ALEXANDER C. IRVINE

ROSSETTI SONG

SOME PEOPLE HAVE ALWAYS wanted to be President, or a baseball player, or a movie
star, or business tycoon. Me, I've always wanted to own a bar. Not some flaky
franchised chicken-finger paradise for post-fraternity muscleboys and their
bimbos; a real shot-and-a-beer kind of neighborhood joint. Pool table or two in
the back, an old Wurlitzer by the bathroom doors, a long mirror behind the bar
suitable for the sort of what's-he-got-that-I-ain't-got scrutiny to which
melancholy drunks love to subject themselves. Tables with a topography of
cigarette burns, water rings, dents of uncertain origin, all preserved under a
quarter-inch layer of varnish. Beer signs on the walls, no bikinis or
volleyballs allowed, just painted mirrors and classic flickering neon like the
sign out front that says FRANK'S PLACE. Cab company numbers taped to the side of
the phone. A blackboard leaning against the mirror advertising the day's special
and a permanent addendum: HANGOVERS FREE OF CHARGE.

An old neighborhood bar, like I said, but it's hard to find a good one because
fewer and fewer people live in the old neighborhoods anymore and the ones who
are left don't talk to each other. Harder still to start one up, because any
place that will support one already has one, but that's a defeatist attitude as
Susan would have said. A real go-getter can-do type of person, that was my wife.
She died the day after my small-business loan was approved. Car wreck. She
wanted me to have the bar, though; ever since I'd known her she'd said I was
born to be a bartender. How do people decide things like that?

Did you know that more Americans die every year in car wrecks than were killed
in Vietnam? Or maybe it's every two years. Nine months ago I wouldn't have known
that, but tending bar fills you up with more useless trivia than you would think
any one brain could hold. I know that the Ambassador Bridge in Detroit runs
south to Windsor, Canada, and that Wally Pipp is the name of the guy who lost
his job to Lou Gehrig. Bar bets. There is nothing so esoteric or irrelevant that
someone won't bet a beer over it.

I spent Susan's insurance policy on an antique Wurlitzer that plays real
records. Limits my selection a bit, but the kind of crowd I draw has a certain
collective taste and the guy who sold me the juke threw in about twelve hundred
forty-fives that he'd been collecting since 1956. So I have Elvis and Patsy
Cline, the Beatles and Marvin Gaye, Louis Armstrong and Johnny Cash, along with
tons of stuff that I've never even played. And I take requests, got a sign over
the Wurlitzer, so I find myself sorting through those boxes of forty-fives
looking for something that I'm pretty sure I should have even though I've never
actually seen it. It was because of one of those requests that I struck up an
acquaintance with Milt Chrzanowski.

A guy -- not Milt -- sat down at the bar once in the early evening, not long
after I'd opened, and said, "Beer."

I love people who order like that; to a bartender, it's an expression of trust.
At least, I choose to look at it that way since the alternative is believing
that people don't care what they drink, and that concept is unsettling and
foreign to people such as myself. This guy looked at first inspection like a
local-brew sort (not something I can explain J, so I cracked open a Pike. After
a second look, I set it down without a glass.

"Nice juke," he said, finding the beer without looking at either it or me. He
took a long swig, glanced at the label, and dug a twenty out of his shirt
pocket. "What's on it?"

People always ask me that when they see it's an antique, as if I'm only going to
have some sort of theme music. It annoys me. The guy got up and walked over to
the box, standing slightly bent in front of it as he examined the selections; he
was taller than he'd looked sitting down. He stayed that way for a long time.

There were eight or ten people in the place, Boeing workers and fishermen
killing time until their boats went back out. Two or three trickled in every
time one or two wandered out. I lost track of the guy as I filled orders and
shot the shit with regulars about the Sonics' postseason collapse and the
continued influx of Californians into our fair city. Eventually my granola-punk
waitress Donna came in and everything leveled off into an average Wednesday
night. I was unloading the dishwasher when I looked up to see the tall guy back
at the bar. He waggled his empty beer at me. As I set a fresh one in front of
him (I'd guessed right about the glass), he dropped a five on the bar and walked
off.

Donna sashayed up to the bar laden with empties. "You haven't even noticed my
new tattoo," she said petulantly.

"I lose track," I said, flinging bottle caps all over the floor behind the bar.
I have a trash can by the coolers, but some nights my aim is off.

"Do tattoos change color when you get a sunburn?"

The speaker was not the tall guy. He was a slight balding fortyish guy in a
pinstripe suit that looked kind of crooked. Except for the suit he kind of
resembled me. I looked around for Donna but she was gone, a faint odor of
patchouli her only remnant.

"Dunno," I said. "I never had one."

"Neither have I," he said.

"Fine place you have here," he added, squinting into the narrow neck of his
bottle. "The Wurlitzer is a lovely touch."

He gave me a funny look when he said that, like he expected it to mean something
more, or at least other, than just what he said. I'm a bartender; when in doubt,
I always agree. "Yup."

"You don't recognize me, do you?" he said, looking back into his bottle. I've
heard many a man swear that they saw God in the bottom of a beer bottle. Myself,
I just usually feel Him pounding on my head the next morning.

"Fraid not."

"Ah well," he said, motioning for another beer. "I guess you wouldn't, but those
of us in invisible occupations occasionally pine for recognition. We are the
offensive linemen of the commercial banking world, the midlevel functionaries."

Lawyers and bankers, two kinds of people you never want to piss off. "I'm sorry,
ah, Mister..."

"Chrzanowski."

"Oh, yeah," I nodded vigorously. "I remember talking to you now." It was
actually true. He had called to reassure me that the loan was not in danger
because of Susan's death. I had been worried because she made quite a bit more
money as an engineer than I did as a local government reporter for the P.I, and
I had quit my job to give the bar a go. So they could justifiably have worried
about my ability to make the payments. But we had some money put away, and even
after the funeral expenses and the Wurlitzer there was a bit of insurance money
left over. I was a financially comfortable widower, at least as long as the bar
broke even. "It's Milt, right?"

He brightened. "That's right, Mr. Sutter," he said, reaching for his wallet.

I shook my head. "On the house, Milt, as long as you never call me Mr. Sutter
again." I caught myself just as I began to slide into smarmy-bartender mode.
"The name's --"

"Frank, yes, I remember." We shook hands, me self-consciously wiping my hand on
a towel first. He peered into the full bottle, wrinkled his forehead as if in
disappointment, then drank anyway. "You know that this space was occupied by a
bar before you leased it, don't you ?"

I nodded. "Yeah, they left it a mess, too," I said. "Place was a dive."

He nodded, wistfully I thought. "It was that, at least in its last few years.
But in the years before that, it was a place not unlike this one; not too rowdy,
but not sanitized either."

I was surprised that my taste in bars had anything in common with that of a
mid-level bank manager.

"I used to stop in fairly frequently when I worked out of the branch near here,"
Milt continued. "Ten years or more, until I transferred downtown in eighty-one,
I came to this place to decompress after a busy day of climbing the corporate
ladder." He chuckled and shook his head. "God, has it been seventeen years?
Ambition; glad I've given that up. Middle management is the lubricant in the
great engine of commerce," he said grandly, raising his bottle in a toast.

I returned the gesture with a dirty highball glass, and Milt fell silent as I
filled Donna's orders. I never did ask her about the sunburn thing.

"They had one of those, too," he said suddenly. I looked up and he was gesturing
at the juke with the now-nearly-empty bottle. "Splendid machines, those.
Memories as pleasant as the music." He drained the bottle, waved it at me. He
was getting lit pretty fast, and the more he drank, the more English he sounded.
Not an accent, but choices of words and emphasis. Something.

I set another beer in front of him. He clinked the neck of his empty against its
replacement, a sardonic little fare-thee-well. "Have you ever heard of a folk
duo called Five and Dime?" he asked.

"Nope," I said. "I wasn't much of a folkie; earnestness makes me squirm."

"Well, you couldn't really be expected to know them if you weren't a native,
either. Are you?" I shook my head; I'd grown up and gone to school in Michigan,
then ended up in Seattle by way of Texas and Colorado. Susan had more to do with
it than anything else. I've always been a sun-worshipper, and there are winters
here when I'd willingly trade a week at the beach for melanoma. But love will
make you do strange things.

"I didn't think so. Anyway, they were locals, students at the U-Dub." This is a
strange local colloquialism; University of Washington, therefore U-W, therefore
Yoo-Dub. "They never amounted to more than playing coffeehouses for tips, but
they pooled all of their money once and recorded a single. It was 'Tangled Up in
Blue,' as Simon and Garfunkel might have done it while on a sodium pentothal IV
drip. Godawful song. But it was backed with the most amazing piece of pop music
I think I've ever heard, a lovely ballad called 'Rossetti Song.'" He raised a
questioning eyebrow at me; I shook my head again and looked at the clock.

Nearly ten. I cracked open my first of the night, cheating by only a few
minutes. Since the accident, nostalgic people give me the jitters.

"'Rossetti Song,'" I said under my breath. The sound of the words out loud
brought to mind 'Rosetta stone,' and it was in the grip of strange allusions
that I went back to lean on the bar opposite Milt.

"The reason I ask all this," he continued, "is that your predecessor had that
song on his jukebox. I was wondering if perhaps you hadn't acquired his
collection as part of the lease or something."

"No, I got the spinner and the records from an ad. 'Actually plays records!' the
copy said, like it was walking on water, and the guy who sold it to me referred
to it as an antique. Shit, it's only two years older than I am."

I paused to drink my beer, get something in my mouth before I started some
maudlin rant. "Helluva collection came with it, though; supposed to be twelve
hundred, but I haven't counted."

"Twelve hundred," Milt repeated. He drummed his fingers on the bar for a moment,
then added, "Did you get it around here?"

"Jesus, Milt," I said, rolling my eyes. "Yes, I'll look for you."

"It's called 'Rossetti Song.'"

"I know."

"Reminded me of the words 'Rosetta stone' the first time I saw the title; isn't
that strange?"

I drained my beer. Slowly. "You don't say."

"I do, and you know what else? The word juke comes from Wolof, a West African
tribal language. Their word dzug means 'to live wickedly.' How about that?" He
knocked back the rest of his Pike. "Another, please?"

I got one for him and another for myself, and it still wasn't ten o'clock.

"Rosetta stone," I said, sitting cross-legged on the attic floor of the home
Susan and I had bought 4 B.C. Before Crash. Every event, every memory of mine
was starting to orient itself around the accident, around the afternoon that I'd
come in the front door shouting "I got it! I got it!" and heard the phone
ringing. I picked it up and the voice on the other side identified itself as one
Maura Yee from Swedish Hospital downtown. I didn't get there in time to say
goodbye.

And that was it, really; I was a married newspaper columnist one day and the
widowed proprietor of a drinking establishment the next. I wasn't able to either
mourn my wife or exult in the realization of a lifelong ambition. They canceled
each other out, and I trudged ahead in a sort of dazed equilibrium. No great
epiphany, no sudden collapse; just a bit more beer than was really good for me
and an aching vacant spot that I tried to pretend wasn't there. And every now
and then I would wonder when I would begin to mourn, or stop mourning, or begin
enjoying Frank's Place, and by the time I got done thinking about it I didn't
know what the hell was going on. And at that time it was nearly 1 A.C., almost a
whole year; when did everything start up again?

The streetlight across from my house flickered weakly, mortally wounded by
neighborhood teenagers. In its sporadic pink-orange light I could just barely
read the label of the forty-five that rested in my lap: FIVE AND DIME, it said
at the top of the circular label, and on the bottom ROSSETTI SONG 3:47. And
running along the outside edge was the legend SPARE CHANGE RECORDS. I'd never
heard of the label.

Rossetti, I knew, was a poet. Two of them, as I discovered when I rooted out
Susan's Norton Anthologies from her undergraduate English courses. I flipped
through the wrinkly translucent Norton paper and found Christina Rossetti,
younger sister of Dante Gabriel. The first two poems were simply titled "Song,"
and I put the book down. It was four o'clock in the morning; Milt would be happy
and the poems could wait until tomorrow. I reached for my beer, remembered I'd
left it upstairs next to the boxes of records. The book lay open in front of me,
and I suddenly registered that the handwriting between lines and in margins was
Susan's. Susan's from twenty years before, when the only Frank she was
interested in was Zappa.

"Yeah, well, he's dead too," I said, and stood up. I flipped the Five and Dime
record over in my hands and laid it B-side-up on my ancient Garrand turntable.
The soft crackle in the dim room as I laid the needle smoothly on the lip of the
record gave me a shiver; it was a sound I loved, bringing a weight of
anticipation that the tiny spark of a compact-disc laser cannot match, and the
few seconds of not-quite-silence that follow it always flood me with memories of
songs, and memories of Susan.

I sat on the floor in front of the couch and picked up the book as the music
began, a melancholy call-and-response between two guitars with a faintly Celtic
flavor and a definite tinny recorded-in-someone's-bathroom edge. One guitar
dropped into a steady chorded dum dadadada dum dadum and the first voice came
in, a half-chanted lyric baritone:

I met my love and wooed her, overarched by cypress leaves She was so frail, her
face so pale, I feared that soon I'd grieve. My love proved stronger than my
fear, and her fair hand I won Though we both knew her illness grew, our two
lives we made one.

It was my wont to mourn her as we clasped our hands together To slowly walk and
hear the clock toll far across the heather. I had but to caress her cheek; my
touch bespoke my fear "But I still live!" she'd say, and give this song to stop
my tears:

And now the second voice (was it Dime or Five, I wondered?) took over from the
first, a sprightly tenor dancing a cappella except for a double knock on the
guitars at the end of every phrase:

When I am dead, my dearest, sing no sad songs for me; Plant thou no roses at my
head, nor shady cypress tree: Be the green grass above me with showers and
dewdrops wet; And if thou wilt, remember, and if thou wilt, forget. I shall not
see the shadows, I shall not feel the rain; I shall not hear the nightingale
sing on, as if in pain: And dreaming through the twilight that doth not rise nor
set, Haply I may remember, and haply may forget.

At the second line, I recognized the second "Song" in Christina Rossetti's
Norton entry. I followed along as that lovely tenor embraced her words and then
soared into wordless arpeggiated harmonizing as the baritone and guitar leapt
back in:

One day she lay and could not sing, nor raise her lips to mine Her breath was
stilled, hard sorrow spilled my love upon her dying. I laid no roses at her
head, nor sang a dirge to mourn An oath I swore, to nevermore love any woman
born.

She was my Lady of Shalott, my belle dame sans merci, And when she died, I only
cried to keep her memory. I walk the grass above her now, and every shady tree
With her voice rings; I know she sings, and know she welcomes me.

I sat very still, Susan's handwriting in the margins of the blocky book wavering
in my teary gaze. There was a pop from the speakers as the needle kicked off the
end of the runout groove, and a tear fell directly onto a note she had made next
to "Song."

Expressions of mourning, it said. Dead don't remember us, why should we them?

The tear sat trembling in an auroral ring of dissolved black ink, smudging the
word don't. I started to close the book. There was a touch on the back of my
left hand, a familiar brushing across the backs of my fingers that started a
quivering in my stomach as it paused briefly over the still-pale stripe on my
ring finger. Then it was gone, and I was left alone in my house an hour before
dawn, my only company the ticking of the runout groove and the crushing
realization that she really wasn't ever coming back.

MILT DIDN'T SHOW UP until the next Wednesday. I spent the week staring at the
Five and Dime record peeking out from where I'd stashed it behind the cash
register. I suppose I was convinced that if I stared at it long enough I would
figure out whether what had happened was real. I was wearing my wedding ring
again. Donna noticed right away and asked me if I'd been to Vegas and what was
her name; after an inexplicable crippling wave of embarrassment, I threw a
washcloth at her and went to open the doors. I mopped the floors, got
deliveries, sparred with Donna, called cabs for laid-off Boeing riveters, and
not once did I find myself suddenly destroyed by remembering that my wife was
dead. Well, I found myself thinking at irregular intervals, I guess I went and
got over it. The words wouldn't attach themselves to an emotion.

When I turned around from the register and saw Milt there, the first thing I
noticed was that it was nearly twelve, much later than it had been the first
time he came in. He was wearing the same crooked suit, wet from the misting
rain. I wondered if he wore it every Wednesday. He was the kind of guy who might
have a schedule like that.

"Whatever it was I was having last week, I'll have it again," he said, and
damned if I could remember. I reasoned that if I couldn't, he couldn't either,
and cracked him a Pike. "So --" he said, and I cut him off.

"Got it," I said, pulling the disc out from behind the register. I returned to
the bar and spun it on the polished wood in front of him. "It's been here a
week, waiting for you to come back."

Milt seemed afraid to touch the record, afraid even to get near the corner of
its plain paper sleeve that pointed at him. "That isn't funny," he said.

It happened to him, too, I thought, although what exactly I meant by it I wasn't
sure. I looked at the clock again, suddenly in a hurry to chase everyone out and
close UP; I didn't want to play the song with people around. If whatever had
happened in my living room happened again, the whole bar would be treated to the
sight of my flipping out over a thirty-year-old garage-folk ballad.

A scan of the premises revealed only three bodies not in my employ, and one of
those was Milt. The other two were down to the lukewarm dregs of a pitcher of
Budweiser and showed no great promise of finishing it. "Call you a cab, fellas?"
I asked, hardly raising my voice over Patsy Cline singing "I Fall to Pieces."
The pair squinted up at me, then stubbed out cigarettes and rose to leave.

Donna had already put most of the chairs up. I called her over. "You can go
early if you want," I said. "I'm coming in tomorrow morning anyway."

She shook her head. "Rent's going up. I need the hours."

"What, it's Wednesday; you'd be gone by one anyway -- never mind, I'll pay you
until two. Just go. Deal?"

She looked quizzically at Milt, then back at me. "You just put your wedding ring
back on, Frank."

After she left, I turned out the neon signs in the windows and the hanging
lights over the pool tables. Streetlights cast spiny shadows of chair legs on
the floor, made wavy by the rain and crosshatched by the sharper shadows cast by
the single light behind the bar. Across the street was a vacant factory
building, most of its windows broken out, graffiti covering the padlocked doors
and grimy brick walls. It was raining like hell.

I wondered if my place was going to turn into a sleazy dive the way my
predecessor's had; I was on the edge of a vacant part of the city. But who knew?
I was also on the edge of a perfectly healthy retail area, and in six months
Frank's Place could be surrounded by a completely new trendy zone. Fashion was
too capricious to be outguessed.

Milt was still staring at the record as if it were a booby-trapped memory. I
walked by him and picked it up on my way over to the jukebox. I pulled the juke
away from the wall and opened its case, removing the Supremes and dropping Five
and Dime in their place. Milt hadn't moved; he was looking at me out of the
corner of his eye and gripping his beer in two hands.

I dropped the canopy back into place and was pushing the Wurlitzer back against
the wall when Milt said, "It's happened to you too, hasn't it?"

I stood slowly up and wiped my palms carefully on my towel until I was sure I
could speak without making a fool of myself. "What exactly do you mean by 'it'?"

"Come on, Frank, you kick everyone out as soon as I get here, send your waitress
-- who obviously thinks I'm some sort of rough trade home early, and you're
wearing your wedding ring again. I hadn't noticed that until she brought it up,
but I'd bet the contents of my branch safe that you played the song and
something happened." He was looking at me greedily, practically begging me to
admit to something. I wondered what he saw when the song was played. Or thought
he saw; maybe I'd just been drunk and feeling guilty.

I dug a quarter out of my pocket. "Why is this song so important to you, Milt?"
I asked.

He hesitated, but only for a second. "Because my wife died here while it was
playing."

I was looking at the selection cards, and I saw number 19.6, "Baby Love" by the
Supremes, but my hand wouldn't quite move to put the quarter in the slot. "I
remember humming along with the tenor over the melody line," Milt went on, "and
right at the words 'raise her lips to mine' she put a hand to her temple and
just pitched over out of her seat. Her name was Petra and she would have been
forty-six this September." He said all of this as if he were the Ancient
Mariner, doomed to repeat his tale of woe. I saw that he still wore his wedding
band as he pointed to a window table and said, "Right there, under the Mount
Rainier sign. That's where it happened."

Milt slid off his stool and walked toward the front table, still pointing. "And
now when I hear that song in this place, I can see her,' he said, his voice
beginning to tremble.

His arm fell back to his side as he approached the table and stood in front of
it. "After I was transferred downtown, I found a copy of the song and took it
home thinking that whenever I needed her I could play it there. But it didn't
work," he choked, and I could see tears shining in the odd pink glare of the
streetlights. "It didn't work, and then this place closed and it was years,
years before you came along.'

Milt paused, his fingers tracing the surface of the table. When he spoke again,
he was calmer. "And when your wife died I was terribly afraid that you would
refuse the loan and the space would remain vacant for longer than I could stand.
A midlife crisis is difficult enough without the added complication of a dead
wife you can't talk to, ha ha. So even though I had no idea what you would do
with the space, I had to make sure your loan wasn't recalled. And after you
actually had the place open, I came in just sort of -- quixotic, you know, and
saw the jukebox..." He shrugged miserably and produced a handkerchief.

I caught myself punching buttons and realized that I'd put the quarter into the
jukebox. The selector arm reached up and plucked the Five and Dime single from
the row and laid it on the turntable, and the sad, searching guitars began their
once-upon-a-time.

The colors in the Wurlitzer's bubble-glass began to dance, and I could feel
gentle vibrations in the palms of my hands as I leaned against the machine and
watched Milt stand quietly for a moment, then pull out one chair and stand
behind it. He smiled and went around to the other chair, sat down and leaned
forward, spoke quietly and reached out, his hand moving like he was brushing his
thumb lightly across invisible fingers. He stayed like that, smiling and
talking, his eyes alight, and once I swear he laughed out loud and I couldn't
hear it.

And I felt nothing.

The song ended, and Milt looked down and shrugged, then lifted his hand in a
halfhearted wave. He looked up at me like a man beatified a long time after
death.

I stalked across the room and flipped the door key onto his table. "Lock up when
you leave,' I said harshly, and charged out into the storm.

"You haven't slept," Milt chided, looking me up and down from the other side of
my screen door the next morning.

"Your goddamn pounding on the door woke me up," I answered truculently, lying.
Milt shifted nervously from foot to foot.

"The key," he said, almost as if reminding himself, and he lifted it wrapped in
a handkerchief from his breast pocket. "I left the two dollars for the beer next
to the register."

"Oh, for Christ's sake," I said, snatching the key from him. We stood there for
a moment not looking at each other. "Well --" he said, but I cut him off.

"You had coffee?"

"Well, no," he said. "Is that an invitation?"

Neither one of us spoke again until I'd gotten coffee and we'd both had the
first scalding sip. Then the silence seemed more companionable, and finally Milt
said, "You can tell they're not English, can't you?"

"What?"

"Five and Dime. Whatever their real names were. Are. I mean, heather and cypress
trees don't even grow within a thousand miles of each other, I don't think."

"What's your point, Milt?"

"No point. It was an icebreaker. Another middle-management skill." He sipped at
his coffee. "As was accepting this coffee. It gives us a chance to talk.
Communication is the first step toward a solution of any problem."

"How come I didn't feel anything last night?" I asked. I have no
middle-management skills.

"Why do you expect me to know?" Milt answered.

"Goddammit, Milt. Answer the question."

He paused, and then spoke carefully. "There is a difference," he said, "between
mourning and nostalgia. That's as simply as I can put it. And some people make
the transition from one to the other invisibly, over a period of time.
Invisibly. Ha. That's me," he said bitterly.

Then he shook it off and continued. "Others make it in a great terrifying
epiphanic moment. You felt something the first time you played the song?" I
nodded. "And where was this?"

"In my living room."

"But Susan didn't die there, did she?"

"No."

"Well." He rubbed at one eye. "Hm. There's an old saying, ancient really, to the
effect that magic only works on those who believe in it. Now I don't necessarily
believe that's true, but I do think -- how to put this -- that there are some
things that can be used in unusual ways given the proper circumstances. Which
wouldn't arise unless the person was aware of the object's capability, so there
you have your 'magic only works' canard. And I suppose this record, or this
song, is one of those things. What's it about, after all? Getting past mourning.
Are you through mourning your wife?"

I thought about it. My wife is dead, I thought, and waited for the squeeze in my
chest, the anger, the rotten ache of loss. It didn't come. In its place was a
memory, almost a waking dream, an image of the way her fingers used to brush
across the backs of mine and linger for a moment on my wedding band, like Piglet
saying I just wanted to be sure of you. And then it was gone.

I found that my throat was tight, but I was smiling. "'Tis better to have loved
and lost, right?" I said. "There's a canard for you."

"That's what I thought," Milt said.

DONNA GOT USED to it, I guess, but she always gave me an odd look when I let
Milt stay past closing on Wednesday nights. I let it go; after all, it wasn't
Some. thing that could be easily explained. Milt and I evolved our own set of
rituals attendant only on Wednesdays: he brought a roll of quarters, I left the
door key by the register. Usually when I came in the next morning, there were a
few empties on the bar and a sawbuck on the register, and in return Milt drank
free whenever I was there. It was a peculiar arrangement and it proved
satisfactory for both of us, if not for Donna.

And after a dozen Wednesdays, I took a detour on the way home after leaving Milt
to his visit. I sat with a six-pack on a park bench facing the Sound and drank
slowly until I had to turn around to watch the sun came up. The colors of the
dawn take on a certain enduring splendor when you've stayed up all night to see
them, as if you've ridden the underworld, been swallowed by the wolf and come
out the other side. And the sun, oh, the sun, leaping huge and molten from the
Cascades and waxing into its full blinding brightness as the city began to wake
up around me. I drove home accompanied by foreknowledge of nostalgia.

The next Wednesday was miserable, gray and drizzly, the sun a pale smudge. I
spent the day running errands. The evening at the bar passed pretty much like it
always did, and Milt showed up at quarter to twelve like he always did.

I stopped Donna before she could escape and handed her an envelope. "Don't read
it before you get home," I said.

She shook her head and said, "Nothing you do surprises me anymore." I held the
door for her as she left, thinking Yeah. We'll see.

Milt and I didn't usually talk on Wednesday nights, him being incoherent with
anticipation and me likewise with exhaustion, but tonight I went over to his
table after I'd shut everything down and said, "I put the key in an envelope
tonight."

He looked at me quizzically. I'm the worst liar in the world, and I know my face
was giving something away, but all he did was nod, God bless him, and I walked
out the door. Outside it was still raining and I whistled all the way to my car.
Then I whistled all the way home, and then I went through the list one more
time. Accountant; check. Realtor; check. City clerk; check. Bank account; check.

Loan officer. "Check," I said, and laughed out loud.

I thought about it as I hummed down 1-90 past the suburbs and the outlying
communities and up into the mountain towns. Thought about the progression from
mourning to nostalgia, and moments of epiphany. Invisible, ha, that's me, Milt
had said, but what he hadn't figured out is that he didn't want it any other
way. He'd opted out, settled into a comfortable mid-level job, saved my loan
after Susan's death, done everything he could to keep everything the same. Or
not even that; he'd gone back, recreated a previous sameness. Petra keeps coming
to him because he wants her to.

And that was the one thing Susan was wrong about. The dead do remember us, and
they do want to be mourned, and they will keep coming as long as we keep wanting
to go to them. That wasn't what I wanted anymore.

Frank's Place was a huge temple to Susan's memory, an everlasting flame hoping
to draw her like an ectoplasmic moth. I threw everything I had into it after she
died because it was her dream for me as well as my dream for myself. It took
more than a year before I figured out that dreams you dream with someone die
with them. Frank's Place was a dead woman's dream kept alive by the living.

And I couldn't keep it alive any longer, but Milt Chrzanowski could. He was on
that invisible slow climb, that vision-dulling trudge through the bleak
underground of loss and inadequacy and abandoned anger, and Frank's Place had
been his dream for a dead woman before anyone had dreamed it for me.

Or maybe that's all bullshit. But Milt signed the quit-claim, and sent a letter
to my accountant too. I don't think I want to read it just yet. I do hope Donna
still works there, and I told her so in the letter I gave her that last night.
There was a check in that envelope too, in case she thought she couldn't work
for Milt, but my accountant says she hasn't cashed it. So things are probably
just going along there like they always were. Maybe Milt quit at the bank to
take on the barkeep's life that was dreamed for him. Maybe not. I imagine I'll
find out whenever I read his letter.

Meanwhile, the check from the realtor came, and due to the robust nature of the
Seattle housing market I can afford to drive myself a bit further down this road
or that, looking for a little sun to worship and a new, living dream instead of
a monument to loss. I'm leaving the sad songs to Milt. Let him hear the
nightingale. And let him rendezvous with the dead, too; I'll remember if I will.

And if I will, forget.