Alice waited in the car, prepared to outlast Madeline. The afternoon grew colder as it inched toward the winter night. The parking lot filled. The tavern opened for dinner. Patrons at the bar spilled out onto the picnic tables. Conversations crowded the air. Still Madeline did not reappear. Alice had no choice but to go inside, unless she wanted to sit shivering in the car until the bar closed.
The wood-paneled bar looked just as she remembered, right down to the deer heads on the walls, the taxidermy bear lurking in the corner. The license plates above the liquor display, the scent of beer and Lysol, it all came rushing back to her. The space had always been a little dark, worn, old-timey.
Madeline sat on a stool at the far end of the bar, chatting with a middle-aged bartender spilling out of an overly tight tank top. She spotted Alice hovering by the door and waved her over.
“I was wondering when you were going to buck up,” she said as Alice slipped onto the barstool beside hers. Above the array of taps for beer, a moose head watched over them. Madeline signaled to the bartender. “Shirley, a beer for my friend, please.”
Shirley sloshed the beer as she placed it on the slick bar. She pulled a rag out of her back pocket and wiped up the spill.
“Alice used to come here every Sunday with her father as a kid,” Madeline said.
“Is that right?” Shirley said indifferently. “What’s his name? Maybe I know him.”
A moment passed before Alice said, “Paul Meadows.”
Shirley’s face grew animated. “No shit. You’re Paul’s kid? I remember you.” Alice wasn’t sure she believed her until Shirley said, “You had matching brown leather jackets. What was it he used to call you, Big Al?”
“Tall Al.” No one had called her Tall Al in years. As with her height, Alice had hated the nickname. “Don’t try to change the things you dislike about yourself,” her father would tell her. “They might end up being the things you like most.”Alice had learned to love her height, which was the same as her father’s. It allowed her to see the world from his altitude.
“I always wondered what happened to you two.” Shirley wiped the rag over the bar again. “One day we just never saw you again. Lot of disappointed folks, I’ll say that.”
Madeline watched to see how Alice would respond. “He passed away. That’s why we stopped coming.”
Shirley’s eyes misted. “I’m real sorry to hear that.” She laughed. “I’ll never forget this one time, the bar was slammed and I was here on my own. Some drunk guy broke a glass, and it sliced me.” She held out her palm to show Alice a cut like a love line across her palm. “I mean it was gushing. One of the regulars was a doctor. He bandaged it real tight so I could finish my shift. Meanwhile, the place is going wild. I look over and your dad’s behind the bar, pouring this and that into pint glasses then sliding them over to customers. When my hand was good and bandaged, I saw him pouring Sprite and grenadine into a mixer. I said, ‘Paul, what the hell is that supposed to be?’ And your dad’s all innocent, ‘That’s not what’s in a Manhattan?’ And you know what? The guy he made it for said it was the best Manhattan he’d ever had.” She laughed again. “He was a good man, your dad.”
“He was,” Alice said.
Shirley said she’d be right back and returned with three shots of tequila. She raised her glass. “To Paul.”
Alice and Madeline lifted their glasses to hers.
They stayed long enough for Madeline to drink another beer and the effects of the shot to leave Alice’s bloodstream. The bar grew busy, and whenever a longtime regular came in, Shirley pointed Alice out. Some of them Alice recognized. Others she wanted to recognize. They all had stories about her father, how he did this magic trick with a quarter that they could never figure out, how he settled fights before they started, escorting troublemakers out without their realizing he was doing it, how he could get any band that rolled through to play “Honky Tonk Women,” even those who claimed not to know the chord progressions.
Alice grew dizzy with the past, stories she half recollected, others, like the magic trick, that she doubted were true. Her dad had thick, clumsy hands. Still, she believed these regulars recalled the trick because her father could make any moment magical, even kicking a guy out of his favorite bar.
When Madeline’s head drooped, Alice decided it was time to leave. Outside, the mountain air invigorated her. She wanted to run through the woods, to twirl among the spindly oak trees. Instead she ran to her car and lay on the hood, looking up at the starry sky.
“Oh, Madeline. Thank you,” she said when Madeline joined her on the hood. “I needed that.”
“Your father’s death was a tragedy,” Madeline said to the stars. “Don’t let that define all the good times that came before it.”
The sky was dark in the mountains, making the few constellations Alice knew easier to find. For her eighth birthday her father had bought her a star. He called it Alice Minor. It came with a certificate and a star chart to locate it in the vast sky. On the night of her birthday it was too foggy to see any stars. They had to wait three nights, and when it was finally clear, they still couldn’t identify Alice Minor among the stars above. For a week they scanned the sky fruitlessly. Alice Minor was nowhere to be found. “I think you’ve been had,” Bobby said to Paul. “Those companies are all scams. Only the International Astronomical Union can name stars.” It was like Bobby to look this up. It was like Paul not to.
“That just means the whole sky is yours,” he told his daughter. “You can look up and know any one of those stars might be yours.” Alice didn’t want the whole sky. She wanted her star.
After her father died, she forgot entirely about Alice Minor. When she looked up at the night sky, she just saw a marker of another day that had passed without him.
How had she forgotten about the star her father bought for her? How had she let the tavern become a relic of his death rather than a monument to his life? Madeline was right. She had allowed his absence to consume everything that came before it.
“What about you, with Gregory? You cut yourself off from everything after he died.”
“On the contrary, I’m living the life we always planned to live together. The house we shared, the library Gregory built for me, that was his dream. Maybe it isn’t the life others would want, but it’s everything to me.” Madeline closed her eyes.
Alice watched as the contours of the old woman’s face blurred into the darkness surrounding them until she could not tell where Madeline ended and the night began. Eventually it got too cold to stay outside, so they retreated to the car and drove to Madeline’s house. Alice pulled to a stop outside and looked over at Madeline, whose head bobbed in and out of the porch light, there and then gone. There and gone again.
“I won’t forget this night,” Alice told her.
In the morning Madeline’s door was closed. Not wanting to wake her, Alice tiptoed downstairs, surprised to find no thermos of coffee waiting on the counter. She searched the cupboard until she found a French press and ground beans. As she waited for the water to boil, she surveyed the fridge for something to eat. What little food remained on its shelves had grown moldy.
