A tray of food arrives for the family next to them. The waitress slides each plate onto the table as the family oohs and aahs.
“I have to go to the bathroom,” Alex says.
“Hurry up,” Lorca says. “We have to get back to the club.”
Alex runs off. Louisa stacks a pile of creamers. “You’re rough with him.”
“I’m real with him. He’ll grow up knowing what’s real.”
“Or he’ll grow up hating you.”
Lorca feels the day falling off a cliff. “So,” he says, “how does someone get into the snake lady business?”
She allows him to change the subject but registers it with a tilt of her pretty eyebrows. “The original snake lady is a friend of mine. We were dancers together, legitimate dancers, in a burlesque show. She said it would be easy money. She was right.”
“How do you get them to stay on you?”
“Practice,” she says. “I hold my arms in the tank and they wind around.” She pantomimes holding her arms in a tank. “When I come onstage, the snakes’ heads are down by my hands. I shimmy around, show them to the boys.” She sways in the booth to demonstrate. “Then, I go like this.” She gyrates on the diner seat. Lorca’s neck warms. “They crawl around my belly and legs. I do splits, shimmies, the whole shebang. The snakes are pros. They’re the stars and they know it.”
“The whole shebang.” Lorca is getting a sad feeling. “Do you mix it up every time?”
“I do not,” she says, “mix it up.”
“What kind of future is in snake dancing?”
“It supported my friend for years,” she says. “She’s quitting because she has cancer and she wants to be with her kid, but if she didn’t, she could have done it indefinitely.” She reacts to his grimace. “I like it, Lorca. It’s fun.”
“Fun,” he says. “Do the snakes have names?”
“They have names.” She seems less willing to share their names than to talk about the dancing.
“Give.”
“Don’t laugh,” she says. “Hero and Leander. Like the Greek myth?”
“I know like the Greek myth.”
Alex returns from the bathroom and asks his father to win him a prize from the claw machine in the lobby. They slip into their coats. Every other table’s jukebox works. They walk through several eras of rock and roll, each table its own sad painting: the church crowd, a family, a couple, an old man eating alone. Lorca hears Alex call out the tunes. “ ‘Fill Me Up, Buttercup,’ ‘The Twist,’ ‘God Only Knows,’ ‘Chances Are.’ ” Louisa sings along, her voice Marlboro and terrible.
At the register, Lorca waits to pay while Louisa and Alex examine the pie cases. “Coconut custard,” she says. “You ever have that?”
Alex wrinkles his nose. “Bleh.”
“That’s how I feel about it, too. What about that one, Black Forest? I’m a chocolate girl.”
Alex’s voice is sober. “I’m a chocolate girl, too.”
She tousles his thick curls. Alex tries to hide how happy this makes him.
A gleaming bank of machines in the lobby promises prizes in exchange for skill. Alex points to what he wants: a stuffed owl. Lorca feeds a quarter into the machine and nothing happens.
“Two quarters, Dad.”
He feeds another quarter. “This only took one when I was a kid.”
Louisa says, “Tell it to your plants, old man.”
The claw, activated, lurches over the pile of toys. Before Lorca can figure out the buttons, it takes a directionless swipe and misses. The machine shudders to a halt. Lorca feeds it two more quarters.
The claw jerks to life again. This time he is able to position it over the owl. He lowers the claw; its metal hooks close over the animal but drops it when it ascends.
“You suck at this,” Louisa says.
Again he feeds the machine two quarters. Again the claw holds the owl for a moment, then drops it. “Is this fixed?” he says. Alex avoids his eyes.
Lorca has one quarter left. He asks Alex for another one. The boy digs through his pockets. “Well?”
“Jesus.” Louisa tosses him a quarter from her purse. Lorca tries again. Another failure. He shoves a dollar bill into Alex’s hands and tells him to get it changed behind the counter. “Do you want the toy or not?” he says, when the boy hesitates. He turns back to the machine. “They want you to lose all of your money in this thing.”
“It’s not a big deal,” Louisa says, shifting in her heels.
Alex returns with the change. Lorca loses the dollar in less than a minute. On the second attempt, the claw snatches the owl by its wing but at the last second, releases it.
Lorca elbows through the crowd that waits for available tables in thick coats and stockings. The pies in the case shine. He reaches the cashier. “Can someone talk to me about the machine in the lobby? How can I get my son the owl he wants?”
“One minute,” says the cashier.
“I’ll pay you for one,” Lorca says. “I can’t spend all day playing a game.”
The cashier’s smile is thin with aggravation. “It doesn’t work that way.”
“How about it works that way today?”
The manager is there, asking how he can help. “Why is everything in this place broken?” Lorca says. He leads the man to the lobby, where Louisa and Alex stand by the machine. Alex holds up the stuffed owl. “Louisa got it.”
“Lucky, I guess,” she says.
Louisa Maya Vicino. Louisa from her Italian grandmother, Maya from her Spanish mother, and Vicino which means “near,” because her distant ancestors lived in the vicinity of something important, like an olive grove.
Two weeks later, Lorca’s father, Francis, pauses in the middle of a story to readjust his grip on the pilsner he fills. When his head hits the ground, it makes a metallic sound Lorca can hear from the other end of the bar. His father is already dead by the time Lorca reaches him, beer unspooling around him, eyes fixed on some fascination under the bar. Lorca gathers him in his arms.
Gathers him in his name — Jack Francis Lorca.
We carry our ancestors in our names and sometimes we carry our ancestors through the sliding doors of emergency rooms and either way they are heavy, either way we can’t escape.
5:00 P.M
Sarina tries a barrette on her dark hair. She tries the expression she will use when she sees Ben Allen for the first time in four years. Surprise tippling the sides of her mouth. She runs perfume along her collarbone. Getting ready is a series of negotiations with herself and her meager set of prettying items. She settles on a black skirt, champagne blouse, no barrette. She won’t do much walking tonight so she makes one final bargain with herself: heels in exchange for a cab ride there.
Thinking about him requires so little effort that she can do it while performing mindless activities. Soaping the dishes, replaiting Clare Kelly’s hair, drying the dishes. The part of her brain that plays his ongoing reel is unconnected to the neurons and synapses that control things like conscious thought and logic. Ben turning to her at a party. Ben turning to her. Ben turning. What human being deserves to be the nucleus of such high esteem? Certainly not Benjamin, middle name Hal, last name Allen. Five-nine in boots. Who has a car that doesn’t start on cold mornings, an unfinished screenplay, a law degree he doesn’t use, a romantic’s tendency to save movie stubs, and a mannered, unsmiling wife.
5:15 P.M
“Do you want the good news or the bad news?”
The trash bags are gone, the bar wiped clean. The lights have been hung; they line the stage and loop around the Snakehead, making the old axe glow. Stalled in the doorway, Lorca experiences a stomachache he can only call Christmas.