I had been working late at the Mercury rather than going home to Nora and a silent house. Nora would be reading as usual, wrapped up in an afghan in the front room, and Toni, our little girl, who was two or three then, would already be asleep in her bed upstairs under a white comforter. So I had gone back to the office after supper to try to work on an editorial I was writing for the next week’s issue of the paper, and afterward I had walked up the block to the Holt Tavern on Third and Main streets. I wanted noise and laughter; I wanted to drink a beer among friends before going home again. At the tavern I stood at the bar talking to Bob Sullivan for a while.
Bob Sullivan was a semiretired farmer who had moved to town recently, and at the moment he was seriously disappointed in his granddaughter Amy. She had married a local boy named Jerry Weaver six months earlier. “And the kid wasn’t any good for her,” Sullivan said. “I told her so. Here she’s just a year out of high school and then this Weaver kid talks her into a church wedding before she even has time to turn around good and see what else there might be in the world waiting for her.”
“How old is she?” I said.
“Nineteen.”
“It’s pretty young to get married.”
“That’s what I mean.” Sullivan said. “But do you think you can tell these kids that?”
“No I don’t.”
“Well you can’t.”
Sullivan ordered another Jack Daniel’s on the rocks. After it was on the bar in front of him he drank half of it at once.
“So,” he said, “after I see she’s going to go through with it, I decided: hell, all right, then, I’ll make it easier on her. I’ll buy her a nice double-wide trailer as a wedding present. And I did. It was brand-new too when I give it to her.”
“That was good of you.”
“Because you don’t think that kid has any money, do you?”
“His family has two or three sections of wheatland. They ought to have some money at least.”
“But do they spend it?”
“I wouldn’t know.”
“They don’t. And now I wish I didn’t either. I’m going to tell you why.”
“I’m still listening.”
“Because,” Bob Sullivan said, “the last time I go out to Amy’s house it was a month ago Sunday afternoon. I sit down at the kitchen table like I usually do and Amy brings me a cup of coffee. And after I’ve litten a cigarette to smoke with the coffee, she looks across the table at me and says: ‘Grandpa,’ she says, ‘I wish you wouldn’t smoke in my house anymore.’ ‘What?’ I say. ‘Grandpa,’ she says, ‘I just would appreciate it if you wouldn’t smoke in my house anymore.’ ‘You would, would you? Well I’ll be damned.’ ‘Because it’s a house rule,’ she says. ‘Is that right?’ I say. ‘Yes,’ she says, ‘it is. Jerry and me made up that rule last week after you was here the last time. I’m sorry, Grandpa.’ ‘So am I,’ I say. ‘And I’m getting sorrier.’ Then do you know what I did?”
“No. But I can guess.”
“I stood up and went outside. That’s what I did. I drove home again mad as hell about it. And I haven’t been back there since. What do you think of that?”
“It sounds pretty sudden to me.”
“That’s what I think. Because I’d already taken out my lighter and litten my cigarette. It wouldn’t be so bad if she had just told me before I’d already litten. But she never.”
“She’ll probably get over it,” I said.
“I don’t know. It’s been more than a month.”
“Give it awhile longer.”
“Sure. But do you know what, Pat?”
“No.”
“Do you know what the damn hell of it is?”
“No I don’t.”
“I miss her. That’s what the damn hell of it is. I miss Amy. I miss going out there, talking to her and drinking coffee with her. And tomorrow it’s going to be Sunday afternoon all over again too.”
Then he looked at me and I shook my head. He drank the rest of his Jack Daniel’s and afterward he sat there at the bar stirring the ice in the glass with his finger. Finally he stood up very slowly and went back to the rest room.