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Valentines
It’s Valentine’s Day 1979, three years before I’m born. My mother works the night shift at Rum’s,
washing glasses behind the bar. She dips them into the hot, soapy water, loosening the sugary
residue at the bottom, then slides them onto the cylinder of plastic bristles that scrub them clean.
Per usual, this is not her responsibility; she’s a waitress. The bartender has been sidetracked by a game of pitch.
The heat’s cranked up, and steam from the water frizzes my mother’s permed blond hair.
She can feel her make-up running. She’s been sweating all night, hustling from her packed
tables to the packed bar where couples are having cocktails before fancy dinners at places
like Orlando’s and The Red Lion.
My father still hasn’t called. Not since he forgot her birthday last month, when
she went downtown to Kelly’s with her sister to drink whiskey and puke in the parking lot.
“God Kath,” her sister had said, helping my mother up the stairs of her apartment.
“This one’s really done a number on you.”
No one’s looking so my mother pours herself a shot of Johnny Walker, Black Label.
She places her elbows carefully against the cool shells of the liquor bottles and
looks at the crowd. Rum’s is dotted with women in red dresses and heels, men in ties,
a few roses wrapped in crinkly plastic on the scarred wooden tables.
She should’ve known better, I imagine her thinking, chasing a man like my father. Hell,
she met him at Kelly’s for crying out loud, drinking pitchers with Joe Mars, Goody, and Snot,
hollering at the Yankees game. It had taken her all night just to get him to buy her a drink.
When he’d finally noticed her, sitting with her girlfriends, laughing and all lit up under
those tacky fake lanterns designed to bring some class to the joint, he’d sauntered over
and introduced himself, reputation preceding. Most women in town knew who Danny Monticello was.
“Kessler?!” he’d said, narrowing an eye quizzically, flirtatiously when she told him what
she wanted to drink. “Lady, you can be my date any night of the week. I’ll buy you all
the cheap whiskey you can stand.”
Soon enough, she had moved into his booth, ball-busting and anecdoting the way she’d
heard the regulars do at Rum’s. My father thought my mother was pretty and sharp,
her green eyes shining when she laughed. My mother thought my father was funny and
charming, and had a smile that made her feel nervous and confident at the same time,
which only certain men in the world can do.
At the end of the night, my father had leaned conspiratorially into her hair.
“So, I got this credit card deal,” he’d said. “One of those things they give
you for spending too much money, you know? Dinner at the Red Lion. Help me put it to use on Saturday?”
That’s when she knew he was a liar. But she’d said yes anyway.
Rum’s is quiet during dinner hours, but picks back up around eleven.
My mother is good at her job, milks the lovesick for the big tips, brings
a round of red Alabama slammers on the house. It isn’t even technically her night
to work. But since another girl wanted the night off to spend with her fiancé,
and since my mother had no Valentine’s date, she took the shift in hopes of at
least raking some dough from guys trying to get lucky. Maybe the money doesn’t
settle the empty feeling in her gut as she analyzes and re-analyzes my father’s
recent disappearance, but the grimy bills feel good in her hands as she shoves
them into the pockets of her apron.
Around one a.m., as the place empties of tables and the stragglers at the bar get deep
into their liquor, another couple pushes through the new aluminum front door. My mother
is standing at the bar, back to the crowd, ringing out a customer’s tab, when that inkling
to turn around comes over her, the way we can sense when we’re being watched or followed.
She turns. She sees them. My father, and a woman with bobbed blond hair. Kim Duncan.
My mother knows Kim Duncan. Every Sunday, Kim comes to Northminster Presbyterian church
with her daddy, the insurance agent who sits in the front pew wearing loud and inappropriate ties.
There’s one with a winking banana that my mother particularly dislikes. And his twenty-seven year
old little girl is known for latching onto any man who will buy her dinner and a little cocaine
on the weekend. Tonight, she’s latched onto my father, eyes drunkenly half-closed, stroking his
arm as they take seats at the bar, where my father finally notices my mother standing.
He watches her face flush as red as Kim Duncan’s slinky dress, sees her green eyes fill with tears.
My mother stares at his navy blue suit jacket and brown shoes, neither of which she’s ever seen before.
Beside her, a tray of washed glasses are stacked upside down, drying. They glisten with
the clean water like crystal, like diamonds. My mother wraps her tapered, piano-fingered
hands around the tray, and picks it up. She continues to look at him—into brown eyes that
would, in three more years, be mine—as she lets the glasses fall to the sticky floor, and
the sound of their shatter fills the dark, almost empty room, before she runs out the door
into the black February night.
Amy Monticello is currently an MFA candidate at The Ohio State University.
Email: Amy Monticello
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