Crumbs of a Life

Everything had changed, yet nothing had. Whether it was comforting or cruel, none of us knew and none tried to decide. The same neon-rainbow, fat Christmas lights webbed the ceiling; the same wobbling dartboard rattled against the wood-paneled wall when a dart hit; the same old stains and scuffs left the checkered tile floor looking as though it crawled with hepatitis—and still 7th Street Dive felt haunted, or even a ghost itself, crumbs of a life that had passed away for all of us.

We had swarmed our corner of the bar, fifteen twenty-somethings crammed into one big semicircle booth and the two booths on either side. Eighteen months had gone by since the last time we all sat there together, and in a way, we did what we always did before. Scan the menu. Deliberate painstakingly over what to drink. Spiral into panic when the server asks what you want. Resort to ordering what you always get. Endure ridicule from everyone else for being self-consistent and panicky.

Laugh until all the laughter dies out and everyone realizes that tonight will feel different after all.

Our drinks came in groups of five, so it took the server three trips. Sean sipped his beer before everyone else's arrived, and instantly Anthony smacked the back of Sean's hand, gasping with wonderfully theatrical horror.

"What?!" Sean wiped beer foam from his spluttering mouth and dropped the glass back on the tabletop as if it had burned him.

Anthony batted at Sean's hand again and fussed, "The toast is ruined now, Sean! Where is your etiquette?" at the exact moment that Valeria slammed her palms down flat on the tabletop and bellowed with imperious drama, "You've brought dishonor to the whole family!"

We fell apart howling with laughter then, loosening up, harassing Sean until he smiled. Someone—I guessed Dominique but I couldn't be sure from where I sat—started belting out lyrics from Mulan.

"Leave it to a bunch of overgrown theatre kids to get kicked out of a bar for singing showtunes," Lily snorted to my right.

"They never kicked us out yet," Gamble piped up from directly behind us, craning his neck from the other side of the booth. "Even when we botched the whole first act of Cats. If singing the shit out of Cats doesn't get you kicked out of a bar, I don't know what will."

"We could always try an impromptu minimalist performance of Hair," Lily pondered aloud.

"Gamble," I interjected, "You're thinking of that time at Dairy Queen—we were seniors in high school then, we couldn't have gotten in here."

"Mm, yeah, that's right."

"And we did get kicked out of Dairy Queen for that," Lily added. "Permanently."

By now, the entire bar had joined in with Dominique and the rest of our motley crew. A drunken rendition of "I'll Make a Man Out of You" roared around me, its volume rivaled only by the gladiatorial thundering of the crowd surrounding the mechanical bull across the room.

The song always ends, I thought to myself as my head swiveled slowly around. I watched the faces of my old friends, most of them singing, swinging their beers. What happens when it ends? Do we say his name? Or does it stay here, hanging in the air?

I could see now how much time had passed, what it had given each of us and what it had taken away. Anthony had filled out and gone to community college for a couple of years, and he worked nights as a dancer. Valeria and Sean moved away a year after we all graduated from high school, but only after Sean hit rock bottom; I didn't know whether he was drinking any less these days, but he looked better. Lily worked her ass off in undergrad, and she dealt with her anger over lack of immediate professional success by wearing zero makeup and posting long monologues on Facebook. Gamble and his wife had babies, beautiful ones. Dominique didn't believe in God anymore.

Walt was dead.

And me? I couldn't seem to decide whether or not this life was worth living without these people living it alongside me every day—I hadn't been able to decide for seven years. I moved two states away, worked a nobody-who-sweeps-the-floor job, worked a crushing corporate job, got empowered and quit the crushing corporate job, worked as a freelance whatever now, told everyone that I was reasonably happy—but we were all just coping, weren't we? All just coping with being alive.

Not Walt, though.

He wasn't coping anymore.

"Honey." Anthony was nudging me. The Mulan sing-along was over. "You alright?"

I looked at him and felt absolutely empty. "Are you? Are any of us?"

Lily was scrutinizing the tabletop now, and I heard Martin sniff somewhere in the booth behind me.

Awkward sadness and silence collected in the air, a silence unbroken by the constant growl of drunken chatter and tinny music playing overhead and glasses hitting the bar. Anthony, ever the dignified one, gave his head a small toss and lifted his glass. He met my gaze, and I lifted my glass to meet his.

I said, "To Walt."

Glasses rose and clinked. Martin sniffed again and I realized he was weeping.

"God, I wish he could be here for this," Gamble mused from the other booth. "I wish he could see..."

We sat frozen as his thought hung fractured in our corner of the bar, like a sprawling cloud swollen with unreleased rain.

"...that we care," Gamble finished lamely. "I wish he knew we cared."

"He knows," Anthony said.

"How do you know he knows?" Lily was looking up again. "He killed himself, didn't he? Why would anyone do that if they knew people cared?"

Martin let out a wail and I heard him bury his sobs in his arms against the tabletop. Gamble spoke to him in hushed tones; I heard him thumping Martin's back lightly. I squirmed in my seat, my throat taut. I saw that around the other side of the circular booth, Dominique swiped her tears away the moment they left her eyeballs so that her mascara wouldn't run.

"People get stuck," I said, because I didn't know what to say but had to say something. My throat began feeling as though it had been scorched inside. "They get stuck and they think they're alone there—wherever they're stuck, I mean. It's like it exists apart from knowing how loved you are. When you're stuck, you can't help but wonder if being stuck is all there is. I guess sometimes it can have a lot to do with being loved well or not being loved well. But sometimes it's a different thing altogether."

No one spoke for several minutes.

A girl was dancing on the bar at the other side of the room when Sean asked suddenly, "What do you think Walt would say on this side of things?"

"Like whether there's a heaven or hell?" Lily sipped her cider, wiped an eye discreetly.

"No, I mean—well, I guess I don't know what I mean." Sean slouched back against his seat.

After another beat, Valeria said, "I think he would change it if he could—if he had known we could've just all flown home and done this and been together instead. With him here, not with him...gone. You know?"

Nods of agreement, clinks of glasses. Someone said "to Walt" again, and then we were toasting and Martin was trying not to cry so hard.

"You know what I think really would have made his day?" Lily posed the question and drained her cider. "Seeing how loud we have to sing and how many booths we have to dance on before we finally manage to get kicked out of this bar."

Anthony and Valeria were already on their feet, and Dominique sprinted to the bar to order shots.

"I think," Gamble said as he stretched his neck again so he could meet Lily's eyes over the top of the booth, "Now would be an excellent time to see if we can pull off that minimalist presentation of Hair."

---

A moment pierced that night, I realize when I look back on it.

The fifteen of us sat, squatted, laid flat on the ground, stood leaning against the wall as we waited for Ubers and Lyfts that night. Yes, we were asked to leave 7th Street Dive. No, Sean was not arrested when he tried to punch someone in the face with a handful of french fries after they hit on Dominique before we even made it through "Aquarius." Yes, Lily did throw her head back and laugh—actually laugh—when Valeria announced an intermission and volunteered Anthony to dance on the bar as a "half-time show," which he did.

No, the Walt-shaped hole in our small, secret, once pure little world did not close up, did not callous, could not be sutured.

But as we loitered outside at 12:05 a.m. waiting for rides home, and as I stood counting my friends over and over again, achingly counting one less than there should have been, I understood: while 7th Street Dive indeed felt haunted now, and while life itself seemed to me a haunting of its own kind, perhaps it was worth living through if only to be graced by the ghosts. Perhaps the crumbs were pieces of what gave us life before, and they had to be remembered and held dear. Perhaps honoring them meant continuing to live—continuing to leave crumbs behind for others to follow.

It was the best I could make of Walt being gone. But I had to make something of it. It was unbearable otherwise.

"What's that story about the kids with the breadcrumbs?" I asked Anthony as we stood leaning against the peeling blue paint encasing 7th Street Dive. "With the candy house?"

"Hansel and Gretel? Those two dummies?"

"Yeah, the kids with the breadcrumbs. You remember why they left them all over the place when they were lost in the woods?"

Anthony turned his face toward me, unsure of what I was saying but happy to be there again, happy to be with any of us again now that it was clear we could disappear so suddenly.

He said, "So they could find their way home—yeah?"

"Yeah." I nodded, finally tired enough to actually sleep through the night for the first time in two weeks. "So they could find their way home."