Closing Time

My mother says I need to pick up my father at the bar again. “He’s staying to help close up,” she says. She wears a cotton housedress she bought at Eckerd Drugs for two dollars. I look at the clock on the TV. It’s almost eleven p.m. and MASH is almost on. I ask if I can go later and she says, “Whatever, I don’t care,” and reaches for her cigarettes in her front pocket, but it’s empty.

“Why is he helping to close up?”

My mother puts her hands on her large hips. “I don’t know.” She walks into the kitchen. “I need you to go get him. He has no ride home.”

I hear her shake a fresh pack of Salems from a carton she keeps in the cupboard and then she shuffles back to her bedroom. The TV voices are muffled behind the door.

My mother has owned the bar for two years. She named it Duffy’s Tavern after a golden retriever we once had who got too big for the house and she gave him away. It’s in an older part of downtown with more empty shops than open ones, but the rent is cheap and the area is supposed to be coming back. She gets by catering to day laborers, who pay with crumbled dollar bills. A year ago it got a reputation with bikers as the place to hang out. Bikers from across the state make sure to stop on their way to Daytona Beach for Bike Week in the spring.

My father is popular there. He can talk with anyone about anything. He talks to people no one wants to and that’s what they like about him. He walks over from his job at the post office where he has sorted mail for twenty-five years. My mother drops him off at eight a.m. and they usually drive home from the bar. Sometimes he gets drunk during the chitchat, sometimes he doesn’t. You never know. He doesn’t help my mother run the bar. I don’t think she wants his help, but she seems to resent he doesn’t offer. He drinks for free and talks to the lonely patrons with wrinkled money and rough hands.

After my show, I dig for the keys in my mother’s deep pocketbook. I’d rather take her car. I have to shake it several times to hear the jingle and then feel around. I come across bingo dabbers and shreds of tobacco. I drive her Buick across the river into downtown. There are few lights and the streets are empty. Everyone is home and in bed. I wonder if my father is drunk and how he will feel for work the next morning.

My mother acted indifferent to the late nights at first. Once she called the bar “your father’s favorite plaything,” but that was it.

One night I came home from a movie and saw her bedroom light on. The TV on the dresser flashed an ad for The Wheel of Fortune. She sat with her knees up, a well-worn paperback folded nearly half. Her glasses were pushed to the top of her head and she held the book inches from her face. Next to her, on my father’s pillow, was a crust of dried vomit. Some had carved a path down onto the sheets.

“What happened?” I stared at the brown pillow.

“Your father got sick,” she said without looking up. I wondered why she hadn’t cleaned it up, or if it bothered her, and whether she would sleep next to it. She turned a page.

The other times I picked up my father was because he couldn’t drive and my mother didn’t want to get him. He never seemed like he had been drinking. He didn’t smell of cheap beer from the tap. No stagger or excessive anger or happiness. He was just himself. The only way I could tell was if he repeated words. Once, he climbed in and asked me about the radio. The volume would suddenly go up and down.

“I need to get it fixed,” I said.

He played with the dial, but the volume wouldn’t change. He sat back. “That’s very unusual. It just started to do that?”

I rolled down the window. The breeze made him pat down his thinning hair. “Yes. I thought one of the bar guys could look at it.”

“That’s very unusual,” he said. “Very unusual.” I inhaled the river as we drove over it. “It just does that? That’s very unusual, very unusual,” he said.

A few lights burn inside the bar as I drive up, and a dim, yellow glow is cast on the creaky steps leading to the front door. The door is locked and I peer through the dirty window next to the giant shamrock my mother chose as a sign. It’s like looking in a fun house mirror where shapes are distorted. I don’t see the usual bartender, the older woman with the long braid whose name always escapes me.

My father is near the back by the two pool tables. He drags a mop back and forth across the wooden floors. All the stools are tucked under the bar’s lip in a long neat row. Two stuffed trash bags lie nearby. I wipe the window with my palm and watch him work. After each pass he dunks the mop into the yellow industrial bucket and squeezes out every drop, shakes it twice, and goes back and forth in slow, steady strokes. I have never seen him mop before. It has his full attention.

Copyright © 2008
 971 MENU