Abandonment
by Pat Hanahoe-Dosch
In January the blue in the sky disappears in our part of New Jersey. Even on the rare occasion when it isn't cloudy, our world is filled with just sand, a few bare trees, and a lot of empty houses waiting for the summer/weekend people to come back. In fall and winter I nickname this place The Abandonment. After Memorial Day, tourists and summer residents return, and the whole island is rescued from ruin again.
In this small bagel shop it's warm and--pardon the pun-- toasty. Every morning I open the shop at 5:00 a.m. By then, the baker has already filled most of the bins. Customers love the smell of this place, but to be honest, I don't even notice the smells anymore. My favorite is whole wheat with plain cream cheese. That's usually breakfast because I can eat for free here. I'm saving up to go away to the state university in a couple of years. Maybe. I'm taking a math class at the community college two nights a week, now. Mom gave me the tuition money as my graduation gift. She says I have to keep going to school because if I stop, I might not ever go back. "Look at me," she usually says when I grumble about homework. "I got married right after high school and never went back. I thought I knew everything. Look at me now- a single mom waiting tables six days a week and can't even get ahead with all that overtime." I'm not sure if she regrets having me more than not going to college, but I hear her message. She says it often enough. I'm working hard at this class, harder than I did in high school where, to be honest, I didn't do much. Why work hard when you know you can't afford to go anywhere anyway?
The shop is owned by a man who lives in Philly most of the time but has a gorgeous big house two blocks from here, facing the ocean, which he visits on weekends in the summer. I live four blocks away from the beach in a small, old house my mom inherited from her mom. We're still cleaning mold out of the laundry room from Hurricane Sandy. The manager of the bagel shop, Miriam, also runs the deli across the street, so she lets me and Frankie basically run everything. I open, and Frankie closes. If we have a problem, we can run across the street and ask for help or an answer, but we don't get many problems here selling bagels. I mean, who'd have a problem with bagels?
We're only open until 3:00 p.m., anyway. Our rush time is from 6:00 a.m. till about 10:00 a.m. on weekends and the summer. The rest of the time, we just get a few locals and stragglers. And Louie.
Louie hangs out by the corner most of the night. He pretends he's waiting for a bus, but his particular bus never comes. It's always the next one. I think he sleeps on the bench under the bus stop sign. He sits up when he hears me unlocking the door in the mornings. "Hey Kimmie," he always says. "Got any leftover bagels from yesterday?"
I always save him one. We give the rest to the homeless shelter on the other end of the island though in the summer there isn't usually much left over. In winter, there're too many leftovers, but Miriam says to keep baking and selling what we can-- I nicknamed her Always Hopeful, but never call her that out loud. The other side of the island is where most of the poor are. On our end, in summer we're over run by the rich who own second homes here, but this time of year, it's mostly just us locals. Some of us may be just hanging on, but we're not soup kitchen poor. We make a living off the rich and the tourists here one way or another.
Then there's Louie. I guess there are others like him, but I don't see them. Once in a while there'll be another guy hanging out at the bus stop with him, but they never stick around. Louie, though, he seems to like drinking at the Sailfish bar until it closes. He always smells of stale beer and sweat, mixed with a faint whiff of urine. He's sad, and I understand sad. I always figured someone abandoned him, too. I nicknamed him The Abandoned Bum, but I don't call him that. I let him into the shop with me and toast whatever kind of leftover bagel I set aside in a bag under the cash register the day before. He likes cream cheese with chives, so that's what I smear on it. Sometimes he has enough to buy a coffee, but sometimes he doesn't. He looks real bad today, so I figure he probably doesn't.
"Don't tell anyone," I say, as usual.
"Thank you," he says, taking the bagel in both hands and lifting it to his nose to smell it. "Mmm."
"Here," I say, handing him a cup of coffee. "The coffee's on me today. You look like you need it. What'd you do to yourself last night?"
"God bless you, girl," he says. "I may have had a bit to drink last night. I was celebrating. Yesterday was the feast of Queen Esther, you know."
"Hunh," I grunt, wiping down the counter. "You mean Purim. I'm Jewish, too. I know it was Purim yesterday." Actually, I hadn't known that. We aren't religious. But I knew all about Queen Esther. When I was little, my mom did tell me the stories behind all the holidays.
I think I know what's coming. This is the real reason I feed Louie and let him hang out at the shop for an hour or so in the mornings. Louie tells stories - not always well, but they are always funny in some way or another. He entertains not just me, but the customers, too. Already there's a line of three people, all regulars who stop here to grab breakfast on their way to work. I take their orders and start gathering bagels, filling a bag with a dozen for one, making bagel and egg sandwiches for another, pouring coffee for the third who can't decide if he wants a poppy or onion bagel. I think he just wants to hear Louie's story. We know it will not be the traditional Bible story.
"She was my ancestor, " he says. I laugh. He looks at me with a sad squint. I refill the coffee pot and try to look serious. It's more likely that I'll graduate from Harvard Law School than that Louie is descended directly from Queen Esther of the Bible.
"The way most people tell that story," he says, "it's all about Mordecai. But really, the hero of the story is Queen Esther. She's the one who saved our people. She was a strong woman, like my own Esther, God rest her soul." He stops and looks down at his coffee. He hasn't taken the plastic lid off of the Styrofoam cup yet. "And that's because the queen's father died before she was born, and her mother died giving birth to her, so she was always alone, orphaned, even in the house of her uncle. Of course, she wasn't queen then, just a scared Jewish girl." He pauses for a minute. He looks out the big display window at the front of the shop. "Like my Esther," he says. "She was always scared because she was an orphan, too. Her aunt and uncle raised her with their kids, but she never belonged, she told me. She never belonged anywhere until she married me. But then she died," he says. "I was driving, and we crashed. And now she's with Queen Esther somewhere."
He's silent for a moment. Then he says, "But Esther, she knew how to get what she wanted. In the end, the king gave her everything and all the Jews rose up and killed all their enemies. It was a great victory, but a sad time for everyone else. Death is a terrible business," he says. He leans forward, over the counter to me and says quietly, "I think she wants revenge on me, too. She comes looking for me sometimes at night and tries to stab me with the cold. But I keep waking up." He walks out the door, slowly, with his coffee in one hand and the paper wrapped bagel in the other.
The customer who was listening turns to me. "Onion," he says. I toast his bagel, butter it, and give it to him. He pays me. "Not the usual kind of story from Louie," he says. "Man, I feel bad for the guy."
"Yeah, " I say, "Me too." He leaves. I watch Louie from the front window. He sits on the bus bench, hunched over, eating his bagel just like he's done countless mornings before. His stained wool coat looks a little shabbier than usual. I want to go out there and hug him or something, maybe tell him about my dad who left us when I was little. Mom says sometimes that he can't handle responsibility, that's why he left, but sometimes I think it's because my twin died when we were infants. She just stopped breathing, mom says. I want to tell Louie I know about death, too, but I don't remember her, or my dad. I just know them from photos. Maybe he blames me because I didn't die too. I don't ask mom about that any more. She never answers my questions, just says some things are better left in the past. She works all the time because we don't have insurance or much else, except bills. We have lots of bills.
In high school, I thought not having a dad made me The Abandoned Kid. I tried to find him once, a couple years ago. There are lots of ways of finding someone on the Internet. It looks like he's been living in Las Vegas, going from one job to another, one apartment to another. A bum, my mom says. I picture him like Louie, sleeping at bus stops, hungry and lonely. In my head, that made me think I could bond with Louie somehow. Like we're kindred spirits or something, but today I realize we're not. In a weird way, it's kind of a relief, but still cruel. I pour another cup of coffee and take it out to him. "Here," I say, handing it to him as I sit on the bench. "You look like today's gonna be at least a two cup kind of day."
He squints up at me because the sun is coming up and the day is getting kind of bright. For once, it isn't cloudy. Spring must be close. He's always squinting, I think. He doesn't ever look straight at anybody, as far as I can tell. "Thanks," he says. "Queen Esther is gonna save us all, you know. She did it before. She will again."
"Hey," someone calls from the shop. "Are you open or what? I gotta get to work. I need to bring a dozen bagels with me for a meeting."
"Sure," I say, more to Louie than the customer. "Whatever." Frankie should be here soon to help out. I usually re-tell Louie's stories to him. Not today though. There isn't a story to tell. Not one he'd want to listen to, anyway.
I guess no one wants to listen to the real stories, the ones that aren't funny or made up out of wishes. I hope Louie will be funny again tomorrow. I count on him to be funny. I have to get back to work, then later go home, make dinner so my mom won't have to when she gets home, exhausted, and I won't ask my mom anything about my dad, again, though I want to, because I know she'll never tell me more than she has. My dad probably isn't anything like Louie. He probably isn't that guy on the Internet, but has a job and a house and another family, by now. I know he's never coming back. I have to make up my own stories. Maybe I should work on making them funny like Louie does, most of the time, but I don't know how to make something funny anymore than I know how to find someone who's missing. For all I know, that guy I found on the Internet could have been just someone who had the same name. But it's the only story I have of him. I want to believe someone gives him a bagel and coffee sometimes. Maybe someone listens to him sometimes. Maybe he tells stories about me.
About the Author: Pat Hanahoe-Dosch’s story, “Sighting Bia,” was a finalist for A Room of Her Own Foundation’s 2012 Orlando Prize. Her stories have been published in The Peacock Journal, In Rosse Review, Sisyphus, and Schuylkill Valley Journal. Her poetry has been in many publications and two books. See her website https://pathanahoedosch.blogspot.com/