Later, at the Bar

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Hank called Bill Kane, who made the soups and burgers at the diner, and told him to stay home. Bill had already assumed Hank would close the diner early because as far as he was concerned his boss was a lazy man who looked for excuses to lose money. But he went to the diner anyway, because it was nicer than his own apartment, and called his ex-girlfriend Trish to see if she needed help shoveling or with anything, really. But when a man answered the phone, Bill hung up and went next door to Lucy's Tavern -- which was never closed because Rita, the bartender, lived upstairs -- and got blind drunk instead.

The second storm blew in from nowhere a few weeks later, and no one, not even the weather girl on Channel 7, saw it coming. The day started out clear, but by noon the air was heavy and raw, and by four o'clock the sky had turned steel gray. By five, as Hank Stevens, Bill Kane, and the other regulars filed into Lucy's Tavern for happy hour, the snow began to fall.

At seven-thirty, Lucy Beech, the founder of Lucy's Tavern, was awakened from the dream state she'd been in and out of for several days. She heard the windows rattling and saw the snowflakes whirling like madmen. She listened to the wind howling and it sounded familiar, like the melancholy cries of the wolves that used to greet her on the one hundred acres of woodland where she grew up in Alaska. That sound always made her feel at home, and now it seemed as if it was beckoning her, saying get up, come outside, come see this miraculous storm.

Lucy was eighty-two and her bones were tired, but she got out of bed and walked outside wearing only her nightgown and no shoes. Snow hit her face. Cold hurt her teeth. The fierce, bitter wind reminded her of the storms of her youth, and she sat down on a snowbank and waited.

Lucy's obituary appeared several days later next to the police monitor, which reported three DWIs, one burglary, and an arrest of a woman whose cat was "defecating in an annoying manner" on her neighbor's front porch. The obituary was short, as Lucy would have liked it, but it was written by her cousin who lived in Topeka and didn't know her very well. It hardly mentioned the tavern Lucy established, or how -- because Lucy loved live music and dancing and understood people who liked longing more than they did love -- it became the center of the community.

It didn't talk about Lucy's late partner Suzanne, who died a month before Lucy and was buried in the garden by a slender birch. (Like many women in that town, and perhaps the world over, Lucy fell in love with a handsome woman after years of loving men.) Instead it mentioned Lucy's fine hand at embroidery, her moral upbringing, and her decent sense of community service.

In its own way, the bar Lucy built did service the community. The place itself was nothing special -- a narrow room on the first floor of a brick building that had once been an apothecary. It had hardwood floors and mullioned windows, and when Lucy bought it, the floor-to-ceiling apothecary shelves and cabinets were still there, flanking a long beveled mirror and facing a wooden counter, which Lucy decided would make a good bar. She was in her twenties then, an Alaskan fisherwoman with proud cheekbones and long dark hair that she wore in two shiny braids. Rumor had it that she had been so skilled at fishing that she'd once taught an orphaned bear cub to hunt salmon. But she'd given that up to come east with her boyfriend, a noisy, failed actor who wanted to start a dance hall. They bought the storefront next to Hank's Diner, and because it was mostly Lucy who paid for it they called it Lucy's.

Some people said the bar was cursed because Lucy's boyfriend left town with a milliner six months later, leaving Lucy heartbroken and alone, miles away from the Northern lights and the midnight sun and all the things she used to love. But Lucy, who stayed in upstate New York -- a place known for its brutal winters and triumphant springs -- laughed at this. After all, even salmon swam upstream to spawn. Heartache, to her, coursed through everything -- which was as it should be, since people needed it to make them kind.

Over the years Lucy built her bar into an open front parlor full of music and drinking, where bad behavior within reason was perfectly acceptable. She knew how to use both the gun and the baseball bat she kept under the bar by the cash register and she didn't judge her patrons as long as they paid their bills. Although once or twice she may have offered her opinion. "You know, Martin, most of us learn in grade school that saying things like 'I'm so lonely' doesn't impress women," she might have said. And when Hank Stevens sat at the bar saying things about his wife like "You wouldn't complain about the smoke at a strip club the way she does," she might have responded with, "I would if I was seven months pregnant." To her, the bar was like a good wedding, where love, sex, hope, and grief were just in the air and everyone who breathed it in was drunk not just on booze but the smoky haze around them.

So, cursed or not, Lucy's Tavern was the place most people in town came to lick their wounds or someone else's, or to give in to the night and see what would happen. Lucy grew older and her body thickened. Her once nimble feet grew arthritic and gnarled as the roots of the poplars that lined the streets in the center of town. But her skin, which rarely saw the light of day, stayed youthful and high colored even as her dark braids turned gray, then white. The bar aged too -- the hardwood floors became seasoned and polished from dancing and fighting. The mirror grew mottled and reflected a softer, more flattering image of the people it faced. Eventually a gallery of stuffed birds -- a crow, a turkey, a proud kingfisher -- that Lucy's partner Suzanne, an ornithologist, had collected appeared at the top of the bar.

By the time that second snowstorm hit, Lucy had long since turned the bar over to her bartender, Rita. So none of her regulars knew she was quietly freezing to death that night, as they drifted in for happy hour and stayed out until dawn, taking shelter from the snow and the wind that shook the buildings. Later, when they were at the bar toasting Lucy's life, the regulars said she was in that wind, mingling with the smell of wood smoke and pine. They said she swept over the graveyards and apple orchards, on to Main Street, past the old brick row houses. They said they felt her make her way by Hank's Diner, then by her bar, where she rode in on the icy air that came off of people's jackets and lingered in the clouds of smoke and perfume. She might have been struck, as she often had been when she was running the place herself, by the rough and beautiful ways people carried their loneliness. She might have breathed into the air, touched a cheek. It's all right, she might have said. The heart is right to cry. Oh, darlings, enjoy the night. She might have considered staying, at least until daybreak, but the wind picked up again and pulled her back into the storm.

The morning after the storm, the sun came out and the sky turned a brilliant blue.

"No," Hank Stevens said to his children. "Daddy does not want to go outside. Daddy is going to make a ham sandwich, and then he is going to lie down."

"This fucking town," Bill Kane said, looking at his snow-covered driveway. "No wonder people kill themselves here every winter."

It was Harlin Wilder, delivering Meals on Wheels as part of his community service, who found Lucy in her front yard in her nightgown, stiff and blue and dead, her face tilted upward, her hands tucked neatly beneath her thighs, as if she were waiting for something wonderful to happen.

Love Him, Petaluma
On Good Friday, the day she suggested the Easter Parade, Linda Hartley was following advice she had given a reader from Petaluma, California, in one of her recent columns. "We should all wear bonnets," she said to the three men sitting next to her at the bar, "and walk up and down this block." She waved her arm grandly toward the street outside. It was six o'clock, well into happy hour, and Linda was quite a bit drunk.

Linda was often drunk. She lived in a drafty old house two blocks from her bar, Lucy's, with a black cat who bit people. "Nice kitty," she would say to the cat, whose name was Walter, when he tried to take a chunk out of someone's arm. Or sometimes, "If you do that again, you little monster, I'll have a kitty liver sandwich for lunch."

All day Linda sat in her house at a desk littered with Post-it notes, sipping from half-drunk cups of cold coffee, dispensing tidy advice to troubled souls she'd never met. "You are much better off being alone than with someone who makes you miserable," she told the adolescent readers of Sugar and Spice (1.5 million subscribers). "If he says something that makes you jealous, make a joke out of it," she told the slightly older readers of Woman Today (2 million subscribers, including dentists). "Don't cause a scene or tell him you want to have a talk. Men hate to hear they have to have a talk."

Not that she followed her own advice. Linda had been known to talk a man's ear off and had once been asked to leave Lucy's after she called another woman a dirty shit fly for flirting with her boyfriend. Still, she had high hopes for her readers, whom she imagined to be flat-faced and openmouthed, insatiable as baby starlings. Her columns were very popular, and she made a lot of money writing them.

The advice she had given Petaluma, of course, had nothing to do with bonnets but rather with various ways to distract oneself from a broken heart.

"Dear Ms. Hartley," Petaluma had written. "I just broke up with my boyfriend of a year. I know it was the right thing to do, as he might have cheated on me, and he drinks a lot. I know these are bad things, and I knew that if I loved myself I'd have to leave him. But all I do is want him back. Maybe I was too cold the last time and I could make it better this time. Maybe I should call him. Do you think I should call him? Please Help."

"I'm sorry, but I'd have to say no calling," Linda had advised. "If you think he cheated on you, he probably did. Stay busy. Start a special project, like gardening or wine tasting. Or try a fitness class, like African dance. Once you develop your own interests, you might find it easier to let him go. After all, there are plenty of fish in the sea."

It wasn't a bad answer, Linda thought, although she was still stuck on one particular fish, a vegetable farmer named Austin. In the same way that Linda nurtured her troubled souls, Austin cared for beans and cabbages, feeding them with water and nitrogenized dirt and pulling bugs off their leaves and stems with his careful hands. After a day of driving tractors, tending corn, and building towers from dirt for the potatoes to grow in, he came to Lucy's for seven to fifteen Budweisers. Sometimes he got feisty and armwrestled Rita, and other times, if the music was right, he'd get loose and charming. Then Austin would start to dance.

That's how Linda fell in love with him. One night in late May, when the cherry trees bloomed hopefully under the moon, she stuck her hips to his and just danced, a half-smoked cigarette dangling from her fingertips, until two in the morning.

They danced pretty well together, if you asked her. They danced in bars, outside in the park, and one night, after they drank two bottles of whiskey, they danced naked in her big, drafty house, two drunk fools knocking against each other, making moonshadows on the floor.

It wasn't until the wheat fields turned purple and summer began to die that Linda noticed how many things Austin broke when he danced. In September he fell into a table at Lucy's and broke four wineglasses. In October he broke a pitcher of beer, a candy dish, and two pint glasses. At her Christmas party in December he danced on her cat and almost broke Walter's tail. Linda suggested that he dance before drinking ten bottles of Budweiser and a half a bottle of whiskey, and he advised her not to nag. Then in February, while the wheat seeds slept peacefully beneath the snow, Austin danced a mambo with a pretty girl who liked to drink even more than he did and broke Linda's heart.

"Goddammit," she said, and told him it was over. But then he showed up on her doorstep at midnight a week later and she let him in. And when he told her he loved her, not the other girl, she was so relieved she took off all her clothes. "We're not back together though," she said. "Not until you stop drinking."

"You're so pretty," he said, and Linda let him stay over the next night, too.

Earlier in the week, before Good Friday, Austin had called her to see if she'd go with him to visit his family in Maine for Easter. "No," Linda said. "We are broken up," she said, even though she wanted more than anything to get into the car and drive for miles with him, with his hand on her leg, the way they'd done all summer back when things were good and she hadn't cared about his reckless nature or how gray his skin was for a twenty-seven-year-old boy. "I can't go," she sighed, because she also knew that if she did, she'd have to lie to her therapist. Again. "Anyway, it's over," she told herself after Austin hung up the phone.

Now it was Good Friday and a good day for listening to good advice. Austin had gone to his family's house without her, and Linda told herself she'd done the right thing. Keep yourself busy, she'd reminded herself as she walked briskly to the bar. ("Always walk as if you are five minutes late for an appointment," she'd advised her readers. "You burn extra calories and exude confidence.") There are plenty of fish in the sea.

"I'm serious," she said to Benny Jackson, one of the happy hour regulars. "We should make our own bonnets and have an Easter parade."

Benny wiped the foam from his third Guinness off of his upper lip. He was a tall, thick man with a handsome nose and yellow eyes. One of his eyes was nearsighted and one was farsighted, which made him fairly good at darts but not so good at walking straight or, for that matter, driving. As a drunk, Linda once told him, Benny was perfect. Almost a natural.

"A parade," he bellowed. He was deaf in his right ear and almost always yelled.

"We could start a tradition," Linda said.

"Where the hell am I going to get a bonnet?"

"You have to make it," Linda said.

"I don't know," Benny said. "I may have to do my taxes on Sunday."

"Oh, bullshit," said Linda, losing patience. "Do them tomorrow. The parade will be at five-thirty," she decided, "which leaves you all day to make your bonnet. You'll do it," she went on. "Come on, I know you will."

Linda thought she knew a lot about Benny, since she'd been drinking with him for more than a year. She knew, for example, that he was a kind man and a good mechanic and not a person in the bar would say otherwise. She knew, from the time she bet him that since he was asthmatic and tone-deaf he wouldn't have the guts to belt out "White Wedding" at a karaoke contest, that he rose to almost any challenge. She knew, because he'd told her, that Benny was divorced, and that he had an eight-year-old son who was sending anonymous notes to his teacher that started with "Dear Stupid." She knew, because she drank with him, that he consumed a six-pack of beer and up to six shots of Maker's Mark a night, unless he had custody of his boy, when he didn't touch a drop, no matter how much the withdrawal made his hands shudder.

"I'll tell you what," Benny said. "If you can get Stewie Levine to sign up, I'll stick some marshmallow chicks on a fishing hat and be in the parade."

Stewart was standing at the end of the bar, well into his second pitcher. A former Navy Seal, he kept his hair short -- actually, he was bald, and although the three pitchers a day he drank widened his belly, he stretched his old T-shirts neatly over it and tucked them into his jeans, which he always bought too long and rolled up, as if he might still grow a few inches.

"Oh, Stew, be in the Easter Parade," said Linda.

Stewart looked at her with brown, soggy eyes.

"What, baby?" he said.

"I think we should all make bonnets and parade to the Helmsman," she said.

The Helmsman was a block away from Lucy's. At eleven o'clock, if the college students came down and stunk up Lucy's with cologne and clove cigarettes, Lucy's regulars would trickle over to the Helmsman in a thin, wobbly line, like worker ants coming back from feasting on the queen's nectar. They'd keep drinking and play pool until three or four in the morning. Sometimes they danced or cried, and occasionally they engaged in oral sex in the sixty-five year-old bathrooms. Linda loved the Helmsman as much as Stewart did. She herself had wept and danced and would have engaged in oral sex in the bathroom, but at the time she and Austin had been too drunk, so they sat on the toilet and shared a few slobbery kisses until Stewart pounded on the door and threatened to kill whoever was in there with his bare hands.

"We'll drink whiskey at the Helmsman," she went on, "and parade back home to Lucy's."

Stewart looked at her red-lipsticked lips and heaved a long, very sad sigh. "I don't have a bonnet," he said.

"You have to make your own," she replied. "Those are the rules."

"Go to hell," Stewart said and followed his barrel belly outside to lie down.

Hank Stevens tried to remember what he had in the diner's lost and found and said he would wear a bathing cap with daisies on it. Elizabeth Teeter, the schoolteacher who was so pretty Hank couldn't stand next to her, said she was going to wear a straw hat loaded with lilacs and edible fruit. She said this with an elegant sweep of her bony arm and carried her drink to the other end of the bar.

"She's so fucking beautiful," Hank sighed. "Isn't she beautiful?"

"She's a beauty, all right," said Benny.

"Beauty," said Linda, who might have been beautiful if it weren't for a slight overbite, "is only skin deep."

Linda had recruited six people to join the parade by the time she wandered back to her house: Benny, Hank, Stewart, Elizabeth, Rita the bartender, and Harlin Wilder. Harlin had recently been arrested because someone in his house had ordered a box of chicken wings and, when it was delivered, grabbed the food and refused to pay, spewing so much foul language that the delivery girl called the police. Four people, including Harlin, were pepper-sprayed as a result of this petty crime, and three people, including Harlin, spent the night in jail.

"It was my roommate, not me, that did it," Harlin told Linda. "I've been trying to stay away from trouble."

"I know, honey," she said. "But maybe you should stop living with your brother."

Linda was in the bathtub the next morning, sipping some coffee and nursing a terrible headache, when she heard her neighbor Dixie approach her door and shove something through the mail slot.

She dried herself off and went out to investigate. Beneath the mail slot was a misdelivered batch of letters, forwarded from one of the magazines in which her columns appeared. Attached to the pack was a handwritten note that said, "If you don't keep that goddamn cat of yours in your own apartment, I'm going to yank its little head off. Love, thy neighbor. (Ha Ha.)"

Linda gave the note to the cat to eat and opened the first letter, which was from Petaluma.

"Dear Ms. Hartley, Thank you for answering my letter in your column," Petaluma wrote in small, curly letters. "I liked your advice. I joined a book club, I signed up for some art lessons, and I even bought a Thighmaster and a fitness tape to do whenever I think of calling my ex-boyfriend. I started to feel a little bit better, but then the other day I saw him with another woman. The thing is, she is tall and beautiful, and I am short and fat. I know I should love myself, and most days I do, but then I see them together, and my legs feel like thick, barky tree trunks. I know he's probably a cheater and I deserve better. But I don't think I should ever have let him go, Ms. Hartley. I'm a full-figured girl who doesn't get a lot of attention in this world. And it's terrible to be alone."

"Oh, Petaluma," Linda said and picked up a pen.

"It is hard to be alone," she wrote back gently. "But it's better than being with someone who won't love you the way you deserve. Make a list of things you like about yourself," she wrote. "Keep the list and recite it to yourself every time you see him with this woman."

A therapist had given Linda this trick after she broke up with Liam, the man she'd loved before Austin. When Liam broke up with her to get back together with his old girlfriend, Linda had made up a list of things she liked about herself in case she ever ran into them. "I have very strong legs," she had written. "I can sing. I have great skin for a woman over thirty. I can read maps. I have never been in jail." But she never had to use her list, because she'd left town, where Liam lived, and moved up north to her drafty house near Lucy's.

"It is not a question of him finding someone better than you," Linda continued writing to Petaluma. "It is a question of people being suitable for one another. He is not suitable for you, and you are not suitable for him. You'll find someone who is much better, don't worry. In the meantime, use that list."

She looked at her words. "Right, Walter?" she said out loud to the cat, who had settled himself on her desk. "It's not rejection, it's suitability. Just like Austin is not suitable for me, and I am not suitable for him." Walter tilted his head and looked hungrily at her thumb. "No, sweetie pie," she said, pulling him up on her lap. "No biting."

She put Petaluma's letter aside and picked up the next one in the packet.

"My boyfriend and I were dry-humping on the couch and his penis got inside my vagina. Could I be pregnat? P.S.: Dry-humping is when you go through the motions of doing it, but you keep all your clothes on anyway. Love, Wondering."

"Oh, dear, confused Wondering." Linda sighed and stuck a Post-it note to the top of Wondering's letter. "Thx for clarification," she wrote. "Explain preejaculatory fluids."

She paused for a moment and looked out the window. "Although, really, thanks for nothing," she said to the cat. "I mean, what makes her think I don't know about dry-humping? I could dry-hump my way through Cuba if I felt like it. She can't even spell 'pregnant.' "

Walter chewed happily on a spider. Linda added a splash of bourbon to her coffee.

The next letter was from a woman in Knoxville who was upset with her fiancé. "He says I hold my knife and fork like a child!!" Knoxville wrote. "I am certainly willing to take criticism, and I know marriage is all about compromise. Still, I don't think 'You hold your cutlery like an infant' is a nice thing to say."

"You are right to be concerned," Linda wrote. "Don't marry him." She looked at her words and pulled off another Post-it. "Make a list of things you don't like about HIM," she wrote and stuck it to the top of Petaluma's letter.

Linda decided that was enough work for a Saturday morning and it was time to focus on her parade. In the back of her closet she found a sombrero she'd won at Lucy's for kissing Rita on the lips. It was orange and had a turquoise band around it with the words "La Cuervoracha!!" Fine, she thought and left the house to go find some more decorations.

At the dollar store she bought four fake red lilies the size of soup bowls; a basket of plastic grapes, bananas, and apples; and some polyester yellow roses. In the gardening section of the hardware store she found a battery-powered bluebird that sang "Toowhee! Toowhee!" if jostled.

On her way home she ran into Benny, who was on his crooked way to the bar.

"I thought you were working on your taxes today," Linda said.

"I didn't say I'd be in that parade," Benny said, eyeing the red lilies sticking out of the top of one of her bags. "I didn't say I wouldn't, but I didn't say I would either."

"I think you should buy me a drink," Linda said and followed him into the bar.

Stewart Levine and Harlin Wilder were already there, talking about Martin Pugliese, who had just gotten arrested for pulling a shotgun on his own son.

"You ever seen his kid?" Stewart was saying. "You'd pull a gun on him, too, if that monster came running at you."

"I might," said Harlin. "But I'm not a big guy. Martin, on the other hand, is pretty big."

Stewart couldn't argue with that.

Benny bought Linda a shot of tequila, and Harlin moved over one stool so she could sit down.

"Linda Hartley," Harlin said. He raised a half-drunk bottle of Schaefer. "Miss Lonely Hartley," he went on. "Linda, I'd like to buy you a drink," he said.

"How's your girlfriend, Harlin?" Linda said.

"My girlfriend's fine."

"We're all fine," said Benny, and Linda raised her glass to him.

Harlin looked at Linda's bag. "How's your bonnet, Linda?" he said.

"In the works," Linda said.

Harlin shook his head. "That's a crazy idea you have there," he said.

"Maybe." Linda smiled.

"Harlin's got ideas," said Stewart. "Stealing chicken wings from a delivery girl isn't a bad idea."

"Unless you end up in jail," said Benny.

"Now listen, you two. Harlin says he didn't do it," Linda said.

"Let me ask you something, Linda," said Harlin.

"Why won't you let me buy you a drink?"

"I have a drink."

"You do have a drink. But even if you didn't have a drink you wouldn't let me buy you one."

"Someday you can buy me a drink."

"Naw," Harlin went on. "You know what I mean, Benny? I mean, here's an intelligent, good-looking woman sitting right next to us. And for months she goes out with the biggest tomcatter in town."

"We're broken up," Linda said.

"And I can't even buy her a drink."

"I wouldn't call him the biggest tomcatter in town," Linda said.

"More like a tomkitten," said Benny. He repositioned himself to the side of Linda so that he was almost between her and Harlin. It was a protective move, and Linda leaned toward him slightly to let him know she noticed.

"What is it about that guy?" Harlin pulled out a cigarette and lit it with fingers that were red and chapped from working outside on a road crew all fall and winter. "The women around here can't get enough of him."

Linda waved the smoke away from her face and wrapped her napkin around the base of her shot glass. She thought about trying to explain to Harlin how she loved Austin in spite of herself, how his sweet words and devastating sadness made her feel reckless and kind. But when she looked at Harlin, his jaw was set.

"Harlin," she said. "Remember Grace? We all knew she was no good. Every time you came in here you were mad at her. Remember how she drove your new truck to Interlaken when she was drunk and came back with Robbie Nathan's phone number tucked into her bra?"

Harlin pulled a plastic sword out of the garnish tray on the bar and carefully cleaned the space between his two front teeth.

"And remember the night you caught her making out with your friend Richie and you got so mad you smashed his head into a street sign, and he got back up and almost killed you?"

"I remember that," said Benny. "He was a little guy, too."

"He was so coked up, he bounced back three times," said Harlin. "I've never seen anything like it. He knocked me down twice before he finally collapsed."

They all sat still for a minute, giving Richie's addiction a moment of silence. Then Linda continued.

"I bet every time you saw Grace you knew somewhere that the whole thing between you two was doomed," she said. "And I bet that made your heart ache so much you didn't know what you'd do next." Linda made a helpless gesture with her hands, and Harlin put his plastic sword down.

"That's what it was like with me and Austin," she said.

Harlin stared at her hard for a minute, as if seeing her with a new pair of eyes. Then he shrugged and went back to his drink.

"Well, I knew it was something," he said. "I mean, the women around here can't get enough of him."

Linda had heard the comment the first time and for a second imagined shoving a big red lily up Harlin's ass.

"See that?" Linda said. "You see that? That is exactly why I won't let you buy me a drink."

Harlin glared at her and put his dollar down on the bar. He finished his beer and walked out.

Linda ordered another tequila and drank it while Benny stayed next to her, watching Stewart try to beat himself at darts.

"The thing is," Linda said after a while, "people don't really want good advice. Good advice is: Eat bananas. Use condoms. Break up with the beautiful, terrible woman who will never stay with you. Bad advice is: Drink three bourbons a day. Sleep with your ex-boyfriend. Go look for a husband in a bar."

"That's the good stuff," said Benny, pulling a cigarette out of a pack someone had left on the bar. Linda watched him pull a cloud of unfiltered smoke into his asthmatic lungs. It occurred to her, not for the first time, that in spite of the fact that he was a goodlooking man and made a decent living as a mechanic, she had never seen Benny leave the bar with a woman. In fact, she'd never seen Benny with a woman, period, except Rita, maybe, or herself.

"Benny," she said. Benny nodded, his eyes still on Stewart, who was muttering vague threats at the side of himself that was winning. "Are you still in love with your ex-wife?"

Benny didn't look at her, and the question hung there in the thick air between them. It sat there for so long that Linda had to double-check to make sure she wasn't sitting next to his deaf ear.

"That's not really your business," he finally said.

It was the first time that he had refused her anything, so she did not say what she thought, which was that it was her business. In fact, other people's sadness was exactly what her business was. Only really, what could she do about it? She could barely live with her own.

"Benny," she said, putting a hand on his arm, "don't mind me." She gathered up her bags and paid for her drink. "I'm just drunk," she said and made her way home.

That night Linda sat alone in her drafty house, weaving flowers, plastic fruit, and ribbons onto her sombrero. There were no drunken messages from Austin on her machine when she got home, and the phone didn't ring at one, two, or three in the morning. "Stay busy," she reminded herself. "There are plenty of fish in the sea."

The morning of the Easter Parade, Linda decided to make a few calls to remind people that it was happening. By noon it was not going well. Rita's girlfriend had found out about a one-night stand she had had with a man, and they were involved in an all-day fight. Hank had no idea what fool business she was talking about, but anyway, he had to fumigate the kitchen at the diner. Elizabeth Teeter was grading papers. "No one will come to my parade," sighed Linda. She thought about calling Stewart, but calling his mother's house made her nervous. She thought about calling Harlin, but she was still a little annoyed with him from the day before. She thought about calling her therapist but decided to fix herself a vodka tonic instead. That one tasted good, so she had a few more.

At five-thirty, the estimated time of the parade, Linda was feeling much better. She added some finishing touches to her bonnet and then stepped back to admire her work. La Cuervoracha!! was transformed. Plastic apples, bananas, and the huge red lilies covered its brim. In the middle of the front, perched on top of an obscene pile of grapes, was the battery-powered bluebird, ready to sing.

"This," she told Walter, "is one hell of a bonnet."

She put on a pink dress and some high heels and, balancing her bonnet carefully on her head, strode briskly to Lucy's as if she were five minutes late. I look good, she thought as she caught her reflection in the plate-glass windows of Hank's Diner. "I am fabulous," she assured herself. She caught Hank staring at her from the inside of the diner and waved.

"Jesus Christ, look at that," Hank said. "It looks like someone vomited up Easter on that woman's head." He waved back..

Lucy's was practically empty when Linda entered, and for an instant the vodka gave her a terrible dose of clarity. She was the Easter Parade. One drunk woman on a Sunday afternoon wearing a sombrero. With a bird on it.

But then as her eyes adjusted to Lucy's cool, dim interior, she noticed three figures clustered at the end of the bar by the television. Benny, Harlin, and Stewart were on their second round. Benny was holding a hat made out of a piñata, a three-tiered papier-mâché chick bursting out of an egg. It had an open beak and huge blue eyes, and it would add a good two feet to Benny's already substantial height. Hank had loaned him a box of toothpicks from the diner, and Benny was busy sticking pink marshmallow rabbits on top of the thing's head. When he saw her, Benny held it up to the one intrepid piece of sun that pushed its way through a dirty window above the bathroom door.

"Benny, it's fantastic," said Linda, thinking she might cry.

"I had to borrow my friend Rusty's jabber saw to make it fit on my head," Benny yelled.

Next to Benny, Harlin was also stabbing marshmallow rabbits with toothpicks, which he then stuck to a black fedora through which two pink rabbit ears poked. "I am Peter Cocktail," he said grandly, and Linda held on to her hat and kissed him full on the mouth. Stewart, who was sitting next to Harlin, demanded a kiss himself. He was wearing a pith helmet and was simply stabbing marshmallow rabbits. Onto his helmet he had pasted a piece of paper that said, "My bonnet, love it or leave it."

"Stewart, it's beautiful," she said, patting his shoulder. She looked in the mirror to check her own bonnet, and in its reflection saw Austin standing near the dartboard, wearing a faded green T-shirt that made his eyes bluer than the sea.

Austin smiled and waved, and Linda smiled back, turning to take a step toward him. As she did, the pretty mambo queen came out of the bathroom and made her way toward the empty stool next to Austin. Linda stopped smiling and backed up, bumping into an inflatable parrot that hung from the ceiling from last year's Cinco de Mayo celebration. "Toowhee! Toowhee!" shrieked her bluebird. The mambo queen said something to Austin, and Linda began to recite her list of things she liked about herself. I can read maps, she thought. I have a widely published, reputable column. The girl stood on her tiptoes and kissed Austin's high cheekbone, and Linda watched as his hand snaked around her waist. I can sing, she thought. I can run four miles without stopping on very strong legs. A plastic banana dropped from her bonnet.

"I can get out of this goddamn bar," she said out loud and turned to the three men. "Well, boys," she announced, "let the parade begin."

Linda linked arms with Stewart, Benny, and Harlin, and they marched down the block. "Nice hats," said Fat Betty the meter maid.

"Are those . . . bonnets?" asked a hippie.

"We're the Easter Parade!" bellowed Benny, clocking Linda on the head with a meaty hand. "Toowhee! Toowhee!" sang her bird.

At the Helmsman, Linda bought Benny and Stewart bourbon and let Harlin buy her a shot of tequila. Harlin saw his lawyer, Lanford Guthrie. "I know you don't like to talk shop when you're off duty," he said, "but I didn't steal the chicken wings. Curly was the one that did it. I was in bed when it happened. They took me to jail in my bathrobe and slippers, for Christ's sake." His ears bobbed up and down when he spoke, and Lanford nodded weakly.

"I believe you," he said.

Harlin clapped him on the back and went to the bathroom.

"Why the hell not," Lanford said to Linda. "I believe all of them. Every time. And you know what? Every time they fucking lie to me."

Stewart ordered himself a pitcher and elbowed his way to the pool table.

"Nice hat," said Frankie, the busboy at Hank's.

"Eat me," growled Stewart, and Frankie let him break.

Linda sat at the bar next to the parole officer and ordered a double bourbon. She had given up thinking about things she liked about herself and had begun listing the men who might love her. "That Liam, he loved me," she said. "Mark Mintner loved me for ten years even though I only kissed him once. Eric Richards and I had very hot sex not even six months ago." She swatted at a bunch of grapes that had come loose and were drooping over her ear.

"I love you, sweetheart," said the bartender. He gave her her bourbon and patted her hand. "We all love you. Really, we do."

Linda gave up on her bonnet and placed it gently on the bar. She sipped her drink and saw Benny at the jukebox picking out music, his chest laboring to pull oxygen into his weary lungs.

Benny saw her staring and came over to offer his hand. "Put on your bonnet, Ms. Hartley," he said. "They're playing our song."

Linda looked up at him -- his fine nose and the semicircles of soft lavender skin that underlined his yellow eyes. Benny burped, and his overexcited bonnet wobbled a little. She saw that on one of the bonnet's outstretched wings Benny had stuck a tag that said, "Hello, my name is Benford." Benny, she thought. Benny loves me.

She imagined that, over at Lucy's, Austin was finishing his fifth or sixth beer. He would be starting to move now, getting ready to twirl and spin the other girl until she felt light and important as a late spring. Linda thought of short, full-figured Petaluma squeezing the hell out of her Thighmaster and wishing the phone would ring. We only get pieces of love, she thought. Sometimes that's the best we can do. Oh, love him, Petaluma, she thought. Love him.

She put on her bonnet and took Benny's arm. They walked to the jukebox, which was playing a Willie Nelson version of "Goodnight, Irene." Benny put his thick arms around her, and she pressed her body full-length against his. She pressed into him and he pressed back, and they swayed together for almost an hour. Even after the songs switched to a faster rhythm, they stayed that way, two flowers drifting in the bar's smoky haze, dancing as if they'd been in love for a hundred years.