It’s a quiet evening, good for bookkeeping. Ours is the sort of town where there’s only one bar, and it’s as likely to be packed at eleven a.m. as eleven p.m. Nora works only a few hours on weekdays, filling the ones that come between getting off work at the clinic and getting home to eat a late dinner with the three of us and get me ready for bed. She picks up more hours on the weekend, but these quiet afternoons hardly seem worth doing. That’s the deal she made with Frank though, and the guys who are here are always glad to see her.
And it’s always guys. Other times of day, the bar could be filled with anyone. These twilight hours belong to her boys.
Zacharias Finkelburg works the night shift thirty-one miles away at the Greenborough 7-Eleven, so he comes in late afternoons for one for the road. I used to object that that was like having beer for breakfast, which seemed gross, or beer for driving, which seemed worse, but Nora would say, “It takes the edge off,” which is what she always says. Zach used to be a line supervisor, so you can see where 7-Eleven night manager is a job with edges that could use removal. He got some kind of rare bone cancer in his ankle and lost from his left knee down. The doctors said he had to find a new line of work where he wasn’t on his feet all day, and Zach replied he needed a new line of work where he wasn’t on his foot all day, that maybe he would get a peg leg and start calling himself Zach-arrr-ias. We always laugh when he tells these stories, but he says the doctors never did. They gave him an ordinary prosthesis, and the Greenborough 7-Eleven gives him a stool to sit on behind the counter.
Here, the stool next to his is empty, and on the one next to that is Tom Kandinsky, almost always, except for the hours he’s in his depot soldering old wheelchair parts to older wheelchair parts to get new wheelchair parts or making the talking calculators talk slower and louder. Tom also has only one foot—nerve damage—and he and Zach like to quip they should pair up for the two-legged race. That Bourne could actually hold such an event does not make this joke funny to anyone but the two of them.
Tom nods to me when we come in this afternoon. “How’s that new caster wheel working out for you, Mirabel?”
“Love it,” my Voice sings.
“Ooh, new speakers too?” Zach asks.
“Better.” Tom’s thrilled he noticed. “I put a DSP into the audio to eliminate noise and enhance the sound quality. You know how much math it takes to do voice? It’s not like you can just roll off a few dBs at 250 hertz. Much clearer, right?”
Why a chemical plant employed an electrical engineer, I do not know, but I also can’t imagine what we’d do if Tom weren’t one.
Hobart Blake sits a couple stools farther down. I find this strange, but Nora says it is the way of men everywhere, not just here. She says in any empty bar anywhere, three women will pick a table in the corner and squeeze into it all together, lean in to hear one another over the music, close as possible. Even if they’re strangers, she says, they’ll sit at neighboring tables and exchange shy glances that turn into awkward smiles that can be dispelled only by one getting up, introducing herself, and joining the other. But men who are lifelong friends, who have been—are still going—through hell together, will still leave an empty stool between them if possible. When I ask her why, she says she has no goddamn idea.
Hobart has what would be a rash if it ever went away, but it never does. He won’t call it a skin condition, though, because it’s only permanent going forward. He didn’t use to have it, wasn’t born with it, didn’t grow up with it, only developed it after the water in his shower started coming out brown and putrid. That he’s stuck with it now does not turn it into a condition, he says. That appropriate rash terminology is a perfectly reasonable discussion to have over beer and pretzels tells you everything you need to know about Norma’s Bar.
When I was little and learning about the body, I used to worry for their livers. But when I told Nora, she snorted. “Nothing can kill these guys. Trust me, they tried.” The male species is endangered in Bourne. The plant employed more men than women, so more of them died, quick and early and before my time. Or theirs. But the other sad truth about Bourne is anyone who’s here is here because they couldn’t leave. That was another thing I didn’t understand when I was little, why you wouldn’t just pack up and move somewhere else. “Lots of people did.” Nora nodded. Then added, “Some could not.”
Hobart stays because raw pink lesions and welty skin would draw stares in any town but this one. Zach and Tom stay because Bourne has lots of accommodations that make life with only one leg easier than it would be other places. And because here they have each other. Frank stayed because he owns the bar. Predictably, it’s the most profitable business in town （though still nowhere near profitable enough to hire a real accountant）。 When you ask Nora why she stayed, she says Bourne is her home. She says she has happy memories here. She says she’ll be damned if she lets those bastards run her out of her own town. But really it’s because of us. Bourne is a good place for Monday to be Monday. It’s a really good place for me to be me.