About Bob

Bob Flood had seven children and nine fingers. He lost his right thumb in a scallop accident. Bob was a fisherman; a doer, he told me, when I answered yes, that I was a reader. I was sitting alone at the bar at the Black Bull on Maine Street in Rockland, drinking a Stoli and soda, beginning Doris Lessing’s The Grass is Singing, which I had just bought for five dollars at Rock City Books. My brown down parka was draped over the stool on my left and parcels from The Grasshopper Shop and stationary store stacked on the right side. I was shored up, so that no strange man could sidle in close and offer to buy me a drink. Bob was undaunted by this arrangement.

He had a ruddy face and the beard of a seaman, a small, shabby man you ignore at the bus station or in the park. He came in from the cold without fanfare and stood with his chest resting against the bar and ordered a Pabst, tipping the bartender two dollars. He had to say hello twice before I looked up, smiled, and cast my eyes back to page one. That was when he told me he had once had a girl who was a reader, a girl who was long gone. He then excused himself, topped his tall can with a coaster, and went to chat with other regulars around the horseshoe toward the back of the Bull. I had just come in to town by bus, to meet my family for sushi across the street. I settled the bill while Bon was absent.

When he returned he asked politely if I would lift my coat off the seat and I obliged. I had already heard him called Bob by some local voice, and so I was amused but not entirely surprised that there on the chair, carved - or burnished maybe? – was his name simply put. He wondered if he could sit down with me, since it was clearly his place after all. Check, mate. I apologized, already charmed, warming to his practiced but guileless act. I apologized again when he extended his right hand in greeting and I startled at the sight of his gnarled flesh. Actually, it was soft and I shook it tenderly. He was unoffended but declined to tell the tale of how it happened.

Bob did want to tell me about Jelly. Janelle Marie, his youngest child, was sixteen and had been trouble since before she was born, when her mumma came home with another man’s child. But he raised her as his own and loved her so dearly his eyes twinkled when he recounted how she broke her leg when she was a baby and promptly came down with chicken pox. She wasn’t a reader but her mother was, like me, and he asked again if I’d like to get back to my book. He had me. I was hooked. The town drunk had me in his ineffectual clutches. He had never been able to keep a woman, though he had had many, he assured me. He had never succeeded, though he could.
He barely graduated from high school, and almost missed commencement because he got an OUI the night before. His family bailed him out. His eyes welled with tears when he told me about his auto mechanic father, who died when he was eight. He was proud and baffled by the news of his grandfather, who was a prominent surgeon. Bob seemed both resigned to and surprised by his fate. He wanted to buy me a drink, and I wouldn’t let him. I told him again I was meeting my family, which was true, though it felt like an excuse because I had been pulling away when I first mentioned my plans. Bob asked me if I had a nice home and family and I said yes, and he said good. Later I learned he lived in a shed.

I can’t stop thinking about this drunk, this fisherman, this father and failure and sweetheart. I hope he is warm at the Bull tonight.