An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England_ A Novel - Brock Clarke [121]
"You with somebody, buddy?" he asked me, handing over the two large beers in two heavy glass steins.
"Nope," I said. The bartender looked at me, and then at the beers, and then at me again, as if to say, like my mother in her note, I think I know you. And who knows: maybe, like my mother, he did.
I sat there awhile and drank one beer fast, and the next one at regular speed. The bar noise and its makers advanced and retreated, advanced and retreated, but pleasantly, not like an army but like a tide coming in and going out, a tide coming in and going out that wouldn't make you wet as you listened to its dreamy tidal sounds. After a few minutes, or maybe it was an hour, I saw old Mr. Goerman, the owner, working the tables, shaking hands, and slapping backs. He was older, a little more raisined in the face, a little more pretzeled in the spine, but recognizably Mr. Goerman. Like the bartender, he also had a waxed handlebar mustache, and I figured maybe they were made to wear those mustaches, the way the waitresses were made to wear their white sacks. In any case, it was good to see him. I caught his eye, hoisted my nearly empty second stein in his direction. He waved back, and a warm feeling came over me, that sort of warm feeling you get when you've been recognized, remembered, and told in so many words that you belong. But then I watched Mr. Goerman wave to pretty much every other person in the Student Prince that night, and he couldn't have known everyone to whom he waved. So I kept drinking my beer, and that helped maintain my warm feeling long after it should have faded, which is of course yet another reason why people drink ― in fact, the main one.
The bartender noticed that I'd finished the second of my two beers, and he must also have noticed that I hadn't done anything suspect while or after drinking them. He must have pegged me as the sort of guy who likes to peacefully order and drink his two big, strong beers at once, because he brought me two more.
"What do you say about something to eat?" he asked, gingerly twirling the sharp ends of his mustache.
"What a good idea," I said. No sooner had I said it ― drunk time being drunk time ― than there was in front of me a platter layered with five different kinds of Munich sausage with a dollop of hot mustard on the side, and on another platter a layer of creamed whitefish, surrounded by a border of hard crackers. Both of these platters appeared from behind me, one platter coming around me from the left, one from the right, the deliverer right up against my back. It was the way food wouldn't be served in a restaurant unless you were being served in a pleasant dream by a very attractive person who wanted you sexually, or unless the server knew you well.
The server knew me well. It was my mother. I turned to face her; she was wearing the white sack. I recognized it, too ― not from the other waitresses, but from that night a week earlier, when I'd first come home and seen my mother and she'd looked like the Lady of the Lake. She wasn't; she was a waitress at the Student Prince. I silently handed her one of my beers and she took it and drank it quickly, then handed the empty stein back. Still, she didn't say anything. I didn't want her to say anything, because I was afraid that she, like the Mirabellis, would call me by a name that would not be Sam, but Coleslaw or some other name by which she could say she no longer knew me or no longer wanted to.
"Sam ―," she finally began, but before she could get any further, I leaped off my stool and hugged her for using my right name. She let me hold her and hugged me back a little, too. My mother smelled like applesauce, which she must have served that night; when I was