Page 42 of Grace & Henry's Holiday Movie Marathon
When I arrived this morning I found Christmas lights over the bar, cotton ball snow around the liquor bottles, and the Poe bobbleheads atop the beer taps wearing little Santa hats. “Believe it or not, I love that, too,” I say. “Just obnoxious enough.”
“All Hector,” says Zoe. “He was here till foura.m.the other night setting it up.”
Hector is our head waiter. I catch his eye across the restaurant, point at the bobbleheads, and give him a thumbs-up.
“Thanks, boss!” he shouts. “Good to see you!”
I’m happy to be in this noisy, friendly place with these people. Being here, though, always makes me a little sad because Tim loved this bar as much as I do. When people find out I own Edgar Allan’sthey assume I’m a big Poe fan. I’m not, really—at least no more than anyone else in Baltimore when it comes to our city’s most famous former literary resident. I worked here all through college and then stayed on after. When the owners at the time, Jackie and Mort, finally pulled the trigger on a condo in Fort Myers, they took me aside one night and explained the finances of bar ownership.
I laughed in their faces. “Are you two out of your minds? I can’t afford this.”
Jackie put her hand on Mort’s. “Neither could we when we bought it.”
Mort laughed. “We barely can now.”
Jackie waved to the window at all our neighboring bars and restaurants. “Here’s a little secret, Grace. Nobody can afford any of these places. Welcome to the food and beverage industry.”
Tim and I had been married about a year then. We didn’t have kids yet, so he’d come in most weekend nights to have a few beers and help me shut down. On a Friday at 2:30 in the morning, I told him what Mort and Jackie had proposed. Over the next forty-five minutes, the idea of buying a bar in Baltimore went from being banana-pants to maybe not so crazy after all to a legitimately sound investment.
“I mean, babe,” he said, leaning on the bar, “everybody’s got two mortgages nowadays, right?”
He was a history teacher who dabbled in American Lit before making the shift to administration, so he knew more about Edgar Allan Poe than I did. My first act as his business partner was to put him in charge of maintaining and adding on to the place’s Poe-themed aesthetic. One of his favorite additions was a gothic painting of the duplex on North Amity Street where Poe lived until 1835. It’s crooked today, like always, and Tim appears now in my imagination to nudge the bottom right corner of the frame.
Is this crooked, or am I crooked?
Zoe snaps me back to the noontime buzz. “Last item: the employee holiday party.” She looks up again, hesitates. “Are we, um…are we doing it this year?”
“What?”
“Everyone’s been asking. It’d normally be the week after next,right? I wasn’t sure if you were gonna wanna deal with it, though. You know, because of…”
The Edgar Allan’s employee holiday party is a tradition passed down from Jackie and Mort. Every year we close to the public one night in December and get spectacularly drunk together. I haven’t, however, thought about it until this exact moment.
“Oh,” I say. “Um, well, yeah.”
“Really? Oh, that’s awesome. I mean, if you’re sure.”
“Zoe, of course,” I say. “It’s what we do, right?”
She closes her planner. “In that case, let’s talk catering. Dom wants to do it again.”
I heard her, but I ask her to repeat herself.
“Yeah. Actually, he’s demanding to. Dude’s got absolutely zero chill when it comes to food.”
“I figured he’d…” I stop here, though, because I don’t know what I figured. Dom, the owner of the place across the street, has done everything he can to avoid me since Tim died.
Zoe sticks her pen behind her ear. “Well, if you wanna talk to him about it, he’s coming over in…” She looks at her watch. “Shit. Right now.”
Which is when Hector yells, “Sup, Dommy Dom?”
He’s by the hostess stand holding a steaming pot, and he looks just as surprised to see me as I am to see him.
“And,” says Zoe, “looks like he’s got spaghetti.”
A tricky thing about marriagethat no one tells you: From time to time you meet people who you absolutely know you’d get involved with if you were single. If you’re happy and your marriage is solid enough, like with Tim and me, you don’t obsess about it, because that’s just how life works. You make choices and you live with them, you accept that opening one door closes all the other doors, and soon.
Dominic Esposito is one of those people for me. If I hadn’t met Tim, I’d have eventually met Dom because he bought the dilapidated pizza place across from Edgar Allan’s and turned it into the ItalianEmbassy. I’d have thought he was good-looking as hell but not my type with all his food-is-art pretentiousness. He would’ve made a sport of trying to prove that I was wrong, and I would’ve shut him out for a while. But a girl can only resist for so long.
