Killing Time

Just after three o’clock in the afternoon, Johnnie MacCracken’s Celtic Pub was dead as a doornail, which is exactly how Bud liked it.

He swirled the last of his beer around in it’s red and white can before leaning his head back and tipping it down his throat. Belching inwardly, Bud crimped his can slightly before sliding it across the bar towards Lora the bartender. Lora was punching tickets into the bar’s point of service station, but she looked up at the skritch of the can against the aged wood of the bartop long enough to catch his eye, her eyebrows raised in question. He nodded for another, smiling politely. Bud wasn’t much for pleasantries, but Lora was a good bartender. She never asked him too many questions, and kept the beers coming quick as you liked. Once, when Bud was embarrassingly in his cups, she even propped him up in the back office rolling chair while she called him a cab, instead of throwing his bony ass out the door like he probably deserved. Dignity wasn’t always too easy to come by when you were a seventy five year old afternoon drinker who didn’t take a day off save for Sundays (it was the Lord’s Day, after all, besides which MacCracken’s wasn’t open on Sundays), and Bud appreciated that far more than the cab or the nap. He thought she might be the nicest bartender he’d ever known. Not that he’d known too many.

Bud hadn’t been much of a drinker in his younger years, save a beer or two after a long day, or a finger of whiskey for celebrations. If he was being honest with himself, and he supposed there wasn’t much harm in that at this late stage, he hadn’t handled what drink he did take very well even then. When he and Nancy had fought, it had invariably been after Jimmy and the boys had convinced him to have a beer or three in the parking lot of the telecom station where he had worked for so many years, or when his brother would come rolling into town (soaked to the bone, usually, and not by the rain) and twist his arm into carousing well past what could have been called a respectable hour. Nancy would likely say that he had never needed as much convincing or arm twisting as all that. Still, even counting for a few nights a year, he kept himself pretty dry the other three hundred and sixty some days. Partly because he tended to see more of his step-father in himself than he particularly liked on those nights, but mostly because of Nancy. One of the only things his step-father had ever said to him that wasn’t said in anger or while drunk, which was most of his waking life until the cancer put him in the hospital and under the watchful eyes of kick-your-ass nurse Janie, was that Nancy was a good girl and that he should listen to her as long as she let him.

So he did.

For forty-five years, some long and some short, he listened to her. When he lost his telecom job in the eighties and she went back to work as a nurse, everything in him was telling him that he was less than a man. His ego should have been the last of her concerns, but it wasn’t. She kept the bruised mess safe and close to her heart until he was ready to build it up again for himself. When their son Jacob decided that he wanted to leave school to pursue music, Nancy’s quiet but steadfast support gave him something to emulate during the time it took him to rearrange in his mind, yet again, what it really meant to be a man. And when Nancy was in the hospital, a stringent and fluorescent place that Bud had done everything in his power to avoid since his step-father’s wasting death so many years before, she showed him for a final time what real strength was – caring, yet again, for his shrinking and spinning heart as if it was him who was ill instead of her. Even then she was stronger than him, and in those weeks in the hospital that were both longer and shorter than their last forty five years combined, he took her lead for the last time as she faced her death without fear.

Bud took a long swig from the beer Lora had set down in front of him and placed it carefully back down on the center of its coaster, the prints from his fingers leaving trails of condensation running down the side. He didn’t talk about Nancy much these days – a geezer of his age got enough pitying looks, if he got looks at all, without bringing his dearly departed into the mix. Every once in a while when someone did something that he knew Nancy would have liked, like the young couple kissing for a little bit too long over their cocktails or the cook slipping a skin-and-bones stray some spare trimmed fat, he wished he had someone else who had known her that he could share it with. But it had been nearly ten years since Nancy had gone, twenty-six since his mother had passed, and his small scattering of friends had either gone on to their great reward or gone on to a senior home – a place that Bud thought may give hospitals a run for their money for the most depressing place in the universe award.

Then again, as he looked around at the nicotine stained beams above him and the scarred and dirt-blackened tile below, he admitted good-naturedly that he might not be in the best place to judge himself. After all, he mused as he took another slug, when you’re just killing time, does it matter a whole hell of a lot where you do it?

Not from where this old geezer’s sitting, thought Bud, and he crimped his can as he slid it away from himself across the bar with another nod towards Lora. Not by half.