Grace
“So, yay or nay on this new Union Craft IPA?” asks Zoe, the manager at Edgar Allan’s.
I think of Henry’s disgusted face in my parents’ backyard. “Nay. Tell them I love them, but this one’s just not doing it for me.”
“Check,” says Zoe. “Also, I agree. My philosophy: Beer shouldn’t hurt.”
We’re behind the bar working through her list of items to run by me.
It’s lunchtime on a Friday, so the crowd is brisk.
I pour some Miller Lites for two guys wearing suits, and I’m wondering if I should be making business decisions based on Henry’s opinions.
I nearly texted him yesterday to see how his groin was doing, but I stopped myself because I’m a dignified, grown-ass woman.
And now I think Zoe is talking about…chicken wings?
“Sorry, what?” I ask.
She looks up from her Rolling Stones planner. “Old Bay wings. Wanna move them off specials and make them permanent? We’ll have a riot if we get rid of them.”
“Done,” I say. “Give the people what they want.”
Zoe asks about scheduling our HVAC service and when we should have the health inspector come by.
I approve increasing our stock of Edgar Allan’s “Nevermore Drunk” merch.
That tagline has always felt too frat boyish to me, but our T-shirts, bumper stickers, and koozies keep flying off the shelves. Again, give the people what they want.
Zoe could make these decisions in her sleep, but she likes to keep me involved, which I appreciate.
As she jots down notes, I notice a small black raven silhouette tattooed on her wrist. It’s woven into the Baltimore-themed sleeve that runs up her right arm.
“Is that new?” I ask.
“Yeah. What do you think?”
“I love it,” I say.
“Good, because it hurt like a motherfucker.”
“Worth it,” says one of the Miller Lite guys.
“Thanks, sweetie,” Zoe tells him. “I like your tie. Try to keep it out of your ketchup.”
Zoe brings in as many customers as the Poe statue.
She’s hot and tough, but she knows exactly when to downshift to cute and docile.
She’s about ten years younger than I am, but we have a lot in common.
She came up as a bartender, too, but kept getting more and more responsibility because of how good she is.
She was my right hand before Tim died. She’s more than that now—a hand and a half, at least.
“How do you like the décor, by the way?” she asks.
When I arrived this morning I found Christmas lights over the bar, cotton ball snow around the liquor bottles, and the Poe bobbleheads atop the beer taps wearing little Santa hats. “Believe it or not, I love that, too,” I say. “Just obnoxious enough.”
“All Hector,” says Zoe. “He was here till four a.m. the other night setting it up.”
Hector is our head waiter. I catch his eye across the restaurant, point at the bobbleheads, and give him a thumbs-up.
“Thanks, boss!” he shouts. “Good to see you!”
I’m happy to be in this noisy, friendly place with these people.
Being here, though, always makes me a little sad because Tim loved this bar as much as I do.
When people find out I own Edgar Allan’s they assume I’m a big Poe fan.
I’m not, really—at least no more than anyone else in Baltimore when it comes to our city’s most famous former literary resident.
I worked here all through college and then stayed on after.
When the owners at the time, Jackie and Mort, finally pulled the trigger on a condo in Fort Myers, they took me aside one night and explained the finances of bar ownership.
I laughed in their faces. “Are you two out of your minds? I can’t afford this.”
Jackie put her hand on Mort’s. “Neither could we when we bought it.”
Mort laughed. “We barely can now.”
Jackie waved to the window at all our neighboring bars and restaurants. “Here’s a little secret, Grace. Nobody can afford any of these places. Welcome to the food and beverage industry.”
Tim and I had been married about a year then.
We didn’t have kids yet, so he’d come in most weekend nights to have a few beers and help me shut down.
On a Friday at 2:30 in the morning, I told him what Mort and Jackie had proposed.
Over the next forty-five minutes, the idea of buying a bar in Baltimore went from being banana-pants to maybe not so crazy after all to a legitimately sound investment.
“I mean, babe,” he said, leaning on the bar, “everybody’s got two mortgages nowadays, right?”
He was a history teacher who dabbled in American Lit before making the shift to administration, so he knew more about Edgar Allan Poe than I did.
My first act as his business partner was to put him in charge of maintaining and adding on to the place’s Poe-themed aesthetic.
One of his favorite additions was a gothic painting of the duplex on North Amity Street where Poe lived until 1835.
It’s crooked today, like always, and Tim appears now in my imagination to nudge the bottom right corner of the frame.
Is this crooked, or am I crooked?
Zoe snaps me back to the noontime buzz. “Last item: the employee holiday party.” She looks up again, hesitates. “Are we, um…are we doing it this year?”
“What?”
“Everyone’s been asking. It’d normally be the week after next, right? I wasn’t sure if you were gonna wanna deal with it, though. You know, because of…”
The Edgar Allan’s employee holiday party is a tradition passed down from Jackie and Mort. Every year we close to the public one night in December and get spectacularly drunk together. I haven’t, however, thought about it until this exact moment.
“Oh,” I say. “Um, well, yeah.”
“Really? Oh, that’s awesome. I mean, if you’re sure.”
“Zoe, of course,” I say. “It’s what we do, right?”
She closes her planner. “In that case, let’s talk catering. Dom wants to do it again.”
I heard her, but I ask her to repeat herself.
“Yeah. Actually, he’s demanding to. Dude’s got absolutely zero chill when it comes to food.”
“I figured he’d…” I stop here, though, because I don’t know what I figured. Dom, the owner of the place across the street, has done everything he can to avoid me since Tim died.
Zoe sticks her pen behind her ear. “Well, if you wanna talk to him about it, he’s coming over in…” She looks at her watch. “Shit. Right now.”
Which is when Hector yells, “Sup, Dommy Dom?”
He’s by the hostess stand holding a steaming pot, and he looks just as surprised to see me as I am to see him.
“And,” says Zoe, “looks like he’s got spaghetti.”
A tricky thing about marriage that no one tells you: From time to time you meet people who you absolutely know you’d get involved with if you were single.
If you’re happy and your marriage is solid enough, like with Tim and me, you don’t obsess about it, because that’s just how life works.
You make choices and you live with them, you accept that opening one door closes all the other doors, and so on.
Dominic Esposito is one of those people for me.
If I hadn’t met Tim, I’d have eventually met Dom because he bought the dilapidated pizza place across from Edgar Allan’s and turned it into the Italian Embassy.
I’d have thought he was good-looking as hell but not my type with all his food-is-art pretentiousness.
He would’ve made a sport of trying to prove that I was wrong, and I would’ve shut him out for a while. But a girl can only resist for so long.
He shifts his bowl of pasta to the crook of one elbow now and bro-hugs Hector before waving to the fry cooks. I haven’t seen him in a couple of months, this tattooed ragamuffin, but he’s still gorgeous in that infuriating way that handsome men can be gorgeous without even trying.
“Grace,” he says. “I didn’t know you were gonna be here.”
“Figured I’d pop in and make sure Zoe isn’t stealing coasters again,” I say.
Zoe shrugs. “Busted.”
There was a time when Dom would storm in here and kiss my cheek with such bravado that I’d feel it in my lower stomach. He catches more air than skin now, though, barely brushing past. “How are you?” he asks.
“Good,” I say. “I hear you’re down to cater the party again.”
“My neighborly duty,” he says. “Figure this place should serve something edible at least once a year.”
Zoe makes a whacking-off motion, and Dom holds up the bowl: thin noodles with red sauce. “I’m thinking something like this for the main course,” he says.
Five years ago, Dom crashed the Edgar Allan’s holiday party with a bunch of gourmet flatbreads from the Italian Embassy. He’s showed up with food every year since.
“Holy shit, Scorsese,” says Zoe. “Spaghetti from an Italian restaurant? You’re really digging deep this year.”
Zoe can’t not talk shit to Dom; it’s the basis of their entire friendship/rivalry. She nicknamed him “Scorsese” a few years ago after she told him he was like some wannabe gangster from a Martin Scorsese movie, and everyone other than him thought it was hilarious.
He takes a fork out of the pocket of his white chef’s coat, twirls pasta. “Just wait,” he says.
“Whoa, is that from here?” asks the other Miller Lite guy.
“Nah,” says Zoe. “He applied for a job a while back, but he didn’t get it because he couldn’t figure out the deep fryer.
” She leaves out that the Italian Embassy is one of the best restaurants in Baltimore, that Dom is renowned, and that the dish he’s holding smells so good that all conversation around us has stopped.
“So, is that, like, out of a can?” I ask. “Ragu? No, you’re more of a Prego guy, right?”
Dom, unsmiling, shakes his head and holds out the fork. He meant to come over and talk to Zoe, but here I am, so he’s stuck with me.
As others have mentioned, he loves me—or at least he did.
This wasn’t a secret, because he told anyone who’d listen, including my husband.
He’d say things like, “Someday you’ll leave that tall simpleton and run off with me,” and Tim would say something like, “You know I can hear you, right? I’m literally right here.
” They were buddies, too, Tim and Dom. They went to Ravens and Orioles games with some of the other bar and restaurant owners from the neighborhood, lobbied the liquor board together.
Tim and I would tease Dom relentlessly about his revolving door of girlfriends.
Since Tim died, though, Dom has treated me like little more than an acquaintance—a neighbor he barely knows.
Him loving me was everyone’s little joke. My husband dying made it less funny.
When the spaghetti hits my tongue my eyes close. Like all next-level food, the flavors arrive in stages. Pasta, something buttery and salty, tomatoes, garlic. “Jesus…Christ.”
He looks at Zoe, then back at me.
“Not bad,” I say. “It’ll work, I guess.”
“Okay, gimme,” says Zoe. “I skipped breakfast.” She snatches the bowl away, grabs one of the Miller Lite guys’ unused forks, and digs in. “You son of a bitch. Why doesn’t my spaghetti taste like this?”
“Good to see you, Grace,” Dom says, formal, like when he hugged me at Tim’s funeral. “I’ll shoot you the rest of the menu after I figure it out.” Then he hustles out the door.
“Soooo, that’s not on the menu then?” the first Miller Lite guy asks.
“Eat your fries, sweetie,” says Zoe.
And now I’m heading for the door, too. “I’ll be right back.”
I’m just in a T-shirt, so I hug myself as I shout Dom’s name.
He stops in the middle of the street and turns, waving a car past as he says, “Yeah?” His expression is pained, like it always is now on the rare occasion he has to actually talk to me.
“Would you come here?” I say.
He looks both ways then jogs back to the curb. “What’s up?”
It’s a fair question. Along with no jacket I came out here with no idea what I wanted to say to him. “How’ve you been?”
“I’m all right. Grace, you’re cold. Don’t you have a—?”
“It’s inside,” I say.
“You should go back. You’re gonna get pneumonia.”
“That’s not how pneumonia works,” I say. “I just wanted to thank you for doing the food. Everyone’s gonna love it.”
Dom runs his hand through his hair. “Oh, yeah, no problem.”
“You don’t have to if you don’t want to, though,” I say. “I know we haven’t really talked much since…”
“Traditions are important, Gracey.” He nods at the gyro place two doors over from Edgar Allan’s, which is fully decorated for the holidays. “ ’Tis the season, right?”
Two weeks before Tim died, Dom came to our house with a bottle of chianti. He was there to hang out and watch the Ravens, but really he was there to say goodbye. I think about that now: Dom’s blue eyes glistening as he left.
Dom looks over at the Italian Embassy. “I gotta get back,” he says. “Five more minutes and those morons’ll fuck up my risotto. Good to see you, though.”
“Yeah, you, too.”