Corner Booth Chardonnay
Stepping through the back door, I squint against the shadows before sliding into the corner booth of the bar section. The restaurant’s near empty, the way I like it. Every few weeks, I drive the seventeen miles along the winding backroads to hide out here for a while.
(The walls are exposed
brick, bare.)
Sepia photographs of long-ago strangers accent corners, line the hallway to the restrooms. A placard boasting the week’s $5 burger sits at the edge of each booth and table. Hunched-over regulars at the bar palm pints, stir highballs.
Climbing on the booth’s seat to stand, I close the blinds against the sun’s glare. I’ve been coming here for a couple of years, so no one minds or even pays attention. It’s the middle of September, the middle of the afternoon, and all of us—except for the lithe bartender with her dark hair in a high ponytail—are middle-aged. On every large screen in the bar, a pitcher steps to the mound— last night’s Texas Rangers replay on mute. Everyone stares at the silence.
On the satellite radio, Stevie Nicks sings about having and losing, thunder and rain.
(Years ago, I stood in a river
during a rainstorm, skipping flat stones.)
The bartender greets me with a glass of Chardonnay, knows I’ll be here for an hour or so. On the patio outside, an older man sips alone. He always sits at the same wrought iron table, dressed like he drove here from playing a round of golf. I’ll pass him on the patio when I leave.
(One summer, I worked at a bar where I unlocked
the tables and chairs on the patio
an hour before we opened at four.
Around 3 o’clock in the morning, I’d drive
home, waiting for
the streetlights to change
on the wide, empty streets.)
Stevie’s voice fades and the song ends.
When it’s slow like this, the bartender sits down and scrolls through her phone to show me the latest shading on her octopus tattoo. A swirl of cerulean, teal, and turquoise floats across the middle of her back. She once tried to show me the tattoo, tugging at the back of her shirt, untucking and twisting around enough for me to see, but someone at the bar raised his empty glass.
(Someone always needs another.)
The Wi-Fi bars on my laptop climb and fall. Waiting for them to turn solid feels like watching the reels on a slot machine. The four dark bars hit. Jackpot. I check my account balance, then Gmail. A new message from Dictionary.com:
reticulation | Word of the Day a netlike formation, arrangement, or appearance. I save the email to my Word of the Day folder—a collection of vocabulary I think I might someday use in an essay.
I didn’t reply to the last email my father sent me. I used to think of this often. Until I didn’t anymore.
(That’s not true.
I wrote the line, didn’t I?)
The patio man steps through the door with a rush of cool wind and the skittering of leaves. He’s come in for another pint and stands at the bar, looking around, but not at any of us. The Doobie Brothers sing about a train.
It’s been a long time since I knew a railroad worker who crossed western states in the middle of the nights. He’d call from the caboose so I could hear the whistle’s four wails. A beat between each one. His name was Andy. A hay farmer who squared gold at the base of the Wasatch Mountains, he took the train job for extra money.
If I could afford it, I’d buy the three-bedroom house in Lubbock, Texas, where I lived from the ages of six to eight in the late seventies, the years Stevie Nicks wrote some of her most well-known songs.
(When she sings them, I wonder if she goes
back to those years and that man
as he was—as they were—then.)
That house in Lubbock. Beige-brown brick, yellow trim. Maybe I’ll send a letter to the address and ask, Will you please take a picture from the window above the kitchen sink? I want to see my mother’s view.
(Sometimes I imagine my father, my mother
in their caskets in the ground.
I can’t help it.)
I text a photograph of my wine glass to a friend so that someone knows where I am. Once, she sat in front of the octopus’s tank at the aquarium in Fort Worth for an hour. A long time after she told me that, I learned that most octopuses live only a year, which means she watched .01 percent of that creature’s life.
(How do we explain our fascinations?
Our obsessions?
We’re drawn. Isn’t that enough?)
It’s been a long time since I stood in a Colorado river in a rainstorm skipping stones, certain I was in love with the man beside me instead of the man who lived states away. The Away Man’s voice on my answering machine—one, two, three times before I’d call back. I worry I will always, in some way, feel more like myself standing in that river more than anywhere else I’ve been or will ever be.
(If I paid my tab and left
now, it would take me
eleven hours before I would be
standing on that shore.
Tomorrow’s forecast for
that town shows rain.)
The Lubbock house sits on the corner of 63rd and Toledo, where the sidewalk frames the property in an L—a path I roamed from the back fence to the mailbox next door on Saturdays and summer days. Back then, a honeysuckle bush vined the mailbox, its red flag peeking from the yellow-stem sweetness. Google Street View shows me the blossoms are gone.
Through the blinds, a sliver of late afternoon sun pierces my glass, making my glass of Chardonnay look like a porchlight.
Other words in my Word of the Day folder:
aureate—golden or gilded
ambages—winding, roundabout paths or ways
concinnate—to arrange or blend together
hyetal—of or relating to rain
thalassic—of or relating to oceans
frondescence—foliage, leafage
velleity—a mere wish, unaccompanied by an effort to obtain it
Is that what we’re all doing here in the middle of the afternoon? Stepping into the rivers of our pasts, drinking the words we did or did not say? Sipping the choices we didn’t make, the ones others did? All those words—sinking.
(Skipping across this page.)
Sometimes at night I stand in the doorway of my back porch and look at the apartments of another complex across the way, wondering how my days might be different if I lived in those apartments instead of mine. One night, I watched a young man with a beard and a warbly voice sitting on a blue plastic cooler on his deck, playing the ukulele. For nights, the notes of his playing woke me, and I’d turn toward the window and listen. After a week or so, only silence floated from his deck. The blue cooler gone. He must have gone on to somewhere.
(Years from now, I’ll read an article online about
this restaurant closing—one week after it closes.)
Every time I sit in this corner booth, seeing the gray and graying men stare into their glasses, I hear Hemingway in my head: It was very late and everyone had left the café except an old man who sat in the shadow the leaves of the tree made against the electric light. The bartender brings over the bottle to refill my glass. Her ponytail swinging. A heavy pour.
(Honeyed lemon and minerals, grapefruit tinge.)
An email from the U-Haul storage on I-35 with this month’s invoice. I pay the bill. My piano, my father’s recliner he bought a week before he had a heart attack in a hotel room, my mother’s daisy dishes, boxes of my father’s records, folders in a box labeled Important Papers, and my childhood bedroom suite.
(Yellow with brass handles.)
America’s on the radio now—a song about a highway. I hum along.
Earlier when I turned into the parking lot, I stopped to take a photo of three ash trees in a line. Their splash of yellow a surprise. On the concrete surrounding them, the leaves that had spilled looked like a reflection in water. I drove slowly through them, my tires churning them the way sand rises and clouds when I step into a river.
(When I come back in a month, the branches will be bare.)
Jill Talbot is the author of The Last Year: Essays (Winner of Wandering Aengus Press Editor’s Prize, August 2023), as well as The Way We Weren’t: A Memoir and Loaded: Women and Addiction, a collection of personal essays. Her writing has appeared in literary journals such as AGNI, Brevity, Colorado Review, Gulf Coast, Hotel Amerika, Lit Mag, River Teeth: A Journal of Narrative Nonfiction, The Paris Review Daily and others. You can find her on Bluesky @jilltalbot.bsky.social and Instagram @jill.l.talbot.