You stand behind a bar for forty years, you see a lot of lonely. You see a lot of stupid and bored, too, but that ain’t the same thing — ain’t no story behind those. Lonely, you got a story, something to pass the time with when it’s slow, ’cause you can read it in their face. Me and Ernie, that’s my husband, we used to make a game out of it with dollar bets, and now and then I felt bad about doing it, but you see enough guys staring down at their wedding bands like they never saw ’em before — it’s like you have to laugh, or else it just makes you sad.

So, we’d bet — is he gonna talk our ears off, or is he gonna mope? Is he gonna order a double, do it standing up, and walk right out, or is he gonna stay until closing? Is he gonna stare at the TV, or is he gonna stare at his ice cubes? And then depending on that stuff, I could put it together — the story.

‘Cause there’s different kinds of lonely, and mostly, the people that came into our place, it was that they didn’t want to go home yet, and that’s the kind of lonely where you’re around other people and you’re still all by yourself. We saw that a lot, guys checking their watches all “great, now I gotta go home and pretend I like my kids.” And we got the divorces, too, where the loneliness is actually pain — we didn’t even bother betting on those. Someone slaps fifty bucks down on the bar before they’ve even got their coat off, you know what you’re looking at.

But then, sometimes, people came in — it’s hard to explain, but when you were a kid, on the first warm day of spring? That first day when you can really feel the sun and it’s warm too, instead of just light. On the first warm day, when you’re a kid, you try to be outside as much as you can, in the yard or on the street, on your bike, whatever. And you stay out till dinner, and you’re sitting outside, and it’s getting cold again, and the ground is still really cold, and you’re freezing but you don’t want to go in yet, because it was just warm, you felt it yourself? And your fingers are getting numb, but you just have a feeling, like you need something, but you don’t know what it is because you ain’t lived yet, you’re just a kid still, and you can’t wait to get to that something — I’m not explaining this real well.

It’s the kind of feeling you can’t tell anyone about, and it’s like you’ll burst with it but you have to keep it in. That’s a kind of lonely too, and some people, they’re born with that kind, and they keep it with them all the time.

They’re not the kind that want to drink when things’re bad, those people, but we’d still see ’em now and then when they came in with friends, or after the Beechwood Lounge closed. And you know who had that look was the Shipley girl — the other one, not Stevie. Doesn’t come in anymore, but back when she was carrying on with that teacher with the gorilla face, the two of them used to come in. Wasn’t as nosy and hey-how-ya-doin’ as the Beechwood at our place, is why. She’d get a Coke, though I think she had a flask in her purse, and she’d sit and jiggle her leg and look around like she was waiting for someone. In a place she’d gone to get away from people. Waiting for that something, I guess, and she didn’t know what. She lives in town now — on Evergreen, I think.

And you know, I don’t know why a girl like that would come back to a town like this, a small town where everybody knows everything about you, or thinks they do at any rate, but then sometimes, I think maybe I’m a girl like that. Or how would I know what that kind of lonely is like?

I never told Ernie nothing about that first day of spring thing, it would have sounded stupid if I said it out loud so I kept it to myself. But sometimes I wonder if I wasn’t one of them. All the times I was the only one sober in the place — sometimes I wonder.

My name is Lydia Jones. I died during routine gallbladder surgery November 9, 1994.

January 5, 2004

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