"A fine entertainment, beautifully wrought." -- New York Post

A funny, wise, and tender story of fatherhood and second chances, for fans of Richard Russo and Jane Smiley. It’s been four years since William 'Belly' O’Leary left his beloved Saratoga Springs for the state penitentiary, but now that he’s served his time on an illegal gambling charge, he’s ready to reclaim his hometown. Trouble is, he’s a stranger now: gone are the days when his swagger had all the girls swooning, when the bar he owned was a hot spot for hard-livers and hard drinkers, when his three surviving daughters bent over backward to please him or avoid his wrath. All his vices have been outlawed, all his haunts have been replaced with Wal-Marts and designer coffee shops, and all his daughters are defying him in one way or another. But Belly is undeterred--threats from his parole officer and neighbors don’t scare him. Soon he’s settling into his old habits and creating a mess wherever he goes. It’s when he finally hits rock bottom that Belly is forced to reevaluate his old life--and maybe it wasn’t worth resurrecting after all. As he slowly acknowledges his past errors, he comes face to face with his biggest regret--the loss of his fourth daughter in a car accident years ago. The secret he’s kept ever since conceals the shame of the worst mistake he’s ever made. With mordant humor and a cast of unforgettable characters, BELLY is an unsentimental look at a misspent life, the absurdities of modern mores, and the resilience of family.

CHAPTER

1

SARATOGA SPRINGS was stoic as the Statue of Liberty with Grace Kelly’s face and the body of Bettie Page. That’s the way Belly O’Leary thought of his town, like she was a woman in a Greek robe, to be revered. He stared out the big tinted front window of the Greyhound bus as it hobbled north on Route 9, down the long line of motels that sat hungry all winter and grew fat with tourists in the summer. They were fat now. August. Cars streamed out the little roundabouts and bled onto the highway.

August changed the face of Saratoga, from Grace Kelly to something a little brassier. Kim Novak, maybe, or any of the girls on the Alberto Vargas cards his father used to keep hidden in his sock drawer. For one month a year, she was a woman with a bad dye job and too much makeup, and this was the town he was coming home to in 2001; this was the lady welcoming him back.

Only he didn’t recognize her. Where once green fields graced the sides of the highway, glass-box office buildings now rose like the great pyramids. Traffic and strip malls and smog choked the last promising stretches of hillside that used to hug the town.

The closer he got to home, the sicker he felt. A moan rumbled in his solar plexus. He recognized it as heartache. He was returning two years early to his hometown, four instead of six, his sentence commuted for good behavior—something he’d never been accused of in his life. He worried now he was back too soon. The town wasn’t ready for him. He’d walk in on her with another man. He’d catch her in a lie.

For four years he’d kept quiet in a cinder-block cell, waiting to hear from his old mistress, Loretta, waiting for word from their colleagues at the New York Racing Association. They’d advised him not to talk. They’d sent Loretta to the courtroom to remind him, quietly, with a hand pressing gently on his shoulder, that two of his three remaining daughters still lived in this town. Loretta with her lips twisted into that sideways life-threatening smile, walking off with his unmarked $172,000 stashed in her fake Hermès Kelly bag.

He half imagined her waiting for him, his midwestern princess, at the bus station now, opening her arms to him, opening the sack of cash, pulling out from her cleavage a shiny gold key to a small office at the back of City Hall, where the NYRA boys and the Republican chairman would offer him cigars and checks bubbling with zeroes and shake his hand for not giving up their names. But he only wanted to see Loretta in his fantasies.

The bus pulled up to Springway Diner and squeaked to a stop. He sat there, in seat 3C, the other passengers milling about, collecting their things, getting up to stretch as the driver turned off the engine and announced a twenty-minute rest before continuing on to Montreal. He sat there and thought about what the prison doctor had told him after his release physical: no salt or cigarettes or alcohol, nothing that might raise his blood pressure. He wanted all of those things now, anything to calm the erratic beating of his heart, to lengthen his short breath. His hands shook. Only two other times in his life had he been this nervous, so nervous it burned, it was something that had to be doused: at his wedding and then, twenty years later, at his third daughter’s funeral. Both those times, and now, he just wanted the moment to melt away, to have already happened. He wanted to turn around and see the hard times behind him.

He stepped off the bus into a blast of heat that surrounded him like an embrace. He’d left a dewy, cool Pennsylvania that morning for this: a thick stew of atmosphere, the air heavy and wet, and he was at that moment so very tired. Across the street from the bus stop were new stores and crummy old motels with new paint jobs and the road sparkled with new, dark tar. His oldest daughter, Nora, was not waiting for him. No one was. He looked at the strangers and tourists loitering on the concrete outside: Who the hell are all you people and what have you done with my town?

This used to be a twenty-four-day town, Belly thought. He remembered the queer quiet just before the racetrack opened each summer, the whole town preparing for the rain, the reign, of tourists to descend. It was like that every year: upscale specialty shops selling fancy linens and New Age chachkas and glossy horse paintings bloomed on Broadway, only to wither once track season ended. But now, since he’d been away, the racetrack stayed open almost twice as long, reaching back into July and stretching all the way to Labor Day. A season of horse racing straddled the town, scarring it up for the rest of the year, just like what they used to say in AA: one foot in tomorrow, one foot in yesterday, and you’re pissing all over today.

He pushed the door open and stepped into the air-conditioned paradise of the perfectly preserved Springway Diner, to wait for Nora. The same greasy red booths, the same metallic wallpaper with flowers of orange and brown. The walls were plastered with black-and-white photographs of the grumpy old Greek who owned the place standing with celebrities—Liza Minnelli, Bob Dylan, some short guy with huge glasses Belly recognized but could not recall—who passed through on their way to SPAC, the performing arts center in the state park. In every picture, they held up a big white cake with strawberries dotting the top, the Greek’s smile wide and white as the frosting. In every picture, the same Greek and the same white cake, and it seemed like this was the only thing in Saratoga that had not changed: cake.

He realized now this would not be easy. The whole time he was in, he just wanted to be out; the whole time he was away, he just wanted to be home, but now he stood on the horrible bridge between his two worlds, stretching like a big grin between his old town and what it had become. He stepped into the bathroom and checked himself in the mirror. A face returned his gaze, a countenance surprisingly unchanged, just grayer, somehow, the skin looser around the curve of his jaws. Someday, he realized, jowls would swing at his neck, but for now, for now, he could pass. The fifteen-hundred-some nights spent in a cell with two other men, in a pod with three other cells—the stress of all that time hadn’t surfaced. He put his hands in his pockets and did something he hadn’t done since the days of high school dances: he winked at himself. He watched the lid close over one icy-blue eye, watched his right side grow dark, then lifted the lid and let the light back in. He decided he could pass for forty-five of his fifty-nine years, and he nodded at himself and stepped out.

He made his way back toward the door, looking over the counter at the desserts for the big white cake, but he saw only the same sorry pies they’d always carried. They looked like home, those crushed-in tops and browned meringue, and he decided to buy one for Nora and the kids, if they ever showed up to retrieve him. That seemed like the right thing to do in a situation like this. He had no one to ask.

The waitress met him at the counter. “Can I get one of those pies?” he asked her. She was a fine-looking woman, or girl; he couldn’t remember what you were supposed to call them anymore.

“Which?” she said, and he didn’t know one from the other so he just said, “Lemon,” and she took it down from the display and wrapped it in a pink box.

“It’s eight seventy-five,” she said, not looking at him.

He had one crisp twenty-dollar bill and a couple of ones crumpled in his pocket: all his money in the world. He would buy something for his family first, then he would get himself something he’d been waiting four years to wrap his fingers around. “Give me that lighter,” he said. He’d been scrounging for matches for four years, and with the power of lightning in his hand, the weight of change in his pocket, he was half Thor, half Donald Trump, sans combover. “And some Newports,” he added. It would be great to even have a box top after all those smuggled-in soft packs with the cigarettes smooshed.

“What color?” she asked, and he pointed to the red lighter.

He flicked and flicked, but he could not light the thing.

“Hey, miss, I think this lighter’s broken.”

The waitress turned around from the society section of the Saratogian and took the lighter from him. She pushed a microscopic lever on the back and rolled the gear till it lit. “Childproof,” she said, handing it back to him.

Belly took it from her, but he just stood there holding it in his hand.

“You just get off the bus?” she asked, finally looking straight at him as she rolled a penny between her fingers. Her nails were an inch long, painted with palm trees, and she’d written “cat food” on the back of her hand with a ballpoint pen.

Belly nodded.

“Where you from?”

She was staring at him now, all the youth of her taking in his age.

“I’m from here. I’ve been gone four years. I just came back from Pennsylvania.”

“What’s there?”

“Prison,” he said, watching her. She didn’t even flinch.

A little flash erupted in the general area of her eyes, some curl around her brows and raising of the lids that made him think he’d been recognized. “Well, since you’ve been in, they made these new childproof lighters with these little buttons and stuff you have to push.” She took the lighter back, her nails lightly scratching his fingers, showed him the tiny piece of metal. “But you can get rid of it.” She pressed her thumb against it, and off popped the lever. She handed it back to him, circumcised.

He looked at her. She might still be in her twenties if he was lucky. Her name tag said “Maybelline.”

“Named after the Chuck Berry song?” he asked her.

She shook her head. “The makeup company.”

Maybelline didn’t look too bad. Lots of orange hair, curlied up and shiny, like copper. And her skin was kind of coppery, too, all metallic with goop. He looked at all that orange on her and thought about the business Nora used to have on Caroline Street, Everything Pumpkin, that sold food and clothes and anything orange. Maybelline could have been a mannequin there.

“You work here long?” he asked, shuffling his feet a little. He’d been wearing jail shoes—Velcro-and-canvas sneakers—these four years, and his cowboy boots weighed about a million pounds, mashing up his toes at the pointy fronts.

“Not too long.” She took out a straw, unwrapped its white paper shroud. “I used to work at the Stewart’s on Route 50 but things got kind of slow, so I came to work here.” Then she took the straw between her lips, blew air through it, nibbled on it with her teeth.

She smiled and he turned to look behind him, but no one was there.

“I’m Belly.”

She said, “That’s what I thought,” and she reached out to shake his hand, wrapped her soft fingers around his callused knuckles, and let them remain just a second too long. Her fingertips were cold and the rest of her hand was warm and kind of clammy: he could incubate there. Something could grow.

How do you know, he wondered, how do you tell if the woman wants you or is just playing with you or if that’s just how she is? He was so out of practice, all his flirting skills dormant and foreign, but he kept looking at her, and she kept looking back at him, and he thought, Maybe, maybe. He looked at her orange-tinted lips and thought, Maybe.

He packed the Newports, peeled open the wrapper, and popped open the top and offered her one, and when she took it, he said, “You want to go out sometime?”

She nodded. “Sure.”

“You want to go out tonight, maybe?”

“Okay.”

Finally, that stinging feeling of nervousness began to float away.

“What time do you get off?”

“Six,” she said, tossing the straw in the wastebasket.

He asked her if Ruffian’s was still open and held his breath while she rolled her eyes back to search her memory, and when she said, “I guess it’s there,” he exhaled.

“Maybelline,” he said, “I will meet you there at six.” She handed him her phone number on the back of a Springway Diner business card. He tried not to smile, but a big dumb grin erupted on his face. He thought of that one dead tooth, that brown bicuspid poking from the side of his mouth, and he hoped she couldn’t see it. She sashayed back to work, and he watched her ass move in acid-wash jeans, and he changed his mind: everything would be fine, easy as pie.

He stood at the window, smoking and staring into the sun. How many years since he’d whiled away an afternoon at Springway Diner? Of his four daughters, only the third one ever wanted to come here, the one who was not with him anymore. Sometimes he’d take a break from the bar and walk down to meet her here, him and the kid in her favorite old-lady pink cardigan with the Izod alligator, slurping a cup of hot chocolate while she showed him her plans for the science fair: The Secret Life of Tornadoes.

He flinched when he saw Nora pull up alongside the diner, the tires of his sweet black Bronco squealing to a stop. It was a great truck, the best he’d ever had, with rock-stomper rods and 230 horses, tinted windows and chrome rims and a thin red pinstripe clinging to the sides. He could see two small dents like vampire bites by the rear left fender as he went out to meet her.

“I thought you quit,” was the first thing Nora said when she saw him drag on his Newport, though she had an unlit cigarette poking from between her first two fingers. Her three boys in the backseat kept quiet.

“I did,” Belly said, “but only ’cause it was so freaking hard to get cigarettes.” He tossed the cigarette to the ground and swiveled his foot over it.

She didn’t get out of the Bronco, just let her cigaretted hand hang out the open window, so he stood by the door and put his free hand on her shoulder, making a right angle. There was so much space between them.

“Nice to see you,” he said.

She said, “Get in.”

The burning feeling was back. He walked around to the back of the truck, his shirt sticking to him in the heat, and threw his duffel bag in, continued around till he got to the passenger door, and climbed inside. His license had run out almost two years before, and he knew his near future included a trip to the dreaded DMV, but not yet, not right away. He lowered himself into the seat and thought how he’d never been on the right side of his own truck. It was only five years old. He’d bought it just a few months before they locked him up.

Nora put the truck in reverse.

He turned to his grandsons. “How you boys doing?”

They just stared at him: a teenager, a little kid, a baby in a car seat. He noticed a slight tremor in his hands, like his fingers were saying hello without his consent. He placed one hand on top of the other to still them.

“You guys remember me?”

“It’s only been four years, Belly,” said the middle boy.

“That’s Grampa to you,” and he turned back around. This, he thought, is what it feels like on the first day of a new job you didn’t want to do, standing there waiting for someone to direct you through a series of meaningless tasks, waiting for the day to end.

“Isn’t it funny,” he said, slipping the cigarette from Nora’s hand and lighting it. “I think the only other time you drove me around was right after you got your permit. You must have been sixteen.”

“You let me drive when I was twelve.”

“Did I?”

“You made me drive even when I didn’t want to, when you were too drunk.” She rolled down her window to let the smoke escape and pressed the button to open Belly’s. “You mean Eliza. You made Eliza wait till she was the right age.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah.”

Four daughters and three grandchildren and their names circled above him like a fly he couldn’t catch. Their differences eluded him.

“Well,” he said, turning back to the boys. “Which one is which now?”

“See the one who’s not even a year old, Belly?”

Why couldn’t she call him Daddy?

“That’s King. You haven’t met him before.”

“I’ve seen your picture, though,” he said to the baby, who drooled on a plastic bib around his neck. “Who’s this one named after?” he asked the oldest boy, the one who had turned into a teenager, pimples beginning to surface on his pale Irish skin.

The oldest boy turned his attention out the window and the middle boy said, “B. B. King.” He looked down at his lap, then raised his eyes to his grandfather. “I’m Jimi,” he said. “That’s Stevie Ray.”

“I know that,” said Belly. “Stevie Ray with the big birthmark on his knee.” He looked at the stretched-out teenage boy and could not believe he was the same little kid he said good-bye to four years ago. “How old are you now?”

The boy said nothing. “Stevie, your grandfather is talking to you,” Nora said. “You know, when somebody talks to you, it’s polite to say something back.”

The boy shrugged.

“Don’t roll your eyes at me, young man.”

“I didn’t,” Stevie Ray said in a small voice, a voice far too delicate for a boy with O’Leary blood.

“It’s all right, Nora. Jesus, give the kid a break. Sometimes a man just feels like keeping quiet.” He nodded at the boy, but the boy’s face was stone. Belly cleared his throat.

“So it’s dead guitarists for all three of you, then?” he asked.

“B. B. King is alive and well,” Nora said. She put a hand on her round stomach. “And number four is on the way.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Don’t say anything, Belly.”

“Am I saying anything?” He looked at his grandsons. “Did I say anything?” The oldest one still wouldn’t look at him. Nora took another cigarette from the pack on the dashboard and put it to her lips. “Aren’t you supposed to give that up?” he asked her, and she turned and glared at him, let the car move down the street without even watching where it rolled.

“Do you see me smoking it?” she growled. “Dr. Pearson said this is the best way to quit.” She nodded toward the ashes leaping from the tip of his cigarette. “You’re the one infecting us with the secondhand smoke. I’m just holding the thing.”

Belly cleared his throat. “Well, how’s it going, then? Getting a girl this time around?”

Nora turned her eyes back to the road. “I don’t know yet.”

“Well, you better hope it’s a girl. Girls are so much easier.” He turned and winked at the boys in the backseat, but they didn’t even blink.

“How are you doing, Belly?” Nora asked him. “That’s the million-dollar question.”

“Hot.”

“Me, too, Mom,” Jimi called. “Can you turn up the air-conditioning?”

“When Belly’s done smoking.” She turned to him. “There’s a heat wave on. Supposed to last all week.” They were still on Broadway, inching down with racetrack traffic, and he noticed now just where they were.

“Don’t you want to turn down Spring Street?”

“We may as well just go on by there now,” she said. “Get it over with.”

He nodded, adjusted the seatbelt that hugged the hollow of his stomach. There it was, the corner of Washington and Broadway, the large glass doors on the street level, his old apartment teetering on top. It used to be his Man-o-War Bar, though everyone called it War Bar for short. He threw his cigarette butt on the sidewalk.

“What is it?” he asked.

“Café Newton,” she said. She pulled up alongside it, put the truck in park. “I’m running in. You want something? A cappuccino?”

Belly shook his head.

“Be right back.” Nora climbed out the door. He could see now that she was pregnant, her stomach starting to pop out, leading her like a divining rod.

He watched tourists mill in and out of his old bar, women in broad-brimmed hats and too much makeup and their toupeed husbands with diamond cufflinks glittering; he could almost see the clouds of perfume and cologne punctuating the air. These were people who never would have stepped foot in War Bar, and here they were surrounding it, squeezing the last bit of life out of its memory.

Jimi scooched forward in the seat, his hands grabbing Belly’s headrest.

“Stevie Ray’s getting confirmed on Sunday,” Jimi said.

“That right?”

The oldest boy looked at his hands.

“I thought they did it older.”

“They let you do it whenever you want to,” said Jimi.

“Who’s your patron saint?” Belly asked his oldest grandson.

The boy didn’t answer.

“Do you talk?”

“He talks when he feels like it,” said Jimi.

“Now tell me your ages again. I haven’t seen you boys since you were this big.” He pinched his thumb and forefinger together.

“You can’t see a baby when it’s that big,” said Stevie Ray. “Except on the ultrasound.”

“Thirteen, eight, and eleven months,” Jimi informed him. “I’m the eight.”

Nora came back with a large coffee. “Sure you don’t want some?” she asked. “It’s decaf.”

He raised one eyebrow at her. “Are you trying to make this hard?”

“It’s just a latte,” she said, but she was smiling, as if she’d won something.

She started the car and lifted another unlit cigarette, and he leaned over and eased it out of her hands, and he thought how they were old enough now to share all their bad habits.

“Belly,” Nora said, and he said, “What?” and she said, “Can you hand me another cigarette if you’re going to keep that one yourself?”

He handed her one, and they continued down Broadway. “What happened to that old building by the Y? It’s got stars on it.”

“It’s the Jewish Community Center. They restored it. That’s how it looked once upon a time and that’s how it looks again.”

“They don’t have Christmas,” said Jimi in the back.

“That’s right, honey, they’re different than us.”

“I didn’t know we had so many they’d need a whole center,” said Belly.

“There are more now,” Nora said, taking a long drag of her cigarette and ducking her head out the window to exhale. “One’s the mayor now.”

“Don’t tell me it’s a Democrat.”

Nora nodded.

“Jesus, you’re gone five minutes and the whole place goes to pot.” He let this information sink in, tried to smooth out all its wrinkly meanings. He had nothing against the Democrats, not in theory, but without a Republican administration, all of Belly’s plans would change. Those were his friends in office, or if not his friends, then his contacts, the people who owed him. How would he collect now? Who would see to it that he was repaid? There hadn’t been a Democratic administration since before Belly was born. He wasn’t even sure he knew any.

“They’re all gone now,” Nora said, looking at him sideways.

“Did they call you? Any of them?” He turned and looked at his grandsons, but their eyes were glazed over in the heat and they were glaring out the window. “Did they say anything to you about me coming back?”

Nora shook her head. “If you mean Loretta, no, I haven’t heard from her. Or anybody. They’ve left us alone and that’s just how I want it. That was your business, not mine.”

He nodded, he bounced his head up and down, but he couldn’t shake this new information into submission.

They kept driving, past where their favorite fast-food restaurant, the Red Barn, used to be, now some big chain bookstore, and the art supply store where his youngest daughter, Eliza, still worked, as far as he knew, past his old haunt Jatski’s Diner and the big town clock that never, until now, kept good time.

“Looks like we got ourselves a makeover.” He motioned at the white picket fences and mums that circled the big oak trees, yellow ribbons panting from lampposts.

“Those are the same decorations they put up every August. It’s track season, remember?”

He remembered everything about track season. War Bar was his for more than thirty years, and the first twenty, the racetrack barely seeped inside. They might put the harness races up on the TV for a laugh, or take a glance at the Whitney, or some tourists might sit up at the counter on Dark Tuesdays and study up the tip sheets purchased from street vendors milling around the side gates. That’s how it was before his mistress, Loretta, wandered sideways into War Bar in the hot August afternoon, not a week after the accident, fixed herself a Cuba Libre behind the counter, and turned on the TV to catch the tail end of the Travers. He remembered that foggy light in her eyes, the realization that even after she’d analyzed the Pink Sheet all morning she forgot to place the bet, her saying, “Put one in for me, would you? I’ve got Tsunami to place, Nada, Nada, Nada to show, and Ivanhoe to win.” He remembered the soggy fifty-dollar bill that started the whole mess, that turned him from barkeep to bookie. It was all her idea. It was all her. He remembered this clearly while everything that went before, his real wife and daughters and their whole life together, remained a blur.

They passed Furness House, the old brown Queen Anne mansion on Union where the Down Syndrome kids used to live. It was pink now, or peach or salmon or one of those food names for pink, and it was a bed-and-breakfast with a fat, pastel “No Vacancy” sign out front.

“Where did all the retards go?” he asked.

“We have no idea,” said Nora. “We’ve been wondering that ourselves.”

Belly shifted back and forth in his seat, massaging his new titanium hips, looking at the new face on his old town. Saratoga was as strange and cold now as his metallic body parts, and August, he thought, was like any woman you couldn’t live with or without. He thought of his grandmother in that last stage of her life, her dyed-rust pixie cut showing gray-white underneath, a marshmallow alcoholic smile continually pasted on her perfectly round face. Every time she looked up, it was as if she’d never seen you before. Right now, Belly felt just like that, like his grandmother, looking up and seeing Saratoga and her summer inhabitants as if for the first time, looking up and saying, again, Who the hell are all you people and what have you done with my town?

They turned down Circular and drove past Congress Park, the site of everything that ever happened to him—first kiss, first fuck, first coke cigarette. “Thing about this town is, you could have your whole life in a six-block radius, you know?” Belly asked.

His daughter nodded.

“Every mistake you made’s in walking distance.”

Finally they turned onto Spring Street, down one block and into the driveway. It seemed like the car ride took longer than the bus, and Belly just wanted to sit in the truck and take a nap, to wake and have his life be settled the way it was before. They all sat in the truck for a minute, Belly and Nora and the three kids, all quiet.

“The house looks good,” said Belly. He was lying. An Erector set of scaffolding held up the front porch, and blobs of white paint dotted the soggy cedar siding. The houses all around looked pristine, straight out of a magazine, but their house seemed to belong on a long-gone block.

“It’s getting there,” Nora said, getting out and unstrapping the baby from his car seat. “Gene’s been working on it for us.”

“Gene, huh? He’s still around? What about your husband?”

Nora pulled the baby up her hip and the boys ran ahead inside and she said, “Don’t start.”

They walked up the creaking side porch steps. “No one’s fixed these yet, I see.”

“It’s next on Gene’s list,” she said, throwing her purse on the kitchen table and setting her Café Newton coffee cup down on the counter. “You can work on the dining room table if you need something to fix.”

“What’s wrong with it?”

“It wobbles.”

Belly put his lemon meringue pie in the fridge and sat down at the table, fiddling with the leather straps of Nora’s purse. He threaded one inside the other till they knotted up and held. “Any messages on that answering machine for me?”

“You just got here.”

“People know I’m back.”

Nora set the baby down in his walker. Belly heard the TV go on in the room behind him and the boys flopping on the couch, fighting over the remote. “What people?” asked Nora.

“People.”

The baby waddled by him, banging plastic keys on the white rim of his walker.

“What people?” Nora said again, and he said nothing. “Belly, you just leave them alone, and they’ll leave you alone. They let you rot down there, so just stay away from them. Especially that Loretta woman.”

He unknotted the straps of her purse, tried to keep his hands busy so he wouldn’t slam them down on the table. “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said.

“Sure, I don’t. Let’s just pretend I don’t know what I’m talking about. That sounds fine.”

Belly pressed on the kitchen table to raise himself up. His hips were killing him. “Where do you want me?” He picked up the duffel bag.

“Jesus, I forgot. You’re in the attic. There’s a girl staying in your room.”

“That was very kind of you,” he said, but she didn’t smile.

“Ann’s friend is here for the week.” Nora looked at him carefully when she said the name of his second daughter. “She’s staying with us.”

“She is?” He let the bag slide off his shoulders to the floor.

“Not Ann. Her friend.”

“Oh.”

“Bonnie.”

“Okay, then.”

“I gave her the guest room because she’s our guest, and you’re, you know . . .”

They looked at each other.

“What?” he said.

“Belly, can I just ask you one thing, one favor?”

“What?”

Nora opened the dishwasher and set in a couple of dirty plates. Then she picked up a greasy saucer and held on to it for a moment and she said, “I want you to be at Stevie’s confirmation on Sunday.”

“Why wouldn’t I be?”

“Lower your voice.”

“Why wouldn’t I be?” he asked in a loud whisper.

“I’m just telling you now so you know. It’s going to be a big affair.” She set the saucer in the dishwasher, rinsed her hands, and called to the boys, “Kids, get your suits.” Then she turned back to Belly. “We’re going around the corner to swim. To Mrs. Radcliffe’s. We do it every afternoon. Join us if you want.”

Belly stood there with his duffel bag slumped around his feet and said, “I hate water,” and Nora said, “I know,” and she collected the baby and the boys like she was gathering dirty laundry in her arms. She said, “Make yourself at home,” and they were gone and the house was hollow and echoey and hot.

He looked at the phone, but the phone did not ring. He picked it up, he cradled the receiver in his hand. He put it back. He lit a cigarette with his Maybelline lighter and he looked at her phone number scrawled in junior high school bubble letters on the card, and when he reached for the phone again, he could not remember Loretta’s number. Fifteen years of calling that number, and all of a sudden it was gone. He took it as a sign. He should clean up some before he saw her. He should wait for her to contact him.

Belly sat down at the kitchen table in his son-in-law Phil’s house, the house that used to belong to Phil’s father and Belly’s ex-best buddy, Phillip Sr. He was Belly’s first friend to die, though they hadn’t been friendly for a long time when he passed; the man did not approve of Belly’s extracurricular activities. When Phillip Sr. used to live here, every house on the street had a menacing look, threatening to collapse. They’d sit on the sagging front porch and drink beer and joke about their kids hooking up and getting married, how the kids would steal their houses from them and banish them to nursing homes. By the time that prophecy half came true, Phillip Sr. wasn’t speaking to him anymore, and the bank had taken Belly’s own house around the corner. Just after their kids got married, Phillip had a heart attack one day while repaving the driveway. There was still that one darker strip of tar, as far as he’d gotten before he keeled over and died, right there by his car.

In the corner of the kitchen a computer in a shocking shade of green sat atop a plastic desk. The kids’ drawings covered both doors of the fridge, and a printed-out picture from a sonogram was taped on top. Affixed to the left door was a long list of home repairs, almost half of them checked off, and then the ones left blank: the dining-room table, the front porch floor, the side porch steps, the two kitchen cabinets above the dishwasher, the leaky faucet, the stone walkway leading to the kitchen door. A silver medal from field day at the Lake Avenue School was looped around the refrigerator door. He remembered his mother telling him the only reason to have children was to have grandchildren, but already he couldn’t recall their ages. His mother had scolded him for not giving her a grandson. “Four daughters, four daughters. Belly, you’re doomed to a life of women,” she’d said when Eliza, his fourth and final daughter, was born.

Belly inspected the cupboards. Fluff. Jif. Doritos. Not a real thing to eat in the house. But he opened the fridge door to find a six-pack of Piels, his old watery favorite. What a good daughter, he thought, as he checked his watch to make sure it was after noon. It was. It was 12:05, and he popped open the can, and that crisp sound called every cell in his body to attention and once it was in his mouth, the hops and barley and the suds and the cold, he thought, I have never been so happy. I have never been this happy in my life. He held the liquid on his tongue for a moment till the carbonation dissolved, and then he swallowed.

One beer sat stranded in the plastic loop when the side door burst open and Jimi ran inside, his wet suit dripping on the linoleum.

Jimi came right up to him, then he stopped and looked carefully at Belly’s eyes.

“Hiya, kid,” Belly said. He felt the whites of his eyes burning red; he felt the pure redemptive power of drunkenness.

Jimi whispered, “Grampa,” and then climbed onto Belly’s lap. He was wet, the boy was wet, and he made dark circles on Belly’s jeans, his wet hair stuck to Belly’s stubble, and the feel of cold and wet burned on his skin but the boy put his arms around Belly and this was his first embrace in four years. He pressed the child to him.

“Ow,” said Jimi. He climbed off Belly’s lap and scampered into the TV room.

“The kid has my eyes,” he said to Nora, who leaned against the counter with the baby on her hip. Stevie Ray stood next to her, holding on to the baby’s foot and glaring at his grandfather. Nora hoisted the baby up higher and then Stevie Ray’s hand hung limp at his side.

“What’s with you?” Belly asked him.

“Were you really in jail?” he asked.

“How old are you, again?”

“Thirteen,” he said.

“Shit,” said Belly. “That’s almost old enough to drive.”

“Were you?” Stevie Ray asked again.

“You bet,” he said. “Four years of it.”

“All right, enough.” Nora gave Stevie Ray a light shove. “Upstairs, change, downstairs, dinner.”

“I don’t want to change,” he said.

“Stevie, goddammit, go up and change, I said.”

The boy’s eyes widened, and he started to walk away slowly, shaking his head and whispering absolutions to himself.

“I’m sorry,” Nora called after him. “Sorry I took the Lord’s name in vain. Jesus,” she said. “You can’t say anything around him these days.”

Nora plopped the baby in his high chair, cooing softly, wiping strands of dark hair away from the baby’s blue eyes. “My little angel,” she said to him. “My perfect little angel.” There was something strange yet familiar about this image, something that made him feel just the tiniest bit sick, trapped in a scene from the past.

Belly realized he had not yet left the kitchen. Nora told him the time when he asked and then he knew he’d had two beers for every hour. That was nothing, normally that was nothing, but after four years with no alcohol—well, with some alcohol when they smuggled it in but almost none, some but not much—after all that time, those few beers in half as many hours had his brain cells sprained. He looked at the baby and the baby looked back at him.

“Nora, this was your high chair. Where’d you come up with this? I remember this.”

“Mom had it.”

“Oh. Your mother.” How could he have gone so long, so many days stretched into weeks and then months, without thinking of his wife, Myrna? Guilt crawled up the back of his spine. “How is she, anyway?”

“We’re not talking about her.”

“Okay.”

Nora sat down at the table with her now cold cup of fancy coffee. “Belly,” she said. “You are welcome to stay here. Stay here for as long as you want. Stay here till you get a job, at least. But my kids are not driving until they’re old enough to drive, and they’re not drinking until, well, until high school, when everybody else drinks.” She slid her fingers over his. “Is that okay?”

He withdrew his hand. “What did I say? Did I say anything?”

“You have to follow the rules.”

“Nora, honey, I have been obeying the rules for four years.” He heard his own voice break. “I am your father and not one of your children, so don’t you go and —”

“Belly, are you drunk already?”

He said, “No.” He said, “Give me a cigarette.”

“You have to smoke outside.”

“No I don’t.”

“Yes, you do. You can smoke on either of the porches but not in the house,” she said.

“You’re going to make an old man with two bad hips get up and go outside every time I have to have a cigarette?”

“It’s not that much to ask, to get your ass up and walk ten feet to the porch to smoke.”

He stood in the doorway, one foot inside and one foot out, fished a cigarette from the pack in his pocket, and lit it with his new lighter.

“Out,” Nora said. “I mean it. Let’s not get off to a bad start.” He didn’t budge. She raised her voice. “Move your ass outside, Belly.”

He swayed in the doorway.

“Oh my god, you’re totally drunk.”

He lifted his hands in an overplayed shrug and smiled, and he exhaled smoke into the still heat of the kitchen.

“I won’t be able to, I can’t do this.” She stopped, took a breath, started again. “I don’t have room for trouble,” she said.

All the beer circled inside him, it rose up his spine and into his brain and it made the words come out. “Trouble? Trouble? You were the most trying of the bunch, nothing but trouble your whole life, and who looked out for you? Your mother? You think because she saved your high chair she cares about you? She was the one who called you a mistake.”

He was aware of the children standing in the doorway. Nora laid her head down on the table, and the baby pounded his fists on the high chair and gurgled with his spit.

All the day’s nervousness had burned down to a fine dust inside him, and he felt calm and sedated and, even at this early hour, ready to find his bed.

Nora stood up and wiped her hands on her jeans. She opened and closed the cabinets gently, taking out cans and a package of pasta, ignoring him as the boys slumped back into the TV room, and the digital music of video games filled the air.

“Nora,” he said, and she said, “No.”

He stepped outside to the porch, put his cigarette out between the sagging and splintered wooden planks and carefully placed the lighter in the pocket of his jeans, the lighter Maybelline had fixed up just for him, and he knew he would see her soon and that she would save him from this house.

He waited on the porch. He waited for Nora to coax him back in, to ask him what he wanted to eat on his first night as a free man, but she kept her head bent over the boiling water and the half-open cans and the spine of a glossy magazine. He stepped off the porch, cowboy boots hitting macadam, and that was the moment when he finally and for the first time felt free.

The stillness of late-afternoon heat made his town look hazy in a movie sort of way. A slight breeze blew through the tall pines across from School Four, where all of his daughters had gone to elementary school before it became a center for vocational training. He walked down the hill and started up, traversing the great fault on which the city was built. Congress Park on his left, Hawthorne Spring on his right, the wide slide of Spring Street between them.

Long ago, the day after Nora was married, he’d walked down Spring Street, alone, early in the morning, 6:00, 6:30. He’d stayed up all night partying; those were the days when people still laid the coke out in little volcanoes on streaky mirrors in back rooms. The wedding was at St. Peter’s and the reception at War Bar. It was one of those times when Loretta wasn’t speaking to him, so he’d taken another girl, a girl whose name was long forgotten, but he could remember the spider-web scars from a breast reduction reaching across her chest. At some point in the night, he’d screwed her in the bathroom; she’d been pounding Greyhounds, and right after he finished, she leaned over and vomited grapefruit and vodka into the sink. He sent her home in a cab, closed the place up himself, headed east, carrying the girl’s long coat in his arms as the sun rose. Nora had married in December, amid all the gray gloom.

He was headed up the hill that morning when a car pulled over, a long, green station wagon with fake wood paneling on the side. It was Mrs. Radcliffe, the hot across-the-street neighbor from when the whole family lived on Phila Street, the one with the pool where his grandchildren now swam. “Can I give you a lift?” she’d asked, her big, wet, half-Mexican eyes taunting him.

“Why the hell not?”

He’d climbed into the passenger seat, watched her maneuver her big boat of a Ford through the empty street. He’d never once seen this woman without makeup, hair spray, the whole thing, never seen her in curlers or with her lipstick smudged. She came out every morning, afternoon, evening, like a perfectly done-up sex goddess, teasing him from across Phila Street.

“What are you doing out at this hour?” she’d asked.

“Nora got hitched last night. It was an all-night affair.”

“I see,” she’d said, pursing her lips, her perfect lips, in a half-moon of disapproval. He’d forgotten for a moment what a strict Catholic she was, that the few times he’d made it to church, hungover and disheveled, she’d always been up in the front pews with her perfect frilly dresses and her perfect husband in his pressed suit, like caricatures of good Christians.

They’d turned onto Circular Street, and she’d asked him, “Where are you headed? Where can I drop you?”

“Home,” he’d said, like an accusation.

“Where do you live now? I don’t even know.”

He’d forgotten. Everything. That he lived above the bar by then with Ann and Eliza, daughters two and four, that his third daughter was taken too soon, and then his wife had left him. He’d thought she was taking him back to Phila Street, to his old life, that she’d drop him in front of the old place and he’d open the door to find everything, his former family all intact.

“Just let me out here,” he’d said, and she pulled up against the curb, and he’d slammed the door without so much as a thank-you, as if she were responsible for the fact that his home was a cramped apartment above the bar where only two of the five women in his life still remained.

He stood now on that very corner, it must be fifteen years later. The house that stood before him that day—a crumbling brick Greek Revival—had loomed like a joke, a magnificent structure rotting from the inside out. Now that same house was whitewashed, remodeled, with two Mercedes tucked neatly in the multicolored gravel driveway where Volkswagen campers used to park. He never thought he’d hear himself say it, but he missed the hippies now. At least they let his poor lady-town rest in her stately disrepair and didn’t dress her up with million-dollar cars and doodled driveways.

“There’s the man himself,” he heard a woman say, and next to him was Margie, Eliza’s husband’s sister. He supposed that made her some sort of long-lost daughter-in-law, and she had so much hair on her face she was almost like the son he’d never had. She was a big woman with wild brown hair and gray eyes that had too much white below the eyelid, giving her a startled look. She never wore makeup or even shaved her legs. He had often wondered how she’d found a husband.

“What are you doing out in the middle of the day, Margie? Don’t you have a job?”

“Do you?” she asked.

He looked up toward his hairline and then at the clouds that held no promise of rain.

“I just walked home for a late lunch, heading back to the office now.” Margie patted her briefcase. It looked like it was made of straw. “Prison did wonders for you. You look strangely good. Just your hair turned gray.”

“Thanks, I guess.”

“I thought you’d come back bald and fat or something. You look like you’ve been summering in the Hamptons.”

“We did have golf,” he said.

“Well, how the hell are you?”

“Fine. You?”

“Oh, come on. Really. How are you?”

“What do you want me to say? I’m tired. It’s hot. I’m unemployed. I’m out of jail. I’m fine.”

Margie switched her weight from one thick ankle to the other. “Well, in a strange sort of way we missed you. They cleaned out all the local criminal color and installed law-abiding yuppies.”

“I heard you got one of your own in City Hall now.”

“Yes, a Democrat, finally, after sixty years of Republican rule, not to mention a hundred years of racetrack corruption.”

“I meant a Jew.”

“Oh, that,” she said.

“Your people have surmounted the final frontier.”

“Jesus, Belly, leave my people alone. I do.”

“I’ve got nothing against your people, Margie. I just believe in the Bible, and the Bible’s got nothing to do with the Jews.”

That burning feeling was beginning to resurface, here in the late-afternoon sun with Margie and the whitewashed mansion, and the beer was evaporating and the sweat beaded at his forehead.

“I am talking to Archie Bunker live and in person,” Margie said.

He turned his head away from her, smiling with one side of his mouth, and when he saw her face turn red, saw her clench her teeth and force herself not to yell at him, he felt calm again.

“Tell you what, Belly. Why don’t we go downtown and get a cup of coffee? I know a nice place down there on the corner. They call it Café Newton, I believe.”

“You go ahead. Just contribute to the downfall of Saratoga with your four-dollar coffee. Join Nora.”

Margie stepped into the shade of a mulberry tree. “Hey, don’t blame me. I’m on your side. I’m Mrs. Small Business Association. I’m the whole town planning office. I’d rather have a locally owned bookie joint than a big chain coffee store.”

“It was a bar, not a bookie joint.” He scraped his cowboy boot along the cracked sidewalk, wiped his palms on his jeans.

“They don’t send you to prison for four years for running a bar in this town. We’ve got more bars per square foot than any other town in New York State.”

“Thanks for the statistics.”

“It’s my job.” She moved her briefcase to the other hand. “All I’m saying is, I’m on your side.”

“No thanks, kid.” He fanned his collar. “I don’t need your help.”

“Did I offer you any?” Margie looked down at her shoes and said, “Shit.” Squashed mulberries stained the bottoms. “Goddammit, I have to go to my meeting with berry juice on my soles.”

Belly laughed at her, two sharp ha’s erupting from the back of his throat.

Margie brushed a sweaty clump of hair from her face. “Lord God, you’re a misanthrope.”

“I don’t know what that means, but don’t take the Lord’s name in vain.”

Margie started to cross the street, calling behind her, “Okay, Belly. Nice to run into you. Not really, but congratulations on getting out and I hope you turn into a nice person.”

She was already halfway down Spring Street when he thought to yell back at her, “Fuck you and your ancestors!”

Maybelline the Springway waitress was a mighty step down from his normal harem. He’d been out with hostesses and a couple of sous-chefs; he’d even been out with girls who danced at the Bunk House down Route 9 in Half Moon, but most of those girls were putting themselves through law school on tips. That’s what they said, anyway.

He’d never had a problem getting women. He could dance, that was one thing. He could lead any woman through the tango, like his grandfather taught him, twist her up till she collapsed in his arms. He could dance, and he had all his hair, and aside from a few extra moles sprouting on his back, age had mostly forgotten him. The older he got, the younger his girlfriends became, and it was this more than anything else in his life that made him feel his place was safe at the top of the food chain.

He walked into Ruffian’s, trying to keep his head down and his eyes up at the same time, trying to hide himself and hoping to be recognized. This was a place he never came: the competition. Just a narrow, dark room painted billiard green, with a good jukebox. He fantasized for a split second that this bar was Loretta’s new hangout, that she would see him here with his orange-gooped-up ladyfriend. There would be a fight, Loretta and Maybelline tearing at each other’s hair, at each other’s clothes, Belly between them playing referee, and he would get to go home with both of them, briefly, and then, after, send the younger girl on her way, and it would be just him and Loretta, alone and back together.

But he would never have the energy for that kind of evening. He sat at a plastic table with the girl and ordered JD neat from the short, dark waitress who didn’t know his name.

Maybelline had done herself up in a variety of animal prints. Cheetah, leopard, tiger—he couldn’t remember the difference. He hated cats. But he had not touched a woman in four years, and here was this pretty, young girl before him, warm to him for some reason he couldn’t determine, and he was in no mood to be choosy.

“What were you in jail for?” Maybelline asked him, doing that same stupid trick with the straw: blowing air through it and nibbling on the end. Then she dunked it in her whiskey sour, slurping drops of alcohol from the gnarled tip.

“Oh, you know,” he started, but he could see he’d have to confess before she’d sleep with him. “Nothing bad, don’t worry. Just gambling.”

She giggled. “I know. I know all about it. It was in the papers.”

“You read the papers?”

She stuck out her tongue. “I’m just saying, it was in the news.”

“Just now it was?” he asked. “That I was out?”

“No, before,” she said. “Whenever that was, five years ago. The trial and everything.” She sipped from her tumbler and nibbled on the waxy maraschino stem. “You were famous.”

“Only for three weeks,” he said. He looked at the orange sparkling above her eyelid. He wanted her, but he wanted her to be someone else. She smiled at him, a little fleck of orangish lipstick wedded to her front tooth, and when he smiled back, his lips were lying.

“Will you open up your bar again?” she asked him.

He didn’t tell her that he couldn’t. “I have to get my own place first. I’m staying with my daughter for now.”

She looked disappointed, kind of green like all that copper had oxidized. He figured it was over, no chance to win this one, so he reached out to touch her hand, her small hand with thick fingers and long nails and too many fake gold rings. He rubbed the soft fleshy pad under her thumb and thought, if this was the only contact he had with a woman, maybe that would be enough. If he closed his eyes and held her hand, he could pretend something bigger had happened.

“I have roommates,” Maybelline said. “But we can go to my place.”

Belly looked up. She wasn’t joking. He wondered if perhaps his daughters had pooled their resources and rented her for the night, if the New York Racing Association was sending him a sign, if Maybelline was a present offered him from some beneficent bystander waiting to reveal himself from behind the bar at Ruffian’s. But it was just this girl, a girl who’d heard of him in his glory days, willing to give herself to him. Who was he to say no?

All he could think before, during, and after: It’s so good to fuck.

They drove from Saratoga to her apartment in Ballston Spa, which was pretty much like living on Central Park West and driving out to Queens to get laid. He sat in the passenger seat of her puttering Hyundai while she drove him to her small, carpeted apartment in a sliced-up old Stick-style mansion. She had a tiny room with a tiny window and a tiny bed and two teddy bears in the corner: thirty-two years old with teddy bears. Two ugly calico cats circled them wherever they walked.

Belly lay on Maybelline’s frilly dollhouse bed and let her wait on him. She couldn’t cook anything. Burned the Pop-Tarts that were their dinner. Mixed too much water in the OJ. Heated up frozen mini-quiches in the oven till the crusts caught on fire and set off the smoke detectors so they belted out their songs like opera stars. It got so he was used to the taste of tar. “Inured” was the fancy word. And he lay there, inured, chewing on his burned-up food, his first meal out of prison, while Maybelline rested her head on the gray fuzz of his stomach, listening to his gastric juices stir and the smoke detectors sing till there was a whole orchestra in her house, in her bed, in her arms, every instrument off-key or broken, until she stood on her painted-pink step stool and silenced them, silenced even what was inside him.

If he closed his eyes, if he kept his eyes closed, yes, it wasn’t Maybelline, it was Loretta. It was Loretta, it was the first time, it was War Bar in its heyday, there was music, there was the music of murmuring and bass beat and that reassuring scent of stale beer. He had cheated before, yes, of course, many times he had stepped out on Myrna, whose breasts drooped and swung like pendulums after nursing four babies, whose stomach turned to a rippling ocean of flesh, everything fallen on her, even her spirit, a body given up on, a body gone to bed.

All the times he’d strayed it had been easy. Easy. The first time—what was her name? A young girl, some folkie type, who’d come to the dais at the back of the bar and asked if she could play her lame Bob Dylan covers on a shiny acoustic guitar two sizes too big for her, that she barely knew how to strum. Such a sweet little thing all the way up from Half Moon in her daddy’s Chevy Celebrity. How could he resist? Yes, he did think about Myrna, for a minute, thought about her the way she used to be, the way she was in their first six months together, before the accident of Nora sealed them up. Myrna, who was too smart for him, really, too sharp, she had something he’d never even touched, what his mother called Ambition. And how she’d dulled over the years, and rounded, and grayed, so much more malleable than he ever would have guessed.

When he met Myrna, that last year of high school, she was an innocent. That’s what he loved about her. She was shockable. His potty mouth, his chain-smoking, his binge drinking, his belt-wielding father, all of it caused her to gasp, to rub her soft hand on his thigh and say, “You poor dear.” She had barely tasted alcohol, other than the sips of wine at Communion, and the first time he plied her with beer—the old Genny Cream Ale, he remembered, the thick dark bottle with the green label—her face lit up, her cheeks with round patches of red like a baby doll, and she twirled around him, his private dancer, his Catholic virgin. He adored her, and he wanted more than anything to fuck the innocence right out of her. And he did.

How long was it before she changed? How long before the alcohol took hold of her, so she had to fight her own hands to keep from pouring the wine or whiskey during four pregnancies? How long before her body changed from tight and thin and athletic to soft and heavy and inert? And then how could he resist, who would even want him to resist the cream puff from Half Moon with her big guitar and her small breasts? And then Nora’s little friend from summer camp, his second—he never told Nora, of course—and then that woman from the track who kept her white straw hat on so she wouldn’t mess up her hair. There were so many, and never did he think twice about it until Loretta. He thought twice about Loretta. Three times. Over and over, from the moment he saw her, he thought about Loretta, he mulled it over. Because just from looking at her he could tell that it wouldn’t be just once, not with a woman like that.

And even though Loretta was so beautiful, so vital, so much the anti-Myrna, oozing with confidence, all painted and perfumed and well preserved, that first time, in the back room, he had to keep his eyes closed. In the self-imposed darkness he put his lips to hers, like two rows of zipper teeth meeting, metal on metal, yes, sparks, enamel on enamel, and he felt so guilty. He opened his eyes, he looked at Loretta pressed to the wall with her leg up and her shirt off and he said, “I’m in trouble now.”

But Loretta was not here. It was Maybelline.

It was Maybelline who held him too tight and too long. “Time to take the convict home,” he said, swinging one leg over the bed.

“Can’t you stay here?”

She lay back on the lacy pillows in her red bra and granny underwear. A long black treasure trail ran from her navel, all those hairs pointing down there like arrows.

He was so bored he didn’t even want to say no.

“I gotta go,” he said. He stood and slipped on his jeans and buttoned them, stepped into his cowboy boots.

She tossed a teddy bear at his head and he thought, What is the bare minimum I have to do to get with this girl again, maybe just once more?

She scooched over in her little bed to make room for him, and he curled himself around her, and he knew right then there would be nothing between them, the way her hips pressed into his thighs instead of his stomach; their bodies just did not fit. But he closed his eyes and pretended that he held someone else, anyone else, any of the women he had loved or lusted after, he held her tight to him and ran his old-man hands along the soft skin of her inner arms until she was satisfied.

She put on the classic rock station as she drove him back to town. It was only 10:30 according to Maybelline’s Hello Kitty watch, but he was so tired. He wondered what it would be like to come home at night with his fingertips stained from espresso, smelling of coffee grounds instead of booze. There were things he missed about the bar business: his pockets stuffed with wads of cash, smoky memories lingering on his shirt collar, meeting the sunrise most nights. He missed the mixing-in of vermouth and bitters, the satisfaction of pouring a perfect head on a Guinness. He missed that moment when he had a specialty drink ready and waiting for a regular: Loretta’s Cuba Libre, Phillip Sr.’s god-awful Miller High Life—the Champagne of beers—Carlson’s boilermaker, and a Shirley Temple for his never-ending supply of much-older lady friends, a Black Russian for Clem the sign painter, Stoli vanilla to start for Huck and Harmony the hippie couple, who made their way by the end of the night to prune liqueur, Rob Roys for the Knippenbergs, and always a Manhattan for Mad Martha, the cleanest bum ever known to man. In the winter sometimes, the graveyard shift guys from the Ball plant would stop in for a Bass.

He did not miss the vomit and the occasional brawl, the Skidmore students with sorry excuses for fake IDs indignant and threatening to sue when the bouncer turned them away, his wife Myrna’s constant whining at the hours he kept, the impossible task of taxes in a cash-based business, the regulars whose skin sagged perceptibly from week to week, the effects of alcohol visible as they stumbled out to empty homes every night. August was the time he hated and cherished the most: fresh blood in the bar, bets rolling in and then away, trying to keep afloat in the sea of crisp bills. Every August, he longed for September to come and save him, and as soon as September arrived, he wished the summer would return. For twenty-four days a year, back then, he owned the world.

Maybelline dropped him off and chirped, “Call me!” before she drove away. He had the card with her phone number and the lighter and the too-sweet scent of her perfume stuck to his collar, and he thought then that he might sidestep all the unpleasantness of starting over and just move in with her out there in Ballston Spa. Get free meals at Springway Diner. Split the gas for her Hyundai. Three blow jobs a week and cheap rent. He’d be all right.

Outside, in the tiny backyard, a girl swayed in the white rope hammock with a laptop computer on her legs. He couldn’t see her face at first, just her long legs in tight jeans hugging her behind, long hair in a wild knot. All memories of Maybelline were murdered by that body. He thought, I want to pull on that hair. He cleared his throat.

“You Ann’s friend?”

She turned.

What a dog. Her face really looked like a dog, like a basset hound, every feature too long, too sad. Her smile was a teardrop of lips.

“So you’re Belly.” She dropped a foot out of the hammock to make it swing. She wore big black boots, shit kickers almost. They made a dent in the soft ground and dry grass. “You’re awfully thin for your nickname.”

“I lost twenty pounds in prison,” he lied.

“The food was that bad?” she asked, her question hooking up and then falling at the end, as if she were a Brit.

“Better than you’d think. And a state-of-the-art gym.” He tried to flex his biceps, but they seemed to have shrunk on the way home.

The Basset Hound stared at him. He dug his foot in the dirt.

“Thanks for letting me stay in your room.”

“It’s not my house,” he said. Then, “No problem.” He took out a cigarette and held the pack out to her, but she shook her head. He was down to sixteen cigarettes, and they were now more than five bucks a pack. It was miserable math.

“I’m only here for three more days,” she said.

“Okay.”

“I’m at Skidmore for this journalism conference.”

“It’s fine,” he said.

“But I’d love to talk to you about your experience of the last four years before I leave.” She sounded so formal and faraway, like a telemarketer.

“Sure.”

She stared at him a minute, as if she were waiting for him to ask her a question.

“I’m a journalist,” she said, as if that answered it.

She sat straight up in the hammock then, and he could see she was too tall for him, all stretched out like taffy. “Do you think we could meet tomorrow for a cup of coffee? I’m buying.”

Her questions kept pulling on him. He took a long drag of his cigarette, blew a line of smoke straight toward her midriff, toward her big silver belt buckle engraved with a hammer and sickle. “That depends,” and he gave her his famous half-turned smile. “Will sex be involved?”

She didn’t laugh.

“So tomorrow,” she said, and she stood up, the whole giraffe of her with the basset hound head, and leaned in to shake his hand. “Okay, then,” she said, and she shook his hand hard, like a man.

“You smell good,” he said. “You smell like vegetable soup.”

The Basset Hound went in and up to her room, and he looked at the three-story Queen Anne Victorian with the sloping side porch and the attic lit up like a fiery heaven and he knew he’d never make it to the top.

Even before he left they were working on this ailing, aging house, tearing out the saggy oak slabs and setting down new pine floorboards. They’d once painted it in what Nora termed “historically accurate colors,” a jarring pink with darker-pink shutters, off-white windows, and teal trim, but now all the paint had faded, and the house craved cover for the patches of joint compound and scarred-up siding. It looked like a candy house after a thunderstorm, what Hansel and Gretel found deep in the woods. Tacked to the front, along the street, was a long front porch that nobody used anymore, not since he and Phillip Sr. had occupied it two decades before. Their two chairs sat lonely next to the railing, waiting for ghosts to roost.

He climbed up the little side porch and pushed open the screen door.

“You missed dinner,” Nora said as he came into the kitchen. “Jesus, you reek. I can smell you from here. Go wash your mouth out.”

“I love beer,” he said. “I love it.” Nora sat at the table with the baby asleep against her chest, leafing through a gardening catalog.

“Drink all you want now, but you better be sober on Sunday.”

He opened the fridge and took out the last Piels. “No problem,” he said. “Anybody call?”

“Not for you.”

“Where is everybody?”

“Asleep, Belly, it’s eleven o’clock.”

“Jesus, you know, this is about the latest I’ve been up in years. We had lights out at ten.”

Nora said, “I’m sorry.” She squeezed his hand.

“Where’s the husband?”

“The restaurant.”

“He ever show up here?”

“He lives here.”

“I’m just saying, when is he home?”

Nora turned the pages of the catalog. “He gets home between three and four, sleeps till noon, and does it all over again the next day. He works his ass off for us.”

“I see.”

“What? What do you see?”

“I just see, is all.”

“Oh, Jesus, Belly.” She slammed the catalog shut, and the baby made a low moan. She lowered her voice to say, “He keeps the same hours you did. The restaurant business, remember? Remember what it’s like to work for a living?”

“I remember I stayed out much later than I had to,” Belly said, watching Nora’s tough face thaw just a little, a tiny tremor at the corner of her mouth. He smiled at her.

“Good night, darling Nora,” he said.

She said, “Brush your goddamned teeth.”

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