And Molly, well, just look at her . . . Eighteen years old, and her brains were practically paying her way through school. Not just any school, but Vassar. I must have done something right, Suzanne decided, feeling warm as she remembered Molly going up in her cap and gown, getting her sheepskin, valedictorian of her class. Her speech was all about how life would be what you made of it. Molly had listed off the people who had faced much harder challenges than the average bear yet had still made something of themselves. She attacked the laziness and apathy that had settled on today’s youth, but in such a way that the other students in her class didn’t feel chastised, only gently reminded of the real world. Then, she had said out loud, in public, that her mother was the hardest worker she knew and that she intended to follow in her footsteps, using her mind and strength just as much as she could. Suzanne, who hadn’t seen that coming, had burst into tears.
Buddy attacked his puzzle for a while, then put his pen down and stretched out his arthritis-ridden hand.
“So,” he said, by way of openers, “how did you take the news?”
Suzanne looked up. Her mind was so wrapped up in the numbers she’d just jotted down on her financial aid form that she had no idea what he was talking about.
“The news,” she repeated, blankly. Then she remembered. “Oh, the Great Family Outing, as Brandon calls it?” She shrugged and leaned in confidentially. “Truth be told, I’m just so thrilled she’s not pregnant—she can sleep with animals if she wants. As long as she’s happy and she uses a condom. Or, you know. Whatever it is gay ladies use.”
“I thought they liked to be called lesbians. But when I asked Brandon what to call her, he said, ‘Molly.’ I asked her what I should call her, she said, ‘Fabulous.’”
She chuckled. “That’s my girl, all right.”
Buddy smiled and went back to his crossword.
“So, how’s it going with him living over there, anyway?”
“You’re not implying I’m uncomfortable with the gays, are you?” Buddy raised an eyebrow. “Besides, I knew he was gay since the moment he moved in.”
“You did?” Suzanne’s eyes widened in dismay; Buddy had more gay-dar that she did? This was terribly disconcerting. “How?”
“He organized my spices and seemed overly concerned with the crease in my pants,” Buddy puffed. “He paints his nails. And in the shower he sings ‘I Could Have Danced All Night.’ Sorry, darling, but they’re stereotypes for a reason.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Not my place to say anything,” Buddy said in a calm, easy manner. Suzanne realized he was right. “Although, I have to admit, I didn’t know about Molly. I guess it’s harder to tell with the ladies. Is that un-PC of me to say?”
“Hell if I know.” She bent over her work then. “So, it doesn’t bother you having him there?”
“No, it’s fine. Great.” Buddy nodded. “He makes all kinds of teas, and we have the same taste in movies, from the black and whites to the Star Wars trilogy. But, well, there is the one thing . . .” He seemed to hesitate, looking guiltily at Suzanne.
“C’mon, Buddy, spill it. You can’t throw something like that out and leave me hanging.” Suzanne realized she wasn’t going to be able to focus with Buddy there to talk to, so she put the cap on her pen and took out her Spirits.
“Well,” he divulged finally, “the guy cleaned the place. I mean, he cleaned the place. Top to bottom, back to front, windows, closets, floors, you name it.”
“Geez, send him over to our house. Mom might never let him leave.”
“I just moved in!” Buddy protested. “I haven’t had time to accumulate any good dirt yet!”
“You’re a guy,” Suzanne informed him. “Guys come with built-in dirt. It magically appears on all your stuff, behind your couch, under every shelf, where somehow, no matter if you’re an engineer, a doctor, or a very successful businessman, you just can’t ever seem to remember to look for, let alone clean it up.” She puffed on her cigarette, satisfied that she had made her point. “Built-in dirt, I’m telling you. You all come with it. It’s in your DNA.”
Buddy gave that some thought. “We do,” he agreed. “I guess we do.”
“See?” She smiled. “It’s not such a bad thing.”
“So, listen,” Buddy said casually. “The other night, before all the confusion . . . You were mentioning that you had come across some information.”
“Oh, I haven’t forgotten.” Suzanne lit a fresh cig off the one that was nearly dead, and looked directly into his eyes, smiling. “I was just waiting for you to sweat a little before bringing it up again. So, are you sweating?”
THIRTEEN
Buddy stared at her for a moment and then finally broke into a huge grin.
“Boy, you really are your mother’s daughter, aren’t you?”
“I shudder to admit it,” Suzanne grimaced, “but there it is.”
“So, why don’t you tell me what you know?” Buddy said amiably. “And, just out of curiosity, why you know it, so I can set about denying it.”
“It just struck me,” she began slowly, tapping her fingers on the arm of her chair, “as, well, awfully out of character for someone like you to get caught serving booze to little girls.”
“Why?” Buddy asked, sincerely surprised. “Your mother has told you any number of times how many skirts I chased, what an absolute pig I am . . . Sometimes I’d get me some action in the backseat of my Jeep in the alleyway of the restaurant, between shifts. That’s how much of a horny bastard I was. I . . .”
“Okay, okay, we all know that if it moved, you tried to mount it.” She held up her hands, fending off the details. “Go on, be proud of it, be a guy if you have to. Just don’t make me have to hear about it—that’s practically incest. But, that’s not why I thought it was weird.”
“Well, then,” he repeated, “why?”
“Because, as you said, Daddy loved the ale, and the cognac, and he ran the dining room, and therefore the bar. Most of the time, you were in the kitchen or in the office.”
Just talking about it brought back memories so dear a fine mist appeared in his eyes. He bit his lip until they subsided. Ever since they’d lost the pub, he’d tried as hard as he could not to think of O’Shenanigan’s. But how, he often asked himself, do you not think of the happiest time of your life? “Yeah . . . most of the time . . .” Buddy kept his voice casual, wondering where she was going with this.
“Sometimes when it was slow,” Suzanne went on, “you’d take your paperwork out into that circular table in the corner, remember?” She stopped for a moment, looking at him, smiling, remembering. “That was Buddy territory, when there were no customers. You’d sit there, with a big ol’ rack of lamb and a Guinness. Or the pub-pub platter and a Guinness.”
“Pub-pub platter.” The memory flooded back to him so fully he could smell it. “Let me see, that was mushroom caps, potato skins, curly fries, and a cup of Irish stew. Chef Fred, he was a genius. Best working suppers of my life.”
“You weren’t behind the bar often.” Suzanne crushed out her butt, stood up, and began to pace around a little, in full-on Nancy Drew mode. “In fact . . . actually, no, I’m sure. I’m absolutely sure that I can’t recall seeing you there at all. You used to joke you were nervous about all those hanging glasses; something about being a bull in a china shop, I think.”
“Well, sure I was nervous.” Buddy admitted. “Those were some expensive frosted glasses, and there were hundreds of them, all hanging from the ceiling.” He shrugged, pulling his gold Zippo out of his front pocket, and lit his pipe. “I’ll admit I stayed out of the bar as much as I could, but with a place like that, everyone pitches in with everything. I used to catch your mother, who was the hostess, running the dishwasher. Your dad would shovel the walkway in the wintertime, when he couldn’t pawn that chore off on you, that is.”
“Like you said,” she continued, not giving him the smile he was after, “I wasn’t old enough to work at the
pub, but sometimes they’d let me do my homework at the bar. Daddy and that guy, Terry, would be behind the bar serving drinks, but Terry was only there Thursdays through Saturdays. Sometimes, if it was busy, Mom helped if it was just wine, or beer, or something simple. But not you. Never you.” Buddy started to protest again, and she held up her hand, and took a deep breath, exhaling carefully. “And then,” she said finally, “there’s the simple matter of the TEAM test.”
“What the hell,” asked Buddy innocently, “is a TEAM test?”
And with those seven words he completely hung himself.
She squatted down next to Buddy’s chair to look him directly in the eye.
“The TEAM test,” she told him softly, “is a safety course required of each and every bartender in the state of New Hampshire. The politicians cooked this one up special for us back in the sixties when reefer started actually making its way up from the big bad city. Anyway, it’s a tough test. Really tough. So tough, I’d really expect you to remember preparing for it and taking it. That is,” she reached out and tapped him on the chest to emphasize each word, “if you’d ever taken it.”
“Oh, that.” Buddy said hastily. “Well, that was a pretty damn expensive test, you know. When you’re running a business, you cut a corner or two.”
“Two minutes ago, you didn’t know what the hell it was, and now you remember how much it cost?” Suzanne stood up and went back to her chair. “And if you cut that corner, it was the only one. Those books are as clean as a whistle. I could eat off those books.”
“This hinting is giving me a freakin’ headache, Suzie-Q,” Buddy grumbled. “So if you have something to say, do us both a favor and just say it.”
She crossed her arms and looked at him for a long moment with a mixture of admiration, confusion, and love.
“You weren’t the one,” she said at last. “You were not the one who was caught serving alcohol to pretty young things.”
Buddy was shaking his head back and forth before the words were out of her mouth.
“See, you’ve got it all wrong.” He struggled to stand, reaching for his cane. “Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong. You see . . .”
“And you took the fall for Daddy,” she overrode his words, “because of what he did for you in Vietnam. Because you loved him like a brother. And because you knew my mother would castrate him with a rusty grapefruit spoon if she knew.”
Buddy held up a weathered hand to stop her.
“I love you, sweetie, but you just don’t know what you’re talking about, and I don’t want to discuss this anymore. I’m going inside.” Having gotten a firm grasp on his cane, he planted it hard and stood, managing a few firm steps toward his own house until Suzanne’s voice stopped him.
“People make mistakes, Buddy,” she said gently. “All the time. They fuck up. I’m pissed as hell at Daddy—it’s weird being pissed at someone who’s dead. You can imagine the guilt. People do stupid things, but you don’t stop loving them for it. So there it is. I can see forgiving him for something like that.” She took a few steps closer, tilting her head, looking at him in wonder. “But you taking those charges for him? I don’t understand—that’s too much, Buddy! You didn’t owe him your life. No matter what you might think, you didn’t.”
Buddy spun around and walked to her faster than she thought him capable of.
“Didn’t I?” he asked fiercely. “Didn’t I owe him my life? I wouldn’t have come back if it weren’t for him. Understand? My life would have been over. Over. You should have seen the way his whole body jerked back when that bullet hit him. The way his eyes rolled back in his head, all that blood . . . That bullet he took would have got me right in the throat,” he tapped just the spot, “and I’d be lying there still. I’d have rotted in some jungle while the enemy cut off my nuts and wore them for cuff links.” He took a deep breath; the doc was always telling him that getting too strung up about anything wasn’t worth it these days. “So that’s where I think you’re wrong, Suzie-Q. Because what I do think is maybe I do owe him my life.”
“You’re right,” she admitted softly. “I don’t understand, because I’ve never been there. I’ve never had anyone do anything like that for me, and I’ve never been in a position that I’d do that for anyone, except, of course, my kid. But no matter how it’s sliced, diced, or cuisinarted, I do know it’s stupid to ruin your future for your past—all over someone else’s screwup. Daddy fucked up, Buddy. Not you. Daddy did. So, his fuck up, his punishment. He should have been the one to pay for it.” She looked down at the ground, tears blurring her vision, and wiped them away discreetly before she looked up at him again. “Look, don’t lie to me, Uncle Buddy. Please? It’s insulting, it’s infuriating, and I already know the truth. So please do me the honor of not lying directly to my face.”
He stared at her for a long moment, and then he sank back into his chair. “Yeah. Okay. You happy? Yeah. It was Jimmy.” He took a deep breath, surprised how good it felt to say it out loud, to tell the truth out loud, even if it also felt like besmirching his dead best friend’s name. “I didn’t like having my name in the newspaper, and I didn’t like paying the fine, and I sure as hell didn’t like having a record that kept me from ever getting a liquor license again, thereby killing any future plans I had for another restaurant. That squashed what little soul I had left. I loved that business, you know? I always imagined . . . You know how I loved going to the theatre; I always thought the restaurant biz was a lot like Broadway.”
“Broadway?” Suzanne smiled at the analogy. “How do you figure?”
“Oh, the preparation, the costumes, the lighting, the crazy hustle-bustle feeling of the ‘meal must go on,’ the fake accents, even.” He relished the flavor it all brought back. “Those were the days, kiddo.”
“So,” Suzanne asked hesitantly, “if you knew that all that would happen if you took the blame, then . . . why?”
“Because,” he shrugged weakly, “love will make you do funny things. Far more than booze or drugs ever could.”
“Love is a dangerous drug—right up there with crack,” Suzanne agreed. “But still, throwing your life away because of your best friend, it’s just ridiculous. Even if the man is just like a brother to you.”
“I wasn’t talking about Jimmy,” Buddy said softly.
“Well, if you’re not talking about Daddy,” she demanded, “then who the hell are you . . . ?” It all fell on her then, like a piano falling out of the sky and landing on her with a musical grunt. “Oh. My. God,” she said faintly.
He looked at her for a long, hard moment. “If she’d have known it was Jimmy, it would have killed her,” he said. Suzanne wondered how many times he’d said that phrase to himself over the years, to reassure himself he’d done the right thing. “And that would have killed me. Okay? You get it now?”
FOURTEEN
There was a clump of smokers in front of the AA meeting place, which was held in the top floor of a Salvation Army store on Congress Street.
“At least they make them smoke outside now,” Ava acknowledged as they scooted in the door, hopefully before any of the disgusting smell stuck to their clothing.
Molly wrinkled her nose in distaste. She’d read that once smokers quit, even after a couple of weeks, the smell would become repellent to them. If only she could somehow strap her mother down and slap a NicoDerm patch on her.
“You think this is bad?” Ava asked as they climbed the stairs to the meeting. “You should have seen it in the old days; the place had a huge cloud over it. The reasoning was, if you tried to make someone quit drinking and smoking, they’d cave on one, then figure they might as well do both again. Sort of a joint disease,” she snorted. “It was hell on the few of us nonsmokers. I’d have to shower and change my clothes in the hallway before I’d go into my house. Jimmy used to say, ‘Baby doll, you gave up drinking so you go to AA and get lung cancer.’” A smile usually rose on her lips at the sound of her husband’s name, followed by a quick catch of her breath
. Then, she’d raise her hand to her mouth and, clearing her throat, change the subject with a vengeance. This time was no different. “Yes, we’ve got us a big bunch of randoms today,” she commented.
The meeting room was already half-filled with AAs walking around, easily chatting with each other. Some of them looked like they’d spent the night in the gutter, some of them looked like they’d just gone shopping at Neiman Marcus, and there was a whole host of other types in between.
Brandon muscled his way to the coffee line as Molly and Ava tried to find three seats together.
“Will they mind that I’m not an alcoholic?” whispered Molly.
“Just don’t mention it, because then they’ll think you’re in denial,” Ava informed her. “Then, this whole room will turn into an angry mob of people trying to make you see the light.”
“Got it. Don’t deny my problem.” Molly winked, giving her a thumb’s up.
“Feel free to tell me if it’s none of my business, dear,” Ava dug through her pocketbook in search of a mint, “but how often do you drink?”
“Please, Grandma.” Molly glanced around, then remembered where she was.
“Look, I’m just asking. I asked your mother the same question.” Ava popped a butter rum Life Saver into her mouth thoughtfully. “She doesn’t seem to drink much.”
“For a long time, she didn’t drink at all.” Even in such accepting surroundings, Molly still found herself wanting to fall off the wooden fold-up chair and right through the floor. “Not even champagne on New Year’s Eve when I was little. And when I got old enough to bring home all the Just Say No stuff from Officer Smiley at school, she sat me down and told me that you had a special disease called alcoholism.” She glanced apologetically at Ava, hoping she hadn’t offended her, but Ava didn’t bat an eye. “She also told me it was hereditary, so she might have it, and I might have it. And what alcoholism did was, well, when you drank alcohol, it made you crazy. You’d start drinking, and you couldn’t stop, and you’d do all kinds of nutty stuff that you’d be embarrassed by later.”
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