SEVEN A Cold Shoulder
O ’Grady’s Tavern sat at the corner of Marina Street and Cove Avenue, facing, appropriately, the Bluster Cove Marina. As a plaque above the hallway to the restrooms announced, it had been in business and owned by the O’Grady family since 1933—since literally the day after Prohibition ended.
Truly, it had been in business quite a bit longer than that. The tavern’s building had started life as a house, which Donal O’Grady and his wife Margaret had built when they’d moved to town. Donal had been a fisherman, from a long line of them extending all the way across the world to Ireland. He was also, like most of his fisherman friends, an enthusiastic drinker. When Prohibition hit and the local saloon closed up, Donal had started making his own. He got a reputation for the best homemade whisky around, and he and Margaret started hosting ‘dinner parties’ in their front room, though the dinner was mostly of the liquid variety, and ‘guests’ were expected to throw in to help pay for supplies and such. People started talking about ‘goin’ down to O’Grady’s’ like it was the prime destination in town.
The early 1930s were a rough time for fishing and everything else, but by then the O’Grady’s were making most of their income from their ‘dinner parties.’ When the 21 st Amendment passed in 1933, repealing Prohibition, Donal and Margaret put up a sign announcing O’Grady’s Tavern—Strong Spirits, Simple Food, and Good Company. An iteration of that sign has hung on the building ever since.
Over the years, the building that had started off as a humble bungalow has been remodeled a few times and expanded once or twice. The original house is still there, the heart of the place, and there’s still a living area, but now that living area is an upstairs apartment, which for years has been used to house traveling musical talent.
Most of that musical talent is Irish musicians on tour. O’Grady’s is about as Irish a tavern as one might find on this side of the pond.
I know that history because it’s town lore in Bluster, but I know lots of details most didn’t because Donal and Margaret O’Grady were my friend Erin’s great-great grandparents.
Jessie and I had talked about Erin and the tavern yesterday. Not a great deal—Jessie’s answers to about half my questions could be summarized as ‘you’ll have to ask Erin about that’—but she gave me some important broad strokes. For instance, I knew that Erin was running the tavern. Her father, Ned—whom Jessie and I had always called Daddy Ned—had run it for nearly forty years and had worked there since he was old enough to reach the taps. But Jessie had also shared the heartbreaking news that Daddy Ned had Alzheimer’s.
He was diagnosed about ten years ago, and Erin had returned to Bluster to take care of him and keep the generations-old family business going. They live in that upstairs apartment now, so Erin can do both.
If anyone I know had wanted to leave Bluster as much as I had back in the day, it’s Erin. And she’d succeeded. She’d been headed off to UCLA after the summer in which I’d left, and Jessie had told me Erin had gotten a degree in music education there. She’d worked as a grade-school music teacher in Southern California for several years. But when her father needed her, she’d dropped her entire life and come home.
I could easily imagine Erin dropping her life for her father without a second thought. I could not imagine her taking that tremendous change and the trouble that caused it with anything resembling equanimity.
Erin is not a ‘roll with it’ person. She is a ‘get in its fucking way and beat it till it stops moving’ person.
I was not expecting a warm welcome as I opened the door to O’Grady’s Tavern.
And I didn’t get one.
THOUGH THE TAVERN IS open for lunch, it doesn’t start pulling its crowd of regulars until around four-thirty or so. That hadn’t changed while I was away. I walked in to a dim, mostly empty bar that looked exactly the same. I’m not exaggerating—even some of the stuff on the big bulletin board just inside the door, where local events and news were posted, was yellowed and curling with age. Those things hadn’t moved in decades.
It smelled the same, too. A bespoke mélange of Guinness, Irish whisky, malt vinegar, and fry grease, with a fading undertone of ancient cigarette smoke.
One couple, with the distinctive look of hikers, had a table in the front corner, but otherwise, all the tables were empty, as were the stools arrayed before the long, L-shaped bar.
Behind that bar, illuminated by the stained-glass bar lights (gold with green shamrocks, of course), stood Erin O’Grady, staring at me. She’d frozen in the act of drying a glass.
Though she stood in an unchanging time capsule, Erin herself had changed a lot. She wore the years on her face, with lines around her mouth and eyes, and her auburn hair was showing threads of white. Like me, she’d cut her hair since high school. Hers was more of a bob.
She obviously recognized me. Just as obviously, she was not pleased to see me.
But I expected that, so I didn’t let it slow me down. I walked up to the bar and took a seat. She watched me come the whole way, and I watched her.
“Hi, Erin,” I said as I sat down. Figuring I’d try to start this off with a little humor, I smiled and added, “So, how’ve you been?”
Erin did not return the smile. “Do you think we’re still friends?”
“No,” I answered honestly and without hesitation. “I never expected to see you again, and I figured you never wanted to see me again. But here we are.”
Before she answered, she made a production of turning, setting the glass where it belonged, folding the bar towel, and hanging it up. “And?”
I’d prepared myself for a reception more emphatically negative than this, so I wasn’t yet dissuaded. “And I thought I’d come in and see how you’ve been.”
“Why?”
“Because I’m back in town. I’d like to be friends again, if we can figure that out, but at the least, I’d like not to be enemies.”
“You’re not an enemy. You’re not important enough to be an enemy.”
That was the first thing she’d said that I wasn’t ready for. That one felt like a direct hit. I didn’t know how to respond to it.
When I didn’t answer back immediately, Erin sighed. “So, this is a bar. People who come in here buy drinks. Are you buying a drink?”
While the tense moment called for some alcohol, I wasn’t going to drink in the middle of the afternoon, when my kid was home alone. Besides, Erin didn’t want me there, and I knew our problems weren’t going to get worked out over a pint of Guinness. At least not yet.
I stood up. “No, I’m not buying a drink. I just came in to say hi.”
Erin said nothing.
“I guess I’ll see you around, then,” I said.
Still nothing.
I started to turn toward the door, but then I thought of one more thing I wanted to say, so I turned back. “I’m sorry about your dad.”
She twitched a little but didn’t allow herself to reply. So I left things there.
There was time to try to sand down the edges of her anger. Bluster was a tiny town; we couldn’t avoid each other. Besides, Jessie was a nexus between us. If I stayed, it would be nigh impossible for Erin and I not to achieve at least a détente.
If I stayed.