“TOOTSIE!” said Red. “Where the hell you been, girl? Want a drink?”
“Scotch and soda,” she said. “Don’t mix it.”
“It’s on me,” said Red. He leaned across the bar and said in a lower voice, “Sorry about calling you Tootsie. I forgot.”
“You can call me Tootsie,” she said with what she intended to be the weary air of a girl who has seen it all, or at least as much of it as a girl can see in Babbington. “Everybody does.”
She got a few laughs from the men at the bar, and a couple of them raised their glasses to her. She felt fine, just fine, in control, pleased with herself. She saw Red look up, toward the back of the room, as if something had caught his eye, and she looked in the mirror to see what it was. My grandfather was looking toward the bar with his glass raised. Red reached for a bottle in the automatic manner of a bartender pouring a drink for a regular who orders the same thing every time.
“Does he come in here a lot?” asked Ariane.
“Has been, lately,” said Red. “You know him?”
“I know who he is. Jack Leroy. Lives on Sinkhole Lane.”
“Yep.”
“Rum?” she asked, watching Red pour. “Not a big drink around here.”
“Nope,” said Red.
She watched him reach for another bottle. “Rum and Coke?” she said. “Are we in the tropics?”
Red grunted.
“Here,” said Ariane. “Give me that. I’ll take it to him.”
Red looked surprised.
“I’m your new waitress,” she said. “Just watch the way business picks up.”
She took my grandfather’s drink and her own and she walked that walk to the little round table in the back where my grandfather was sitting.
“Rum and Coke?” she said.
Grandfather looked up at her, but there was no recognition in his eyes. She could have been Red serving him his drink.
“Mind if I sit down?” she asked.
Another look from Grandfather’s big gray eyes. I remember the way his eyes looked at that time, when my grandmother was so ill, when she was dying. His eyes had the look of someone constantly surprised. I suppose he’d been surprised by death. My grandmother’s death was long and hard. His eyes were always wet, too. I don’t think I ever saw him cry, but I remember how moist his eyes were. In a way, I guess, he was always crying. I also remember the way he drank. He had been the sort of man who drinks very little ordinarily and then surprises everyone by getting jolly and tipsy at a holiday party, but as my grandmother failed he began to drink regularly, with a joyless determination, the way someone might take a foul-tasting medicine.
Ariane sat down and began to talk to him, just making conversation. I doubt that she mentioned me, but it’s not impossible.
[to be continued]
In Topical Guide 707, Mark Dorset considers Drinks: Rum and Coke, Cuba Libre; Appropriation, Plagiarism; and Fact and Fiction from this episode.
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🎧 707: “Tootsie!”