Cold Aisle Reunion

The snow started coming down sideways around four, and by the time I pulled into the lot at The Cold Aisle my wipers had given up on doing anything useful. I sat in the car for a minute with the engine ticking and thought about just turning around and driving home, except home was twenty miles down a county road that was probably already a white rumor. So I brushed what snow I could off my coat, gave up on the rest, and went inside.

The Cold Aisle is a weird little bar. It sits attached to a data center out here in rural Maine, the kind of place that runs on diesel generators and stubbornness, and somebody with a sense of humor named it after the server room term. Half the regulars are techs from next door. The other half are people like me who just like a bar where nobody asks too many questions.

It was empty except for two people. One was behind the bar, a woman named Geraldine who I'd met maybe three times. The other was at the far end of the counter, laughing at something on her phone, and the sound of that laugh made me stop halfway through pulling off my gloves.

She was forty-something, maybe forty-seven, with gray coming in at her temples like she'd decided to stop fighting it and won the argument. Sleeve tattoo on her right arm, all lettering, the kind you get when you work with your hands and your letters. She caught me looking and didn't seem to mind.

"You're tracking slush on Geraldine's floor," she said.

"So is the rest of the state," I said. I stamped my boots on the mat and took a stool a few down from her. "Sorry. Bad day to be anybody outside."

"Tate," I added, after a second, because I'm not great at this. "Tate Brennan. I grew up over in Ashford."

Her eyebrows went up. "Brennan. The Brennan place out past the gravel pit." She put the phone down and turned on her stool to face me. "I'm Lynette. Lynette Carrow. I grew up there too, if you want the truth, before I moved south for a while and then came back north."

I did the math in my head and got nowhere useful. She would've been a few years ahead of me in school, the kind of older kid you know by reputation and not by name. I remembered something about a mural, maybe. Something about a car.

"You're celebrating something," she said, nodding at my face. "You've got the look. I see it on people who come in here at four in the afternoon on a Tuesday with snow on their shoulders and a grin they're trying to keep under control."

"Divorce finalized this morning," I said. "Nine years, done in eleven minutes. The judge was fast."

"Ha." She raised her glass to me. It was something amber. "Congratulations. Seriously. Some divorces are funerals and some are releases, and I hope yours was a release."

"Release," I said, trying it out. "Yeah. It was. She's a good person and we were bad together and I've been saying that sentence to myself for two years."

Geraldine came down the bar and I ordered a beer and whatever Lynette was having. Lynette said I didn't have to, I said I absolutely did, and that settled it. She was forty-seven years old, she told me, turning forty-eight in June, and she managed HR for a logistics company up in Presque Isle, and no, she didn't miss her ex either. We compared notes the way divorced people do, sort of sadly and sort of gleefully at the same time.

The door banged open at a quarter past five and a big man came in wearing a quilted jacket with a data center logo on it, snow crusted in his hair. He looked as though his day had been going wrong for hours.

"Server room's frozen," he announced to the room, meaning to nobody. "Rack four, the intake louvers iced up, and the road crew won't plow the access road until the county does the main road first, which they haven't. So I'm drinking until I have to go back and fight it again."

Then he stopped. He was looking at Lynette. And Lynette was looking at him, and her glass was halfway to her mouth and staying there.

"Vince Moroz?" she said.

"No way," he said. "Lynette Carrow."

They laughed at the same time, this startled kind of laugh, like two people who'd walked into the same doorway from opposite sides after twenty-five years. He came down the bar and she stood up and they did an awkward hug with a barstool in the way, and I got to watch two people in their late forties turn back into college kids for about four seconds.

"You look exactly the same," he told her.

"I absolutely do not," she said, sitting back down, "but I'll take it. Sit. Geraldine, get this man a beer on Tate's tab, he's rich with freedom."

"It's my celebration," I confirmed. "Divorce day."

"Congratulations," Vince said, meaning it, and took the stool on her other side. "I'm Vince. We went to school together, up north, way before either of you were a twinkle."

"I did the math," Lynette said. "You were in my art history class. The one in the basement of Hutchins with the slide projector that stuck."

"The one where the projector always jammed on the same slide. Every time. Renaissance architecture, the dome of Florence. We saw that dome about nine times."

"Because the professor refused to skip it. He said Brunelleschi deserved our patience."

Vince shook his head, grinning, and I understood I'd become furniture. That was fine. I was divorced, I was warm for the first time since noon, and watching two grown adults fumble around each other was better television than anything at my empty house.

It came out slow, the way it does. Vince was forty-six, worked as a technician in the building attached to the bar, lived alone since a marriage had ended some years back. Lynette had come back north after her own divorce, was doing sign painting, real hand-lettered stuff, businesses and boats and the occasional memorial stone. She'd gotten a new tattoo that morning, her forearm, fresh wrap on it, and she was in here hiding from the weather until she could drive to her sister's place two towns over.

"I'm celebrating too, if we're counting," Vince said. "I'm celebrating rack four not catching fire."

"Low bar," Lynette said.

"Every bar is a low bar when your week is going like mine."

That's when Geraldine turned the TV volume up and then turned it back down and just told us straight, because that's the kind of bar it is. "County road's closed," she said. "Plows pulled off. Nobody's going anywhere until morning, maybe later. I've got the cots in back and the fryer works, so nobody panic."

There was a general groan from the three of us, since we were the whole room. I thought about my phone, the three texts I'd need to send, the dog I didn't have because the dog went with the house. Lynette swore quietly and creatively, which I respected. Vince just looked resigned, as though he had already accepted his week was ruined and was now watching it get worse in real time.

"Another round," I said. "On me. If we're stranded, we're stranded celebrating."

"There's the spirit," Lynette said.

"My ex would say that's avoidance," I offered.

"Your ex isn't here," Vince said. "That is the entire point of divorce day."

And Lynette laughed again, that real laugh from her phone, and something passed between her and Vince that I caught sideways. Not much. Just a glance held a beat too long, the way people look at each other when there's an old unfinished sentence between them and they've both just realized the other one still remembers how it started.

I ordered the round and settled in. Outside the windows the snow was going sideways and the plow lights down the road blinked red through it, and I figured if the world was going to lock me somewhere for the night, a warm bar with free stories and somebody else's old flame to watch was a lot better than most places.

That was before the servers went down.

The view-master showed up sometime during the second round. Geraldine found it under the counter when she went hunting for the corkscrew, held it up like evidence in a trial, and asked if anybody claimed it. Nobody did. Somebody had left it behind weeks ago, she figured, some guy from the data center who came in for lunch and never came back. She set it on the bar between the pretzels and the mustard and forgot about it, and I didn't, because I have never in my life seen a view-master on a bar and walked away from it.

There was a little zip bag of reels next to it, maybe a dozen of them, the old red kind with the white paper ring around the edge. I picked one out at random and stuck it in and held the thing up to the lamp over the bar and started clicking.

The Grand Canyon. That was the first one, and it was somebody's actual vacation, you could tell, because the third frame had a station wagon in the corner of the shot with luggage tied on top, and frame five was a woman in a paper hat squinting into the sun with her hand up like she was telling the photographer to hurry. I clicked through the whole reel and put it back in the bag and picked another one.

Niagara Falls. Same vibe. Somebody's whole trip, bought at a gift shop in 1978 maybe, sat in a drawer for forty years, and ended up on the bar of a snowed-in tavern attached to a server farm in Maine. There was something about that I liked a lot more than I could explain.

"Those were the good years of photography," Lynette said, watching me. "You got seven pictures and you made them count."

"You got seven pictures and six of them were crooked," Vince said.

"Art," Lynette said, "takes patience. Brunelleschi taught us that."

Vince laughed at that, a real laugh from down in his chest, and I decided these two had been doing this bit for one hour and it was already better than most marriages I knew.

Then she did the thing with the tattoo. She'd been keeping her right arm angled away from us most of the night, which I'd noticed without noticing, and now she turned it over on the bar and peeled back the edge of her sleeve and the wrap on her forearm, careful, like she was showing a doctor. The tattoo ran from her wrist up along the inside of the forearm, and it was lettering, of course, because that's her whole deal. Hand-painted style, a line of script that curved with the muscle, and underneath it a small drawing of a paintbrush crossed with something I couldn't make out from my stool.

"Marco did it this morning," she said. "I drew the lettering for him. You can't letter on yourself, your hand flips."

"What's it say?" I asked, because from where I sat it was just beautiful looping shapes.

"Nothing you need at your age," she said, and Vince snorted into his beer, and she let the wrap fall back but not before Vince got a good long look at it. He was looking at it the way I'd look at an engine diagram, all attention, no performance to it.

"You always could letter," he said. "I remember that. The sign project. Senior year, you painted the window of the bookstore on Main and it was better than the printed sign the owner had paid for, and he took his printed sign down."

"You remember that?"

"I remember everything about that year," Vince said, and then he heard himself and took a drink and looked at the TV like the score was suddenly important.

And there it was again, that sideways thing. I picked the view-master back up and minded my own business, which is a skill I got very good at over nine years of marriage, so at least the divorce left me something.

The next reel was Yellowstone. A bear in frame two, blurry as a dream. I clicked and clicked.

It was maybe a half hour later, the snow nothing but a white wall outside the windows now, when Vince's phone went off. Not a ring, one