Amity Gaige - Schroder

“Well?” the bartender barked at Meadow. “Did I cheat you?”

“Did he give you six cherries?” I prompted her. “Did he steal any?”

“Not that kind of cherry,” said the bartender. “You only get one of those.”

“Ha.” I nudged her with my elbow. “What do you say, Butterscotch?”

Meadow now stared into her drink, stirring it with a straw.

“Cat got your tongue?”

“Thank you,” she murmured.

“She speaks!” said the bartender.

“She’s shy at first,” I said.

“No, she’s smart. She knows she shouldn’t trust a guy like me. Here. I’ve got something that’ll make her smile.” The man reached under the bar and brought out a small windup frog with a silver key in its back. He turned the key and placed the toy on the bar. The frog flipped backwards and landed on its feet. Meadow watched it.

“You like it?”

“Answer the man, sweetheart,” I said, taking a draught.

“Do you? Here, it’s yours,” said the bartender. “My kids are all grown up and refuse to crack a fucking smile. Let me tell you, you’ve got about six more years and then she’ll barely talk to you. So. You folks staying here in North Hero?”

“Sadly, no. We’re just passing through. We’re on our way to Mount Washington.”

“Now, there’s a place worth seeing.”

“We’re making a road trip out of it. Stopping here and there. A father-and-daughter road trip.”

“No wife?”

“Sure I’ve got a wife,” I said. “For our last wedding anniversary she gave me a restraining order.”

The bartender snorted.

Grinning, I waved my hand. “But I don’t like to talk about it in front of the kid.”

The bartender shook his head, his laughter dwindling. He was looking ruefully at Meadow, who had finally picked up the frog and was turning its key.

“Kids,” the man said. “They ruin your life. Then they’re the best thing about what you have left.”

“ That ”—I raised my empty glass to him—“is the truth.”

We fell into a melancholy silence.

I looked down the bar toward where the old man sat. Hands around a can of Pabst, he studied the muted television. I looked up at the screen. The local news was beginning. I felt a pang of homesickness. For a moment, I missed Albany, its brutal winters, its amateurish politicians. The lead story out of St. Albans appeared to involve a bear attack.

“Funny,” I said.

The bartender raised his head. “What is?”

“Pabst beer. ‘Pabst’ means ‘pope’ in German. I just thought of it.”

“No shit. Pope beer?”

“Pope beer!”

“Maybe the pope blesses it. Holy beer.”

“It’s like kosher beer, but for Catholics.”

“Ha!”

“Ha-ha!”

“Ha! That’s the damnedest.” Chuckling, the bartender pointed to my glass. “Get you another?”

“You’d better.”

“You want a chaser of holy beer with that?”

“Let me think. What would Jesus do?”

The bartender bellowed. I felt a pluck at my arm.

Meadow look up at me. “ Können wir Mommy anrufen? ”

I swallowed. In my stupidity, I thought she had forgotten. No, I hoped she had forgotten.

“Sure. Sure, sweetheart. We can call Mommy.”

“I told you she was smart,” said the bartender. “What is that, German?”

Just then, someone hollered behind the swinging doors and the bartender went out and then came back with Meadow’s hot dogs in a red basket. Meadow perked up at the sight of food. She crawled onto the next stool and got a bottle of ketchup from where it sat with a caddy of miniature jellies between the old man and us. She opened the ketchup bottle and turned it over the basket, thumping the bottom until half the basket was filled with ketchup. I watched her eat. She was completely absorbed. I sipped my fresh drink. The first one had relaxed me, but the second was making me philosophical.

“You’re a good daughter,” I said. “You know that? You’re a good kid, and very responsible.”

She looked at me, cramming the end of her hot dog in her mouth.

I lifted my chin toward the bartender. “All right,” I said. “I promised the kid I’d call her mother. You’ve got a phone?”

“Right there next to the lavatory. But maybe you should finish your drink first.”

“Ha, right. Hey, throw some water on me if I burst into flames.”

I got up and went to the pay phone that hung from the wall. I searched the pocket of my khakis for quarters.

And that’s right about when I experienced one of my life’s greatest reversals. 10Because there, in the television over the bar, was my face.

My face . A snapshot taken just before the separation. And because this was an era of significantly better grooming, of my being a hell of a lot more together , my hair was cut cleanly, and I looked, to my eye, pretty decent and responsible. I squinted upward at the television. There was my name, my age, race, eye color, etc.

The dial tone roared in my ear.

I scanned the bar. The bartender was leaning against the bar with one elbow, staring out the window. Meadow was busy with her hot dogs. But the old barfly in the corner was staring straight at the television, where Meadow’s face now appeared, with her trademark red glasses, her hair nicely brushed — her kindergarten portrait, taken the previous fall. The receiver of the telephone slipped from my grip, crashing against the wall’s wood paneling.

The bartender turned to look. “She give you a hell of a time?”

“Jesus H.,” I said, smiling. “Did she ever. A hell of a time.”

I stooped to retrieve the swinging phone, not taking my eyes off the bartender.

“But everything’s fine now,” I said. “With her, it’s all dry lightning.”

Walking straight up to the bar, I willed myself not to look up at the television. Meadow watched me closely.

“How does this crazy thing work ?” I said, picking up the frog.

“You turn the key,” Meadow said, tamping her second hot dog in the ketchup.

“Like this?” I placed the wound-up frog on his feet. I glanced up at the television. Meadow’s face and mine were now sharing a split screen, a tip-line telephone number scrolling across us, and I noticed with a flash of remorse that there was no recent photograph of the two of us together, that separate ones had to be used, and that the reason there was no recent photograph of the two of us together was because in the scant time we had together, there was no third person to take such a picture anyway, no picture taker, just our banished lives, cruelly subpar to the life we’d shared before.

Cut to commercial. Laundry detergent. A talking teddy bear.

“Welp,” I said, releasing the frog, which immediately malfunctioned, falling to the side and kicking at the air. “Enough shit shooting. We’ve got to hit the road.”

The bartender raised his eyebrows. “So soon?”

“I’m not done with my hot dog,” said Meadow.

“No problem. We’ll just bring it in the car.”

I tossed a pile of money on the bar and grabbed Meadow’s arm, firmly. The butt of her hot dog in her hand, she looked up at me with alarm.

“You folks have a good trip,” the bartender said. “Come on back.”

“We will. We definitely will.”

As I backed out of the door, my eyes could not resist being drawn to the profile of the old man at the end of the bar. He stared forward into the glittering liquor bottles before him — a horizon of alcohol — his grizzled neck swallowing the melt from the ice cube he chewed. And with the jangle of the bell tied to the door, the man turned his head with awful slowness, as if just coming awake, and I tried to divine my fate in his buried eyes.