Twenty-Six
I CALL VINCE TARPLAY from the truck on my way to Rowdy’s and ask if he wants to meet me for a beer.
“Does that mean I have to drive you home later?” he asks. “Not like I haven’t done it before, dawg.”
The fact is that neither one of us has ever been a big drinker. But once we were legal, I have to admit there were some times, a few of them epic.
“If things do get out of hand, that’s why the Good Lord invented Uber.”
“God did that?” Vince asks.
“Google it.”
The legal drinking age in North Carolina is twenty-one.
I had ordered my first legal drink at Rowdy’s right after that landmark US birthday for me, at the end of my junior year at Carolina.
At the time, I’d told Tay—she and Burt had accompanied me to Rowdy’s for the momentous occasion—that I was finally one of the cool kids.
And she’d said, “Can’t remember a time when you weren’t.”
Vince beats me to Rowdy’s and has grabbed a table between the bar and the pool table.
I see him stand and wave when I walk in.
The place is fairly crowded for a weeknight, but nothing out of the ordinary there.
If Scobee’s is where you go in Cross Rivers for the best truck-stop food, Rowdy’s is all about what is advertised as the best brisket in either Carolina, and hot honey wings, and okra fritters, and the pimento cheese spread that goes with the crackers at the bar, and their specialty, known as the Grease Burger.
There are always pickups in both parking lots and at least one old ACC game showing on one of the televisions whether it is football season or not. There are darts being thrown and pool being played sometimes, along with country music on all the time, and even an old-school pinball machine.
When it is football season and more than one game is being shown on the flat-screen TVs scattered around the place, there are a lot of bets being made, in real time, either with bookies or online.
There is a famous story about a tourist from up north coming into Rowdy’s one night and asking if somebody could put the Olympics opening ceremony on one of the televisions.
“We don’t do parades here,” the bartender is supposed to have said. “Unless there’s a point spread on them.”
As I make my way across the front room, I shake some hands and even hear a smattering of applause from the people seated at the bar.
There’s even a “109” chant from over there, so I stop briefly in the middle of the room and put up my hands and say, “No questions, please,” and that gets me a good laugh.
When I do get to Vince’s table, I see that he’s not alone, because Abby Wells is with him. My old girlfriend.
Abby jumps up and smiles and puts her arms out for me to hug her, and I see that the former Taylor McCarter isn’t the only girl in town still as pretty as she was in high school.
“Well, well, well,” she says when I do have my arms around her. “If it isn’t the prom king.”
“And if it isn’t the best-looking prom queen in the history of Cross Rivers High.”
I look down at Vince. “This one of those crazy coincidences you get in life sometimes?” I ask him, a suspicious look on my face.
He grins sheepishly. “I might have given Abby a call,” he says, “just to hedge my bets against you crying in your beer before the night is over.”
“‘There’s a tear in my beer ’cause I’m cryin’ for you, dear,’” Abby sings softly, in her sweet church-choir voice.
She always liked country music even more than I did.
“Hank Jr., am I right?” I ask.
Abby says, “You can tell I spend way too much time listening to the jukebox.” She shrugs. “Too much time here in this place, period.”
“You can’t spend too much time in Rowdy’s,” I say.
We settle right in and spend the next hour talking about old times more than we do drinking from the pitcher of beer in the middle of the table, mostly sitting there untouched after Vince has poured everybody a glass.
Abby occasionally calls me “109,” and I let her do that.
I ask what she’s been doing since I saw her last and she says she’s still working at her sister’s catering business, full-time now instead of part-time.
“Once a Cross Rivers girl,” she says, “always a Cross Rivers girl.”
She finally asks how I’m doing. “And I mean for real.”
There’s a little sting to the suggestion that I might be holding back the truth, but I do my best to hide it from Abby Wells. I tell her I’m getting stronger every day because that’s as much of a truth, like a small piece of it, as I’m willing to share with her.
She hasn’t changed much from when we were exclusive senior year, and even the few times when we’d fall into something or other for a night or a weekend when I was home from Chapel Hill.
But I always had the sense that the only world she’d ever known as a Cross Rivers girl was the only one she really wanted.
Or maybe expected out of herself. She’d finally dropped out of Appalachian State after her junior year and come home to work for her sister.
She said at the time she was trying to find herself. But I suspected she already had.
“Heard you got into it with some shitkickers today,” she says.
“Word truly does travel fast.”
“When hasn’t it in this town?”
Then she gives me a long look and says, “You fixing to hang around, 109?”
“Helping out at the farm for the time being.”
“And just how long is that going to last?” Vince asks.
I shrug. “Till it doesn’t.”
I hear somebody shout, “Let’s get this party started!” then, and see Abby’s eyes widen and her pretty face, pale to begin with, grow paler.
I wheel around and see that Roof and Lynyrd Crockett have made a predictably loud entrance into Rowdy’s.
Somehow, they spot me at the same moment I’m looking across the room at them.
“If it ain’t the Big Nothing,” Roof yells over to me.
It turns out Abby’s right about news traveling fast in our town.
Even news of my brand-new nickname has made it to Rowdy’s.