One Year in Coal Harbor (7 page)

When he got back we all reached for one and Ked and I bumped hands.

“Sorry,” we said at the same time, and dropped our pretzels. We didn’t even bother retrieving them for fear of another collision and no one went for the pretzels after that. The whole thing was getting painful.

Ked had bangs that fell over his eyes so even though
we were both shy he had a place to hide. I kept putting my iced tea glass up against my forehead and in front of my face as if my face needed cooling. I slipped surreptitious looks at him from behind it. When the silence began to stretch on a little too long Bert said, “Well, if we’ve all had all the pretzels we want, shall we go off to dinner?”

Everyone stood up so quickly it was like we had springs in our rear ends. We wasted a little time shuffling awkwardly to the door and such while Evie looked for her cardigan and then her purse and then her keys and then her raincoat because it had started to rain. Ked had a light Windbreaker, which was clearly going to be useless in Coal Harbor. We don’t get a smattering of rain; it pours down like the deluge and penetrates all but the most professional-type rain gear. We looked awkwardly at his thin little jacket and then Bert decided we should drive over even though it was only a shortish walk and we never normally would have. But Evie and I cottoned to the plan right away and got in the car like it was the most natural thing to drive six blocks while I wondered what type of parents bought you a thin little Windbreaker to get through a West Coast winter. Or maybe he hadn’t had parents in a long time, just a series of foster homes where no one wanted to spend money on his outerwear. Evie had told me they never quizzed the foster kids. If they wanted to volunteer information they would. Most of
them came with so little they could call their own, starting with any say about where they got placed, the least you could do was allow them their privacy and dignity.

“ ’Cause none of them have very pretty stories to tell or they wouldn’t be here and sometimes I think even to themselves they like to tell it different than it was. Or believe it will turn out different than it probably will,” she’d explained to me.

When we got to The Girl on the Red Swing it was only four-thirty. Even Evie and Bert usually waited until five to eat. We all sat in a booth and stared mutely and intensely at the menu as if the secret of the universe were contained on those plasticized pages. Bert and Evie weren’t usually shy but if you asked me it was the sheer size of Ked that was striking them dumb. I think they had looked forward to having a cockapoo in human form and patting him on the head like a lapdog, but they’d need a ladder to reach the top of Ked’s head.

“So,” said Miss Bowzer once we’d introduced her to Ked. “What will you have?”

“Whatever you have, it comes on a waffle,” I explained to Ked, because nowhere on the menu does it announce this, and some things, while appealing on their own, gross people out when they come waffleated. Even though you can drag the waffle out and pretend it’s not there. But Ked just said, “Cool.”

While we waited for dinner we didn’t talk much. Evie
and Bert sat as they always did, side by side in the booth so they could sample things off each other’s plates without reaching. That meant Ked and I shared the other side, which felt vaguely too intimate for having just met. We had to work to keep our legs and arms from accidentally brushing.

By the time our dinners came, Evie had recovered her sangfroid and kept us entertained with her endlessly sprightly chatter, full of gossip about everyone in town. I finished my French fries (which I always regard as more of a first course) and dug into my Welsh rarebit, which, by the way, goes excellently on a waffle—all that cheese just oozes into those waffle pockets. Figuring out what works particularly well on a waffle is part of the art of ordering at The Girl on the Red Swing. It had taken me a year of staring at Welsh rarebit on the menu before I finally ordered it, because Miss Bowzer wrote it as
Welsh Rabbit
. I don’t know if it was a misprint or if that’s how she thought it was spelled. It wasn’t until I started helping her in the kitchen that I saw it being made and realized there was no actual rabbit in it; it was basically melted cheese and beer and now it’s a favorite. It always makes me feel vaguely rakish too, because of the beer, and even though I know the alcohol cooks out, still, you are ingesting it.

As I was glorying in its cheesy goodness and beery daring, the restaurant door opened and a big man with
black slicked-back hair and a big black Fu Manchu mustache that hung down both sides of his face came bursting in. Everyone turned to look at him, partly because he was so big and partly because he wasn’t from Coal Harbor. Occasionally we get people coming into town who don’t live here. We even have a motel. But usually they come in the summer. And the ones who are dressed as well as this guy don’t stay at the motel and eat at The Girl on the Red Swing, they stay at Miss Clarice’s expensive B and B out on Jackson Road and we don’t see them because they’re there for some peace and quiet and expensive buffalo-mozzarella-saturated meals. So we all gaped except Ked, who didn’t know the difference between townsfolk and strangers and just kept scarfing down his cheeseburger, unaware there was a floor show.

It might have been an uncomfortable moment for the stranger, coming in to get a bite and having everyone stop breathing at the sight of him, but he didn’t seem to mind. He was broad-shouldered and red-faced from the icy rain that had started and he dripped all over the floor by the front cash as he looked for the hostess to come seat him. He stood like an actor who has come onstage, exuding some kind of natural charisma and stage presence, and I thought any second he would break into a thrilling soliloquy. It was certainly an attention-getting way to be. We had lots of time to study it because Miss Bowzer was in the kitchen. She cooked, waited tables and hostessed.
Actually the latter wasn’t much of a job as most people came in and just sat where they always did. But this stranger didn’t know that so he took the
PLEASE WAIT TO BE SEATED
sign seriously and just stood there. I suppose somebody should have told him he could sit down but he seemed so totally in command of the situation that I think we all felt it would be an impertinence.

Eventually Miss Bowzer came from the back with a tray full of people’s orders, and didn’t seem to notice him until he said, “Kate!”

Miss Bowzer looked up, saw him and dropped her tray. Salads and waffles flew everywhere.

I’m sure all of us wanted to break into applause, although naturally we didn’t. We should have gone back to eating our dinners but we didn’t do that, either. Miss Bowzer, paying no attention to the broken plates and salad dressing underfoot, but treading unheeding over it all, walked up to him, and did a very peculiar thing. She poked him with one finger. One quick poke as if to make sure he was real.

“You came back,” she said finally.

“Yes, I did,” he said. “Or so it seems.”

And then, because I realized who he must be, with his villain’s look and slicked-back hair, I let out a little gulping sound. Ked studied me for a second and then studied Miss Bowzer and the man, who were now walking to the kitchen like they’d been planning this rendezvous for years.

We didn’t see either of them again. Ked gave me another look and I knew he knew I knew something. But though he looked interested and curious, he didn’t say anything.

Then again, no one in the whole restaurant was saying anything.
Anything at all
. It was like a restaurant of mutes. The people whose salads had been ruined looked ruefully at them and a man finally broke the silence and said, “You don’t think she expects us to pay for those, do you?”

It echoed through the restaurant. I felt for the woman whose husband it was. She was probably always shushing him at Christmas parties and stuff.

“Oh, Bernard,” said his wife. “You’re such a
man
.”

“And at such a moment!” added another woman sitting with them.

“What moment?” asked Bernard, looking completely flummoxed.

But the woman just sighed and a lot of other women, as if holding it in until someone got it started, also expelled long breaths and Ked looked at me and we laughed. Then before the laugh could become too companionable, he cut it off and returned to his dinner as though someone were going to come and yell at him for laughing. He was attacking his cheeseburger with such voracity and guilty intensity that I wanted to say, For God’s sake, all you did was laugh. But instead I went back to my dinner with equal companionable voracity. I hoped he realized
that this was for his benefit and didn’t think I chowed down like this all the time.

Everyone else went back to eating too, but there was a hushed quality now and if you asked me, people were keeping it down because they were straining to hear any snippets of conversation from the kitchen. When Miss Bowzer still didn’t come back out, people started getting quietly up and leaving money for their bills on their tables. One woman needed change and asked her friends to make it, and when they couldn’t, they went back to the kitchen and never came out either.

I knew there was a door from the kitchen onto the street but Ked didn’t. “Bermuda Triangle,” he muttered to no one in particular, and I laughed and he looked all wary again.

“My goodness, I guess they plan to stay back there forever,” said Evie, who was still cutting and chewing but whose eyes had never left the kitchen door. “I wonder who he is.”

“I think I know,” I said.

So I told the story and she and Bert thought it was very romantic until they pulled themselves together and realized that this made Dan Sneild my uncle’s rival and how I might feel about it. Then they frowned and
tsk-tsked
but I could see their hearts weren’t in it. Everyone enjoys a good love story and this certainly stepped things up a notch in the saga of Miss Bowzer.

Ked just politely kept chewing. He had dragged his waffle out from under his cheeseburger when it arrived and now, done with the burger, he was pouring syrup all over his waffle and eating it as a second course, which showed he understood the concept perfectly.

“Well, it’s too bad about Miss Bowzer and this, uh, visitor,” said Evie, never taking her eyes off the kitchen door. “Because she makes great pies, don’t she, Bert?”

“Nobody makes a pie like Miss Bowzer except perhaps Evie,” agreed Bert.

“Aw, Bert. Anyhow, Ked, we wanted you to try some pie. We wanted you to order
three kinds of pie
!”

“At least!”
said Bert.

“But it looks like everyone’s packing it in. I guess we ought to go too so Miss Bowzer can have a nice visit with that young man who looks like an otter,” said Evie, and then her eyes darted guiltily to me and she added, “Or not such a nice visit. Usually seeing someone after all those years all you have is an awkward old time, finding you never knew what you saw in the person so long ago. Don’t you think, Bert?”

“I’ve never had such an experience, I guess, Evie,” said Bert.

“But you can guess that, right?”

“That’s what I’d guess,” said Bert firmly, and then got up to pay the bill.

By now, Mr. Barrista was manning the cash register so
people could pay and get out without bothering Miss Bowzer.

Evie and Ked and I were heading for the door when this old guy everyone calls the seer grabbed Ked by the sleeve and pulled him over to his booth. Ked didn’t know yet that you don’t want to get corralled by the seer.

The seer is an old fisherman who sits in The Girl on the Red Swing all day and drinks coffee and mutters to himself. Once when I was helping out, Miss Bowzer wanted me to pour him more coffee, but I admitted that he scared me. He’d been sitting there as many years as I could remember, just getting older and shaggier and weirder. If he can, he engages you in conversation about his dreams. To hear him tell it, he dreams every night about everyone in town. He thinks the dreamtown is real and that it’s important we all know what he sees us doing there. The first time he told me about this, I told Miss Bowzer I thought he was crazy and she said, “Oh, he’s just a little addled after all those years alone at sea. The ones who go out alone for long days and nights, they get funny in the end.”

“My dad fishes alone!” I said.

“He’s got you and your mom, for heaven’s sake. Harry’s got no one at all. That’s probably why he’s invented this whole dreamtown. He doesn’t see folks much in his real life. But in his dreams he’s got a life full of everyone’s comings and goings to keep track of. And it don’t hurt no
one to listen to what he sees. You know we none of us can stay entertained with just our own life. We gotta be kept up to date with a bunch of different lives and what’s happening in them. That’s why TV’s so popular, I guess. But who’s Harry got to keep track of? No one. So he keeps track of us all. Everyone feels better with a job and I guess he thinks that’s his. And if people don’t listen, he never bothers them twice.”

That was more or less true but the part she left out was that when people politely but firmly stopped the seer’s rambling dream narratives, his eyes followed them the rest of the time they were there, watching them eat, like he knew stuff they didn’t and felt sorry for them, not being able to see what was coming. Well, if that didn’t give you the willies I don’t know what would. And who wants to know their oncoming sorrows? Even if they’re only imagined, haven’t you got enough to deal with in the here and now? But there he was telling Ked stuff, and Ked seemed riveted.

I went to wait with Evie and Bert, who were in the alcove next to the gumball machine.

“Gumball?” asked Bert as I approached. He handed me a nickel and one for Ked, too. But I hung on to Ked’s nickel, since putting it in, turning the knob and waiting to see what color you got was the best part. The gum itself only had flavor for about three minutes.

“Look at that boy!” said Evie. “He’s listening so politely to Harry rambling on.”

“He’s such a nice boy,” said Bert. “You can tell that straight off.”

“And not frightened like some by the hair.”