Leonard still lived in the same small apartment above the bar and grill that he and his wife, Edna, first began renting after their marriage in 1957. They lived together happily there until Edna died thirty-eight years later when a produce truck smashed into her car after it lost control on black ice at an intersection a block away. Leonard heard the collision from his recliner in the apartment’s living room.
Afterwards, he began taking most of his dinners downstairs at the bar and grill. He worked a few more years as a heavy equipment operator for a construction company out of New Britain before they finally forced him into retirement at age sixty-six. He was a large man with slight cauliflower ears from boxing in the service, and the salt-and-pepper stubble on his head matched that on his face.
Weather permitting, at least twice a week Leonard drove over to the little cemetery beside the Connecticut River, sat against Edna’s tombstone, and used his fingertips to bury notes he’d written to her in the soft earth of her grave. Sometimes, as he sat there in the falling late afternoon light, he tossed stones in the river.
~
Leonard first noticed the woman in the laundromat across the street from the bar and grill shortly after he retired while eating his evening soup. He supposed she was about his age, and he was struck by her slow, measured movements as she loaded clothes into the washer or dryer and the way she licked the tip of her pencil doing the newspaper’s crossword sitting on a bench while she waited. She came each Monday evening at the same time. He began to linger over a second beer so he could watch her fold the warm clothes deliberately into a large satchel which she then clutched to her chest as she left the laundromat. He smiled watching her walk away down the street. There was a gentleness to her countenance that reminded him of Edna.
The owner-cook, Carl, who always served Leonard himself, was taking away his dishes one evening as she was leaving the laundromat. Leonard pointed and asked, “Do you know that lady?”
Carl paused, then nodded. “Her name is Ruth. She goes to my church.”
“She’s probably married.”
“No.” Carl shook his head. “She’s not.”
“Is she nice?”
“Very. Quiet, kind.”
Leonard watched her with growing anticipation for another two months until three consecutive Mondays passed without her appearing at the laundromat. He found himself frowning, willing her arrival.
When Carl set down his meal the third Monday, Leonard said, “That woman, Ruth. You don’t have any idea where she lives, do you?”
“In that big house next to the gas company storage yard that takes boarders. She has a room there. My wife and I gave her a ride home once after church bingo.”
Leonard waited until the following Saturday afternoon to walk down to the boarding house. He hesitated on its front step, blew out a breath, then rang the bell. A handful of seconds later, a short, middle-aged woman in hair curlers opened the door, looked up at him, and said, “Can I help you?”
“Is Ruth here?”
“I’m afraid not. She left.”
“Excuse me.”
“She packed up her things and took a Greyhound a couple weeks ago.”
“Where?”
The woman shrugged. “No idea.”
They stared at each other while a car passed in the street, and something fell in Leonard. Finally, he heard himself say, “Thank you.”
When she closed the door, he didn’t move right away. It was a gray, chilly, fall afternoon, and his breath came in short clouds.
~
Leonard found ways to fill his time. He worked on his model ships and jigsaw puzzles. He read historical biographies he checked out from the library. On Thursday afternoons, he bowled alone. He went to matinees at the independent movie house near Asylum Hill, mostly old musicals. He did a few small repairs downstairs for Carl and learned to bake bread. He began a watercolor class at the senior center but felt foolish about his ineptitude and stopped going after a couple lessons. Most nights after dinner, he sat in his recliner in the gathering darkness, thinking and vaguely listening to whatever ballgame he could find on the radio as his three cats crawled over him.
On a beautiful morning in early spring, he was reminded of drives his mother and father often took him on after midday Sunday suppers and decided to take one himself. He had no clear destination in mind, so just got in his old Buick and headed out of Plainville on Farmington Avenue the short distance to Route 6 where he drove east. He passed empty cornfields and closed farmstands. Traffic was light. With Batterson Park Pond to his right, he passed under Highway 84 and stayed on South Road to avoid the freeway. He was in no hurry, so drove slowly. After a while, South Road became New Britain Avenue. He saw the little diner he used to stop at for an egg sandwich on a hard roll before work and pulled alongside at the curb.
At eleven o’clock on a Saturday, the place was nearly empty: only an older couple in the nearest of the five booths, a man dressed in oil-stained coveralls at the counter, and a young waitress in a culinary uniform and apron perched on a stool behind the cash register. She was fingering an unopened envelope and glanced up at him while Leonard made his way to the last booth. As he slid into its far side, she met him there with silverware wrapped in a paper napkin, a mug, a steaming metal decanter, and a menu clutched under one arm.
After she set down the silverware and menu, she asked, “Coffee?”
“Please.”
Leonard flipped over the menu while she poured, then up at her. Her eyes held a sort of anxiousness behind black-rimmed glasses. He handed the menu back and said, “I’d like a chicken salad sandwich and potato salad.”
She nodded, scribbled his order on a pad she took from her pocket, and walked behind the counter where she tore it off and set it on an opening in the wall joining the kitchen. A hairy hand appeared there, and it disappeared. Sounds came from the kitchen, as well as the familiar, good smell of things cooking on a grill. The man in coveralls cleared his throat, the couple ate without speaking, and the waitress resumed her position with her envelope on the stool. The place was close and warm enough that a ring of condensation rimmed the front window.
Leonard drank his coffee and wondered how many times he’d stopped there for an egg sandwich in the forty-three years he’d worked for the construction company. Several thousand, he thought. As far as he could tell, it hadn’t changed at all, nor had the menu. A plate of pancakes was placed on the kitchen window shelf, which the waitress set in front of the man at the counter along with syrup and pads of butter. The man prepared his pancakes and dug in. The couple sitting across from each other still hadn’t spoken, but the woman had finished her meal and was staring out the window where an occasional vehicle drove by in the white, spring light.
A few moments later, the waitress brought Leonard’s lunch to his table and slipped his check under the plate. The sandwich was cut at the diagonal with dill pickle chips between the slices, and the potato salad looked as if it had been served with an ice cream scooper. He started with the sandwich and watched the waitress on her stool turn the envelope back and forth in her hands until she finally tore it open with a fingernail. From inside, she removed a single piece of old-fashioned, bluish stationery that her eyes traveled over rapidly. Her hands trembled as she lowered the thin sheet to her lap, her bottom lip quivered, and she began to weep silently.
Watching her, Leonard knit his eyebrows. She continued to weep for the entire ten minutes or so it took him to finish his lunch, her head hung low. The other patrons gave no indication that they’d noticed her at all. Leonard winced at the incongruity of a whistling song that began in the kitchen.
The dregs of his coffee grew cold, so he removed his check, set money on top of it along with a tip, then stole another glance at the waitress, his heart lurching. He considered writing her a note of encouragement or sympathy on the check, but decided against its presumption, and simply put down another ten-dollar bill instead. Leaving the diner, he didn’t, couldn’t, look at her again.
Leonard continued his meander through New Britain, passing the Polish Hall and a pair of boarded-up tool and die shops, crossing Piper Brook in Elmwood and the many two-and-three family houses with their tangle of clothes lines, corner stores, and taverns crowding side streets, and stayed on New Britain Avenue until it briefly became White Street, then Maple near Hartford’s South End. He crossed the wide, brown expanse of the Connecticut River on Founders Bridge and entered East Hartford, another worn industrial town much like all the others along the way. He remained on the central thoroughfare until he could resume eastward travel on Route 44. Twenty minutes later, he was in Manchester and turned onto Main Street. Center Memorial Park sloped down immediately to his right with the library and probate court where his mother had been a clerk. He passed the clutter of faded downtown shops with the same slanted parking spaces he remembered from his youth until he pulled into one of them near its south end in front of St. James Catholic Church. Cheney Brothers Mills, where his father had worked, was just down the street.
Leonard got out of the car and regarded the church’s looming double steeples and prominent flower-like stained glass window in its clapboard center, its side entrance he’d used as an altar boy, and the parish elementary school he’d attended across from the rectory and Knights of Columbus Hall – talismans of his upbringing. He made his way across the wide green that fronted the church’s main entrance and leaned facing it against the pedestal that held the statue of the Virgin Mary. A card table had been set up on the sidewalk near the church’s front steps on which a crowded collection of Dixie cups had been arranged. Leonard watched a woman in a calico-print dress and a mauve cardigan trying to fill the cups with rice from a heavy sack. As organ strains of the wedding march erupted from inside the church, her movements grew hurried, almost frantic. But the rice poured out too quickly, tipping most of the cups and spilling their contents. Rice dribbled onto the sidewalk, and the woman began to laugh.
Leonard smiled, too, then trotted over to her, and asked, “Do you need a hand?”
She looked at him, the sack clutched awkwardly against her side. “No,” she said and giggled. “I mean, yes. I guess I do.”
She had a round face, a small mouth, and soft, tender eyes that danced merrily. They held his for a moment longer than they might have, and he felt a sudden tingling in the bottoms of his feet. She was perhaps a dozen years younger than him. He took the sack from her and began pouring while she righted cups and held them steady. Seconds later, the church doors burst open, the music’s volume increased, and wedding guests streamed down the steps grabbing cups as fast as they could be filled. The newlyweds followed shortly and were showered with rice as they covered their heads and guests cheered. The bride in her gown and train gave a squeal of delight, and the crowd followed them down the sidewalk where a shiny, black Lincoln awaited with “Just Married” stenciled on its back window.
Leonard and the woman stopped their pouring, and it was at that precise moment that he noticed what appeared to be an engagement ring on her own hand, although it was just a simple twisted band with a tiny jade stone. She gave him another sheepish smile, mumbled gratitude, and followed the others crowding around Lincoln’s open doors. Leonard swallowed once watching her go before setting the empty sack on the table and walking slowly back to his car.
He continued down Main Street to Oak, turned left, and circled around the far side of East Cemetery where his parents were buried. He thought briefly about stopping there, but suddenly didn’t feel up to it, so got back on Route 44 where he continued east. Although not yet mid-afternoon, the April light had already begun to slant and suffuse.
He passed through the east side of Manchester. On its outskirts, he was surprised to see Shady Glen Ice Cream Parlor where his parents used to take him for a treat still operating at the dawn of a new century. For the next fifteen minutes, he was surrounded on both sides mostly by woods and the odd house now then visible back through the trees until he saw the south shore of Lower Bolton Lake approaching on his left. A warmth spread through him as he pulled into Bolton Lakehouse’s cinder parking lot where he could just make out the little cottage he’d lived in when he first started working construction up the near shore through the trees perhaps a quarter mile away; his mother’s boss had rented it to him dirt cheap. The cottage’s short dock was still there, but not the canoe he liked to take out, and the big boulder he used to dive off of was hidden in the trees.
Leonard walked up onto the Lakehouse’s outdoor deck above the boat launch and through the side door there into its narrow bar. A dark, cool interior greeted him, along with the murmur of voices from the restaurant on the other side of the mirrored wall lined with liquor bottles. The lone occupant was a bartender who stood in front of the wall drying a glass with a towel slung over his shoulder. Leonard exchanged nods with him, settled on the stool at the bar’s end beside the picture window overlooking the lake, and asked for a draft.
The bartender was tall and slender, dark-haired, thirtyish. He tilted the glass filling it at the tap before setting in on a cardboard coaster.
Leonard sipped foam, then said, “Thanks.”
“Sure. Need a menu?”
“No. Just stopping in quick.”
“On your way somewhere?”
“Not really.” He gestured with his chin towards the window. “Used to live up the shore there a long time ago. More than forty years.”
“No kidding…forty years.”
Leonard gave a soft chuckle, sipped again, and said, “Yep.”
The bartender’s grin showed uneven teeth. “This place changed much?”
Leonard gazed around. “Not so I can see.”
“Been back often?”
Leonard shook his head and felt his lips close into a tight line. A heat had formed behind his eyes. He said, “I met my wife here.”
“That so?”
Leonard nodded and gestured again with his chin. “Right out there on that deck. Nice summer day. Hot, sunny. I’d canoed over.” He lifted his glass. “She was a waitress and served me a beer just like this one.”
“That’s something. What was her name?”
“Edna Noren.”
“Have a picture?”
“No,” Leonard said. “I don’t.” He paused. “But I can tell you this, she was the prettiest woman I ever knew. And the best.”
The bartender gave a short nod of his own. “I’m sure she was.”
Leonard took a longer swallow of beer, then said, “I miss her.”
“I bet you do.” The bartender reached over and patted the back of the free hand Leonard had on the bar. “And that beer’s on me. For Edna.”
The heat behind Leonard’s eyes intensified. He couldn’t speak, so just mirrored the bartender’s small salute before watching him move down to the prep sink and begin washing and drying more glasses. Leonard gazed out at the boat launch and the lake where it widened at its center. A few sailboats dotted the surface, and a man in a hooded sweatshirt tinkered with the outboard motor of a skiff at the dock. Tree branches dimpled with buds nodded on the small breeze. Leonard tried not to think about Edna or Ruth or the woman at the church, but then gave up, sipped his beer, and just let his thoughts tumble over themselves. He thought about the passage of his life, growing old alone, irretrievable opportunities. He’d tried to convince Edna not to go out in the car that winter night, but he could have insisted. He could have walked across to the laundromat any number of times before Ruth moved away. A ring on someone’s finger could mean anything or nothing.
Shadows from trees on the western shore had lengthened onto the lake by the time Leonard thanked the bartender again and returned to his car. Instead of taking back roads, he got on Highway 384 just after Bolton Notch State Park, found a radio station playing old standards, and took the freeway until it became the 84 in East Hartford. He was back in his parking space next to the dumpster behind the bar and grill in less than an hour.
Carl came out of the back of the kitchen carrying a plastic sack of trash as Leonard was about to start up his stairwell. Both men paused in the early gloaming.
“Hey, there,” Carl said.
“Hey.”
“How’s your day been?”
Leonard shrugged. “Fine.”
“Do anything special?”
“No.” Leonard shook his head. “Just went for a drive.”
“Okay.” Carl nodded. “You coming in for dinner?”
“I’ll be down later.”
“All right, then.”
Leonard waited until Carl had lifted the lid to the dumpster to begin climbing the stairs. The lid closed with a bang, then the storm door to the kitchen clicked shut. Like it did more and more, Leonard’s right hip complained about the ascent. As he opened his own apartment’s door and stepped inside, his cats began twining themselves around his ankles. He reached down and took turns petting them. When they stopped purring, he stood very still and listened to the silence become so loud, it seemed to scream. He forced himself to consider what the remnants of the afternoon and the coming evening could hold. He thought he might start a new model ship. Or he only had a chapter left in his latest library book. There was also a half-finished jigsaw puzzle of an old mill on the coffee table. Plenty of choices awaited. Carl usually made split pea soup on Saturdays, a favorite of his, and the Red Sox would be playing their opening game of the season on WEEI afterwards, so Leonard had those things to look forward to, as well. And he’d just taken a nice long drive on a beautiful day.
To no one, Leonard said aloud, “I’m fortunate.”
–
William Cass has had over 325 short stories accepted for publication in a variety of literary magazines such as december, Briar Cliff Review, and Zone 3. He won writing contests at Terrain.org and The Examined Life Journal. A nominee for both Best Small Fictions and Best of the Net anthologies, he has also received six Pushcart Prize nominations. His first short story collection, Something Like Hope & Other Stories, was published by Wising Up Press in 2020, and a second collection, Uncommon & Other Stories, was recently released by the same press. He lives in San Diego, California.
© 2024, William Cass
Halfway Down the Stairs 