Chapter 26

26

It was a quarter to eight when I stepped out of my Airbnb onto the town's flagstone sidewalk for The Forge and my date with Colleen.

Beckford really was one of those hidden gems of a little town, wasn't it? I thought as I stood for a moment in the crisp cool air. It had a town green, a bunch of meticulously renovated Victorian houses, old-fashioned plate glass–fronted stores, a white steepled church. There was a big Halloween parade in the town every year and all the giant windows of the stores were already decorated for it.

It looked like something out of an old Twilight Zone episode where someone goes back in time, I thought as I came to the end of its main street and crossed into The Forge's gravel parking lot.

I smiled.

Hell, it felt like a Twilight Zone episode, I thought smiling as I thought of spending time with Colleen.

Just inside the restaurant's heavy wood door, there was a wait-to-be-seated area, but since I was early, I just crossed to the dark bar beyond it and slid into one of its booths where I could face the door.

The Forge was a casual place but nicely appointed. The walls above the wainscoting were painted English racing green, and there were equestrian oil portraits everywhere of show horses and fox hunts.

The little history about it on its menu said it had been renovated many times but that main part of the barnlike building had originally been built in 1790 as an inn. Then after the Beckford Tool Factory was built just behind it, it had been converted into the depot for the train line that had come through. But the train was discontinued when the factory closed in the 1960s and sometime in the late '80s, it had been turned by one of the locals into a restaurant.

"Well, aren't we looking spiffy tonight," said a voice behind me as I was checking my watch.

The short, feisty and plump bespectacled sixtysomething waitress I found smiling at me as I turned was named Daisy.

Daisy had "a lot of moxie" as they said in old movies. And being a big fan of moxie, I'd gotten into a routine of bantering with her over the last two weeks I'd eaten there.

"Do you really think so?" I said as I rose in my seat, straining to look at myself in the mirror behind the bar.

Clean-shaven with my hair pasted to one side with a little styling gel, I was wearing a pair of khakis with a button-down blue-checked dress shirt. Trying to look my best, I'd even passed everything through the travel iron. My lace-curtain Irish grandmother would have been impressed with the razor sharpness of the creases I'd put in my pants.

"You're pretty as a picture," Daisy assured me with a wink. "Let me guess. Hot date?"

"Is it that obvious, Daisy?" I said, grinning back.

"I figured with that nervous look on your face, it's either that or you're applying for a job. Corona to start as usual?"

"Yes, please, Daisy, and when the lady gets here, please make sure you keep them coming. You know, for my nerves," I said.

The bar she walked off toward was a big, elaborate, darkly varnished horseshoe-shaped affair with all the booze bottles on an island in the middle of it. The bartender behind it, who was also the owner of The Forge, was a tall, lanky, middle-aged man named Scotty.

Scotty had the look of an aging hippie with his long gray hair and wore aviator-style eyeglasses along with a defeated expression of a guy who seemed suspicious that maybe life had passed him by. In front of him sat about a half a dozen regular Joe six-packs staring up at a big flat screen on the back wall where a hockey pregame for the Carolina Hurricanes versus the Pittsburgh Penguins was underway.

As my eyes drifted into the restaurant's dining room, I saw at its biggest table there were a half dozen rough-and-tumble guys laughing and carrying on. I'd seen this group three or four times before. Daisy had told me they were construction workers who were staying in town for the last month, refurbishing the bridge as well as retrofitting a huge modern hydroelectric generator into one of the old Beckford Tool Factory's brick mills beside it.

"What's up with the dinner party with the rowdies?" I said when Daisy came back with my beer.

"I think one of them is leaving or something so they're having a going-away party."

"Are they done with the project?" I said.

"Getting close it seems," Daisy said, "which is making Scotty more depressed than usual. With the way these roughnecks drink, he was thinking of retiring to Palm Beach."

As the men continued to laugh and make fun of each other, I found myself smiling over at their masculine chop-busting merriment. Like most former cops and soldiers, having spent most of my life working with other men in tight-knit units, one thing I really did miss in my retirement was the goofing around and camaraderie.

With nothing else to do as I sipped my beer, I found myself imagining that the men at the table and I were all in the same SEAL unit together and I decided to come up with call signs for them.

The one with the most serious face on him who was probably the foreman was a wiry medium-sized man of about fifty with short spiky red hair and a reddish mustache. That was Sonic.

Next to him was a thin, long-faced sort of poetic-looking Hispanic guy with a goatee who was maybe thirty. I noticed he favored plaid shirts so he was Plaid Don Juan.

The oldest of them was a stocky white guy in his midfifties with a buzz cut and glasses and a graying beard. He always sat there with his arms folded, drinking beer and laughing softly at everything. He seemed to exude more intelligence and competence than Sonic so maybe he was an engineer or something? I dubbed him Papa Bear.

The bald thirtyish guy in a neon orange hoodie next to him looked like he worked out a lot and had a loudmouth New York street accent. I dubbed him Brooklyn.

And last but not least was a lanky and gangly, scruffy blue-eyed pothead sort of guy of thirty or so with longish brown hair. He was Shaggy, of course.

The farewell dinner must have been going on for quite a bit because the gang seemed even drunker than the last time I'd seen them. Which was saying something.

I took another hit of my own cerveza mas fina then decided to check my watch again.

It was 8:15 now, I saw with a frown.

Colleen was running a little late.

Or had she fallen asleep or something?

That would suck, I thought. Really suck. If she was asleep then that would be it. Tomorrow obviously she would be done with her work up here and be gone.

I looked at my watch again.

Was my bucket list going to go wanting after all?