”

She met his second wife, Maddy, at a small park in Elkton, Maryland, a town that felt tossed aside, its hills dotted with the shells of factories and foundries no one living could probably remember in their heyday.

Maddy Grayson was teetering between overweight and corpulent, the rowdy smile she’d worn in most of the pictures replaced with one that seemed to drain a second after it appeared.

“It was Steph, my daughter, who found him. He was on his knees in front of the couch, but his right elbow was still on the couch? Like he’d got up for a drink or a piss and that’s when it took him. He’d been there at least a day, maybe two. Steph had gone around to borrow some money because, well, Lee could be a soft touch on his drinking days. But outside of that, he wanted to be left alone. What he liked to do on his days off was drink decent whiskey, smoke cigarettes, and watch old TV shows. Never new ones. He liked stuff from the seventies and the eighties — Mannix and The A-Team. Miami Vice .” She turned on the bench slightly, excited. “Oh, he loved Miami Vice . But the early ones, you know? He always said the show went to hell when Crockett married the singer. Said it got hard to believe after that.” She fumbled in her purse and came back with a cigarette. She lit it and exhaled and followed the smoke with her gaze. “He liked those shows because things made sense back then, you know? World made sense. Those were good days, sensible days.” She looked around the empty park. “Not like now.”

Rachel was hard pressed to imagine two decades in her lifetime that made less sense to her than the seventies and the eighties or two that seemed less stable or compassionate in general. But she didn’t think there was much point in mentioning that to Maddy Grayson.

“Did he ever want anything?” she asked.

“How do you mean?” Maddy coughed into her fist.

“Like to become, I dunno, something?” Rachel regretted her choice of words as soon as they left her mouth.

“Mean like a doctor?” Maddy’s eyes grew hard fast. She looked angry and confused and angry about the confusion.

“Well, I mean” — Rachel stuttered and tried for a friendly smile — “something besides a bartender.”

“What’s wrong with being a bartender?” Maddy tossed her cigarette to the pavement in front of her and turned her knees toward Rachel. She matched Rachel’s desperate smile with an iron one. “No, I’m asking. For more’n twenty years, people went to Milo’s because they knew Lee was behind the bar. They could tell him anything and he wouldn’t judge. They could come to him when their marriages went tits-up, they lost their jobs, their kids turned into assholes or druggies, fucking world went to shit all around them. But they could sit in front of Lee and he’d serve them a drink and hear them when they talked.”