Page 11 of Locked Down In Watch Hill
I took two dark ales from the front shelf and returned to the table. They were from Cuyahoga Falls Brewing, a startup in northern Ohio that I’d taken a chance on after the rep gave me a decent deal on the first few cases. So far, they sold well, but I didn’t want to expand the business too far into grab-and-go drinks. I wanted to do a few things well and stick with that.
“What would you do if you could make this place over?” I handed Seth the first of the two beers. “If you could maximize it? Give it a little Seth touch?”
“Hmm.” My friend popped the top on his can. “Who owns the lot next to you?”
“I don’t know. It’s been vacant ever since I took over the place. Just gravel and that chain link fence. I’m surprised the Watch Hill town council allows it to stay like that.”
“A town like this is all about appearances, so I’m surprised too.”
“What makes you bring it up?”
Seth gingerly pulled down his mask and sipped his beer. “Maybe you can build an outdoor dining pavilion there. A couple of cozy seating arrangements, a freestanding wood-burning stove, a modular tent for the wintertime so you can keep it going, you know, make it a relaxed ambiance.”
I considered his suggestion. “That’s actually a good idea.”
He tossed me a smile. “Agreatone.”
“But it would probably take a decent amount of money to do it.” I opened my beer, pulled off my own mask, and sipped a long swig of the cool brew. “And that’s money I don’t really have right now.”
“Still, it would be a good investment. Probably change the whole feel of this place. Besides, I think widespread outdoor dining is here to stay. People want that—they like the fresh air and the natural ambiance that comes with it, especially when you are eating in a town like this one.”
“It is pretty quaint here. One of the things I like about Watch Hill.”
“So, you take your food, and all the nice architecture that makes this town look like a postcard, and you’ve got a winning combination.”
“I like it.” I drank some more beer. “I really do.”
My friend studied me. “But I know that’s probably not something you can really think about right now, not with all the craziness going on. I just think that once this is over, you’ve really got a shot at something here.”
“Says the guy who worked for me one night.”
“Hey man, I’ve got a knack for this stuff.”
“That’s an understatement.”
“You saw what I did with The Frosted Heart, back when... back...” He shook his head and looked away. I was surprised that he’d even mentioned it, since I knew it had to feel awful to think about all that he’d lost. “Back when things were how they used to be.”
“One day they will be back again. The vaccine is out there... people are going to get back to living.”
Seth’s gaze returned to me. “I hope you’re right, man. I hope to God you are.”
We drank our beers and chatted more about things that meant basically nothing, and soon enough it was time to go home. The two of us replaced our masks, and Seth promised to come back in two days and fill in for Tyler, who had already requested off for a family dinner he’d been looking forward to for months. Once Seth left, I busied myself with the basic wind down on the restaurant, closing out the cash register and cleaning up one more time. And Seth was right, we were doing well. The night’s totals were higher than they’d been just one year earlier.
A good sign during a time when so many things were bad. An exceptionally good sign.
After closing, I went back to my townhouse. Often, I spent an hour or so playing video games online before giving myself over to sleep, but that night, I took a shower and fell into bed. I woke with a jolt around three a.m. and stared at my phone for a few minutes before taking my phone off the charger and scrolling through Twitter. Not much to read—a few updates on travel bans in various countries, a review or two of Tanner Vance’s latest Hollywood project, and some late-night musing on whatever tweets had been issued from the President of the United States. That was one good thing about Twitter—it never shut down. There was always something to read, always some random take to keep me occupied.
Still, I hated nights like this when insomnia kept me from getting a full night’s sleep. The pandemic had made that worse, almost as if the doom and gloom wrapped around me in a blanket at just the right moment, especially when I needed to fall into a deep and restful slumber. And the only thing that kept me from feeling bad about that was the knowledge that others were doing the same all over the world. The pandemic had robbed us of so much, and that was without talking about the death and economic destruction.
Pushing that aside, I opened Instagram. I hadn’t checked the content there in a while, and it was another round I needed to make in the ongoing effort to keep up with social medial for the restaurant. I might as well do that in the middle of the night. I certainly didn’t have anything better to do. A few red alerts awaited me, along with an endless scroll of accounts I’d followed, everyone from local bloggers and news personalities to travel gurus and celebrity chefs. And one of those alerts came from @cincyashley, an account I hadn’t yet followed.
An account owned byher.
I tapped on the notification, and the app sent me to a full photo on Ashley’s profile, a photo showcasing the chicken wings she’d ordered and the pizza bread. The photo composition was good, and I wasn’t the only one who appeared to think so. About four hundred people had already liked it, and still more commented on her choice of quarantine cuisine. “I’ll have to go there,” one had typed. “I keep hearing about this place,” wrote another.
I don’t know how long I studied the post.
Sure, it wasn’t a huge gesture, it was just content on an app that plenty of people spent far too much time curating. And it probably hadn’t taken her long to figure out what to post and how to arrange it. Judging by the other photos on her page, Ashley was something of an Instagram genius. But I admired the gesture, I really did. She didn’t have to do it, there was nothing making her.
