The unframed shot was a bit more candid than the first, which was a staff photo in which everyone was posing. This unframed photograph was from decades back. Lee had a full head of lanky dark brown hair, and his eyes were set farther up in his face. He was smiling at something a customer had said. While several of the other patrons laughed with their heads thrown back, Lee’s was a small smile, a withholding one; it wasn’t an invitation, it was a moat. He looked to be no more than twenty-seven or twenty-eight, and she could immediately see what her mother had been drawn to. That small smile was all coiled vitality and inflamed reticence. It promised too much and too little at the same time. Lee looked like the worst boyfriend and greatest fuck of all time.
She could see why her mother had described him as smelling like “lightning.” And she suspected that if she herself had walked into this bar in 1979 and this man had been standing behind it, she would have stayed for more than one drink. He fit the look of the profligate poet, the drug-addled painter-genius, the musician who’d die in a car crash the day after he signed his big record contract.
The tour of Lee’s life she received from Milo in photos, however, was of a journey confined mostly to the very bar where she now sat. She could feel his world and his options and his opportunities for casual sex with vibrant women decrease with every photo. Soon the world beyond the bar wasn’t something to dream of, it was something to hide from. The women who once pursued him turned into women who had to be pursued. They then became women who had to be lubricated with the proper amounts of humor and alcohol. Finally, one day, they’d be repulsed or amused to discover he thought of them sexually.
But as Lee’s sexual voltage decreased, year by year, his smiles grew wider. By the time he’d reached her middle-school years and still wore the black vest over a white shirt that Milo required of his bartenders, his skin had mottled, his face had sunk, and his smile had yellowed and picked up two gaps in the back rows. But with every photo, he looked looser, less burdened by the weight of whatever had been behind that fuck-you smile, that fuck-you sexual charisma. The soul seemed to flower as the body declined.
Milo next produced a stack of photographs from the annual Independence Day friends-’n’-family softball game and picnic. There were two women who appeared and reappeared in the photos alongside Lee. One woman was thin and brunette and possessed a face tight with strain and anxiety; the other was blowsy and blond and usually had a drink in one hand and a cigarette in the other.
“That was Ellen,” Milo said of the dark-haired woman. “She was angry. No one ever knew why. Kinda woman could suck the life out of a birthday party, a wedding, a Thanksgiving—and I seen her kill all three. She left Lee around eighty-six, I want to say. Eighty-seven? No later. Other one was his second wife. That’s Maddy. Last I heard she was still alive. Living in Elkton. She and Lee had a few good years and then sort of drifted apart.”
“Did he have any kids?” Rachel asked.
“Not with these women.” Milo watched her carefully across the bar for a moment as he reached behind his back to adjust something on his oxygen dispenser. “You think you’re his, huh?”
“I’m pretty sure of it,” Rachel said.
“You got his eyes,” Milo said, “that’s for sure. Pretend I said something funny.”
“What?”
“Laugh,” he said.
“Ha ha,” she said.
“No, for real.”
She looked around the bar. It was empty. She chuckled out a version of her laugh. She was surprised how authentic it sounded.
“That’s his laugh,” Milo said.
“Then it’s settled,” she said.
He smiled. “When I was young, people said I looked like Warren Oates. You know who that is?”
She shook her head.
“Movie actor. Was in a lot of westerns. Was in The Wild Bunch.”
She gave him an embarrassed shrug.
“Anyway, I did look like Warren Oates. Now people say I look like Wilford Brimley. Know who that is?”
She nodded. “The Quaker Oats guy.”
He said, “That’s him.”
“You do look like him.”
“I do.” He held up a finger. “And yet, best of my knowledge, I’m not related to him. Or to Warren Oates.” He held his thumb and index a hairbreadth apart. “Not even a little bit.”
She acknowledged his point with a slight tip of her head. Arrayed across the bar top was a man’s life in photographs, just as her life had been arrayed before her and Jeremy James two summers back. A collage, yet again, that said everything and said nothing. A person could be photographed every day of his life, she suspected, and still hide the truth of himself—the essence—from all who came along in pursuit of it. Her mother had stood in front of her every day for twenty years and she knew her only as much as Elizabeth had deemed fit to show. And now here was her father, staring back out at her from 4 × 6s and 5 × 7s and 8 × 10s, in focus, out of focus, oversaturated, and underlit. But in all cases, he was ultimately unknowable. She could see his face, but not behind it.
“He had a couple of stepkids,” Milo told her. “Ellen had a son when he met her, Maddy had a daughter. Don’t know that he formally adopted either of them. Never got a feeling one way or the other whether he liked them or they liked him back or if it went the other way. Or somewhere in between.” He shrugged, looked down at the collage. “He knew a lot about whiskey, had a couple motorcycles over the years he was fond of, had a dog for a while that got cancer so he never got another.”
“And he worked here for twenty-five years?”
“’Bout that.”
“Did he have any ambitions beyond being a bartender?”
Milo looked off for a bit, trying to remember. “When he was really into motorcycles, he talked with another guy for a while about opening a garage together where they’d fix ’em, maybe customize ’em. When the dog died, he read up a lot on veterinary schools. But nothing ever came of any of it.” He shrugged. “If he had any other dreams, he kept ’em tucked on a high shelf.”
“Why did he stop working here?”
“Didn’t like taking orders from Ronnie, probably. Hard to take orders from a man you watched grow up. Got tired of the commute maybe too. He lived in Elkton. Traffic between here and there gets worse every year.”
He looked at her in such a way that she knew he was sizing her up, making a decision. “You wear nice clothes, look like you got a good life.”
She nodded.
“He didn’t have no money. You know that? What little he had the exes took.”
Again she nodded.
“Grayson.”
The small hands caressed her heart this time, coldly, but lighter than a whisper.
“Leeland David Grayson,” Milo said. “That was the man’s full name.”
She met his second wife, Maddy, at a small park in Elkton, Maryland, a town that felt tossed aside, its hills dotted with the shells of factories and foundries no one living could probably remember in their heyday.