The bartender brought over a cup of coffee. Gregory thanked him, and Paul held up a finger, said, “My tab.”
Gregory took a sip. Not bad for bar coffee. “That reminds me,” he said. “Shouldn’t you be working over at your coffeehouse?”
Paul waved his hand dismissively. “What do you think teenagers are for? Besides, the place is dead. The few customers we do have either show up before work or at lunchtime. The joint’s not exactly jumping midmorning.”
“What about nights, evenings?”
Paul shrugged. “So-so.”
Odd raised an eyebrow.
“All right. Business sucks.” He sighed. “You know, I was almost going to open up a health food store—”
“And a juice bar? Those are big in California, too.”
“No, just a health food store. But it was too depressing. I thought of the health stores I’d been in, and I realized that no one in there ever looked healthy. They were always either skinny, ugly weirdos or dying old people looking for last-chance miracle cures. Normal people just weren’t into health food. Healthy people weren’t into health food. So I decided to try the café.” He shook his head. “I just thought it would be cooler than it turned out to be.”
“And more successful,” Odd pointed out.
“And more successful,” Paul agreed. He sipped his beer. “Let’s get off this subject. It depresses the shit out of me.”
“All right,” Gregory said. “What ever happened to Larry Hall?”
“Larry Hall!”
They talked about old times, old friends, what had happened to everyone and where they had gone. Most people had moved away. The few who hadn’t seemed to be walking country music clichés—unhappy underachievers with an extraordinarily high divorce rate. Many of their old schoolyard enemies had turned out to have miserable, unhappy lives, and they both chuckled over that.
“You know,” Paul said seriously, “friends come and go, but family’s always there.”
“You’ve sure changed your tune.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Come on. Back in high school, when you couldn’t get a date to save your life, you used to tell me that girls come and go, but friends are forever.”
“I did not.”
“Did too. You’d been watching too many buddy movies or something. War movies. And you had this asshole idea that even if you eventually got married, your friends would be more important than your wife.”
“You a fag?” Odd asked, squinting up at him.
Gregory laughed.
“Very funny.”
“All that male bonding crap is just Hollywood bullshit,” Odd said. “I’ve had a million friends, but I’ve only had one wife, and if I ever had a choice to make between the two, it would be a damn easy one. I may like my friends, but I love my wife.”
“Fuckin’ A,” Paul said.
Gregory grinned, shaking his head. “I can’t believe it. You finally grew up.”
“Blow me.”
Gregory chuckled, sipped his coffee. He felt good. He and Paul hadn’t hung out since high school, but there was none of the awkwardness between them that he would have expected. It was as though they’d picked up exactly where they’d left off all those years ago. They’d fallen into the old rhythms, the old patterns. They were comfortable with each other, perfectly at ease, and there was something nice about that.
“So how is Deanna?” Gregory asked.
“Still at her mom’s. I pick her up Thursday. I called and told her you were back, but to tell you the truth, she didn’t seem all that fired up to see you.”
“Tell her I’ve changed, too.”
“Yeah. Right.”
They laughed.
Gregory motioned to the bartender for a refill. He glanced around the bar, saw neon beer signs, a few old mining photographs half hidden in the gloom, a dead jukebox and a Pac Man video game. In his mind, this place had always been demonized, the home of hate, an evil spot, and it was liberating to see that it was merely a typical small-town business, to recognize on an emotional level that his dread had been all self-induced and that none of the attributes he had ascribed to it existed anywhere outside of his mind. He finally understood what people meant when they talked about “a sense of closure.” The phrase had always smacked of pop psychology to him, and he’d dismissed the word “closure” as yet another trendy, meaningless buzzword, but it was apt in this instance. It felt as though an open wound had been healed, and it made him think you could go home again.
The bartender poured him another cup of coffee, and Gregory smiled his thanks. “You know,” he said to Paul, “I was thinking. You need some help at your café? I’d do it for free,” he added quickly. “You wouldn’t have to pay me a dime.”
Paul frowned. “You won the lottery and gave up your high-paying job to become… a waiter in McGuane? Are you drunk or are you just insane?”
“I don’t want to be a waiter. You have the only café in town, and I thought about all the ones back in California, and I figured I could help you out. You know, spruce it up, bring it up to California standards.”
“How?”
“Do you have entertainment? Performers?”
Paul shook his head.
“There you go. That’d help draw people. I could help you book local singers. Or cowboy poets. Or, hell, maybe even some club acts that usually don’t even hit this part of the state.”
“Why?” Paul asked.
Gregory shrugged. “Call it an investment.” He smiled.
“Or the whim of a bored rich guy. Well, rich-for-McGuane guy.”
Paul nodded, looked over at Odd. “We could have entertainment. We could move back those chairs and tables on the east wall and you could put up a little stage…”
“I’d pay for the materials,” Gregory said. He nodded toward Odd. “And your time. We could get a decent lighting setup, a mike and a speaker system.”
The old man nodded. “It’s doable.”
“This has potential,” Paul admitted, and Gregory thought he detected a hint of excitement in his voice. “No place else in town has live entertainment.”
“Even if we just booked local talent, you’d get their friends and family coming in to watch. At the very least. Charge a two-item minimum, and voilà!”
“This could work. I might be saved from bankruptcy yet.” He grinned, held his hand out to Gregory, shook. “Deal!”
Gregory wanted to go immediately over to the café, but both Paul and Odd had beers in front of them, and neither one was in a hurry to leave. They talked excitedly of the specifics of renovation, the mechanics of outfitting the café with a performance area, and Odd borrowed a pen from the bartender and started writing figures down on a napkin.
After ten minutes of increasingly grandiose plans that made Gregory mention the fact that they should have a budget, a limit, Paul excused himself and headed off toward the bathroom at the rear of the bar.
Gregory and Odd sat for a moment in silence, sipping their respective drinks.
“You’ve lived here for a while, haven’t you?” Gregory asked.
“All my life.”
“You wouldn’t happen to know whatever became of the Megans, would you? The ones who used to own our place?”
Odd frowned.
“Did they move or—?”
“They’re dead,” the old man said.
Gregory stared at him and blinked.
“Bill Megan shot his family. Killed ’em all, then turned the gun on himself.”
Odd answered his next question before he even asked it. “In their bedrooms,” he said. “Murdered ’em while they slept.”
He needed alcohol after that.
He ordered one beer, then another, and finally finished off a third before stopping.