It was late. The bar was overrun with good-timers who were out past their bedtimes. The night-crowd was dwindling.

Bartenders were ready to go home.

I’d just gotten off work, I stopped by to see the band.

The boys played Merle Haggard’s anthem, “Are the Good Times Really Over.” The young man singing was not yet thirty. He had a dark beard, his eyes were closed, and he was testifying.

The bar fell silent while he sang.

The old man next to me stared into his beer glass at his own reflection. “That boy’s the real deal, ain’t he?” he said.

Ain’t he though.

When he finished singing, he picked up a banjo and nearly tore off the strings. The whole establishment stomped its heels on one and three.

“God, he’s good,” said the man next to me. “That kid is something else.”

I ordered a beer, but forgot to drink it. I was too carried away watching the virtuoso fly through the Great American Songbook.

During a break, I introduced myself. He was standing outside, looking at the stars. I told him how

much I liked his music.

He smiled, but said nothing in return.

So, we stood for a few uncomfortable minutes, silent. I decided I must’ve said the wrong thing—as is often my custom.

Another man joined us. He was staggering, slurring his words. He lit a cigarette. He stood beside us, too.

"Damn son,” he said, slapping the kid's back. “You were fabu-lificent.”

Nobody talked.

The young man finally answered, “Thanks.” Then, he wandered inside and picked up a mandolin.

Later, the young man switched to guitar. Then electric guitar, then banjo, the list goes on. And I’ll bet if you handed him a Campbell’s soup can and a number-two pencil, he could’ve played Brahms’ Symphony Number 4.

Years later, I saw him again. He was a little older. He was even more accomplished than the…

I am in a bar. Not a nice one. A place that features low lighting, dirty beer glasses, and an unidentifiable odor.

The live music is allegedly country. But it sounds like a college kid sawing his guitar in half.

The man behind the bar is gray-haired. Tall and lanky. He has been tending bar for forty-three years, he tells me.

He has the easygoing personality every bartender should.

“Got my first bartending gig when I’s in my twenties,” he said. “Was either that or go to school to make Mama happy.”

Tending bar was an education in itself. The nightlife is no cakewalk. Bartending is a lot of hard work for mediocre tips.

He met a girl from a small Georgia town. A waitress.

“She and her boyfriend had just broke up,” he says. “Knew I loved her first moment I saw her.”

They hit it off. Things blossomed. They dated. He moved in. They married.

They lived outside Atlanta where he opened his own

place. A bar and grill with country music on weekends. She worked the kitchen, he served beer.

They had two kids. They did family vacations at Disney. Little League games. They owned a Labrador.

But nothing in life lasts.

“She came home early one day,” he says. “And stayed locked in our bathroom all afternoon.”

It was bad. The doctor found something in her breast.

What followed was hell. He sold their restaurant for a pittance. He took care of kids while she laid in bed. He made sack lunches, cleaned house. Prayed.

He drove his wife to treatments. He read aloud from magazines while she sat connected to plastic tubes.

Treatments didn’t work. Neither did surgery. She was forty-three…

The bottom has fallen out of the sky. My wife and her mother are standing by the front door, watching cats and dogs fall from heaven.

The Weather Channel is on TV. The map shows radar splotches over South Alabama and the Panhandle.

My wife has a bouquet in one hand, a purse in the other. She’s wearing her nice shoes.

My mother-in-law is beside her. She’s wearing what any dignified Belleville Avenue woman would, when leaving the house:

Pearls, ruby lipstick, white sling-back heels, Youth Dew, and her hair is fixed in place with Bullseye Shellac.

“Looks like we’ll have to wait out this storm,” says my wife.

There is disappointment in her voice.

Today is the five-year anniversary of her father’s death. She is supposed to be leaving to visit his grave, only the weather isn’t playing nice.

She leans against the front door, eyes closed.

I don’t know if she remembers, but this front doorstep is exactly where my wife got word of her father’s passing.

When she heard the news, she dropped the phone. She fell to her knees and cried with an

open mouth without making noise.

I held her. She went limp. She moaned in a pitch low enough to vibrate my spine.

“Please, no!” was all she could say.

Five years.

The day of our wedding her father was in the parking lot, waiting for me. He stood on the curb watching an orange sky.

I wasn't well-represented that day. Inside the chapel, I had three members in attendance. My mother, uncle, and sister. I’ve never felt so happy and alone at the same time.

He patted my shoulder and he pulled me into himself.

“You’re about to be my son,” he said. “Let’s go make it official.”

Then, he slipped a hundred-dollar bill in my hand and winked.

“What’s this for?” I asked.

“Just ‘cause,” he said.

He took me fishing. He…

Birmingham, Alabama—a baseball game. My wife and I went to see the Barons play. It was a well-attended game.

I stood in the concession line for a forty-five-dollar beer. A girl in a wheelchair was ahead of me. She was a happy thing. Early twenties. Pretty.

Our line was long. But not like the line to the women’s bathroom. Ladies stood single-file, stretching clear back to Chatom.

The girl in the wheelchair turned toward me.

“You go ahead of me if you wanna," she said. "I got a REAL big order.”

She had labored speech and a nice smile. She explained that she would be stocking up on beer, buffalo nachos, Magic City Hotdogs, and burgers for her friends.

I asked why her friends had chosen her to be the neighborhood pack mule.

“‘Cause I got a motor,” she said. “Check me out, I’m practically riding NASCAR.”

She demonstrated her motorized wheels, spinning in a complete circle.

Richard Petty, eat your heart out.

“Sure you don’t wanna

cut in line?” she went on. “My order will take a while.”

“It’s only baseball,” said I.

So, we talked. I was hoping to learn some of her story. But that didn’t happen.

All I learned was her name, and that she has cerebral palsy.

Instead, she asked me questions. The more we talked, the more personal her questions.

And since I have my mother’s talkative genes, I talked. I told her about myself, about my mama, my wife, my coonhound. I told her about a rocky childhood, and a daddy who died too young.

I talked about my education—and lack thereof. I told her I spent the first three quarters of my existence as an aimless kid, working…

Donald's home is half trailer, half homemade lean-to. He has two little dogs, but his daughter takes care of them. He's too old to care for pets.

His daughter’s home is on the adjoining property. It’s a new-built home. She offered to move her daddy into her spare bedroom. Donald wouldn’t have it.

So, she practically lives with him. She sleeps in a back room. She keeps him fed. She keeps him moving. She encourages Donald to play his fiddle.

He's the creative type. Donald used to build things, wood-carve, paint pictures, grow roses, tell stories, and bow a fiddle.

His house is a wreck. There are piles everywhere. Cardboard boxes, junk-mail, potato-chip bags, radios, guitars, clocks, and enough coffee mugs to construct a national monument.

Donald pitches a fit if ever she tries to clean.

He’s done a lot in his life. He was a cotton picker, a veterinary assistant, a crop duster, a house painter, a janitor, a hunter, he traveled with a band, playing gospel fiddle.

Today, Donald is

slow-moving and half aware.

His daughter shows me photographs lining his dark hallway. Most photos are of a boy. The kid’s entire childhood is hanging on those walls.

A toddler on a tricycle. A boy holding a dead turkey. A young man with a Louisville Slugger. A high-schooler, playing guitar—his daddy on fiddle, smoking a cigarette.

The boy’s name was Daniel. He is no longer.

Donald's daughter opens a book of poems. Her father wrote them long ago. She’s compiled them into a binder with plastic sleeves.

A few lines:

“...And the place below heaven, where suns and moons both rise,

“Is yet bitter and the same, without my little boy closeby.”

His daughter tells me…

Waffle House is quiet this time of evening. The sun has set. I’m on my way back home from Montgomery.

There are eighteen-wheelers in the abandoned parking lot next door. Most of the world is winding down for the night.

My waitress has a weathered face. At first glance, I’d guess she’s old. But she’s not old. Just weathered.

She asks what I want. I order three eggs, bacon, hashbrowns, toast.

“White or wheat?” she asks.

“Surprise me.”

She reads my order to the cook. I never get tired of hearing them do that.

A kid is mopping the floor. He’s tall, skinny, tattoos on his neck. He looks like he just graduated.

“You mean he KICKED you OUT?” the kid asks the waitress.

“No,” she says. “I left."

"Really?"

"And I ain't going back to him. I’ll sleep in my car if I have to.”

The kid leans on his mop. He has a young face.

He says, “You could stay with me and my brother. I can sleep on the couch.”

She smiles. Her teeth are stained, she has lines on her face, but she is handsome.

“That’s real

sweet, E.J.,” she says. “But I can’t.”

“Well, you CAN'T sleep in your car.”

“I'll be fine.”

“C’mon,” he says. “We got Netflix and everything.”

My food’s ready. She hands me my plate and asks if I need anything. And because I’ve eaten enough Waffle House food to own stock in the corporation, I know exactly what I need.

“Ranch, please,” I say.

The kid goes on, “My stepdad used to cheat on my mom, too. She SHOULDA left him, but every time we’d leave, we’d always end up back with him, ‘cause we didn't have nowhere to stay.”

The woman brings my packet of ranch. I drown my hashbrowns within an inch of their lives.

“I'm not gonna impose on you and your brother, E.J.” she says. “Please…

I'm watching a father and son fish in a state park. They stand shoulder-to-shoulder.

After a few minutes, the boy’s rod starts to bend.

He screams, “I GOT ONE DAD!” His voice carries on the water all the way to Birmingham.

And I am a nine-year-old again.

In fact, if I were to shut my eyes right now, I would see my father, shirtless, standing on a sandy teshore, smiling. A beer can by his feet.

“Quit messing with your reel so much,” he’d say. “You’ll scare fish away if you don’t relax.”

On one particular day, my father caught three bass and a shellcracker. Mister Unrelaxed had not been so fortunate—I’d caught one Penzoil can and a medium-sized turtle.

But my luck changed. My rod nearly jerked out of my hands. I tugged and cranked.

And it happened. I caught a bass bigger than most residential water heaters. Daddy whooped and hollered.

He let me take a sip of his lukewarm beer. He discussed how to clean a fish.

He handed me a Buck knife to cut off the head. He

made me swear to keep both hands on the handle.

The next thing I remember is a puddle of my own blood. I nearly fainted.

Daddy wasted no time. He tossed my flopping fish into the truck bed. He pressed a wadded T-shirt against my cut hand. We sped to the Emergency room.

I glanced through the back window and saw my fish flopping in the pickup bed.

“Your mama’s gonna kill me,” said Daddy.

The doctor was an old man. He looked at my hand and said, “What kinda fish you catch, old timer?”

Old timer.

I told him. He smiled, then removed a needle as big as a turkey baster. He jammed it into my palm and said, “I hope it was worth it.”

I screamed. Daddy held me against himself and kissed my hair while…

Jacob was a foster child. He grew up in the Foster Pinball Machine. Birth to graduation. He was never adopted by a family.

He and I weren’t good friends, but we knew each other. I lost track of him at age fifteen. He moved away to a group home.

We got in touch a few years ago. I expected to learn he had a wife and kids, but that wasn't the case. Jacob has animals.

Six dogs, three cats.

I don’t think Jacob would mind me saying that he marches to the beat of his own tuba.

He’s had little choice. His childhood was spent bouncing from family to family, looking after himself, remembering to eat regularly.

Today, he leads a good life. He’s a restaurant cook, he likes to hike, camp, and he’s had the same girlfriend for ten years.

I asked about all his animals.

“I dunno,” he said. “Just love animals. Growing up, I was never allowed to have any.”

Jacob found his first dog after work one night. It was late. A stray black Lab was sniffing trash cans

behind a restaurant.

The dog bolted when it heard footsteps.

Jacob tried to coax it with food. The dog wasn’t interested. So, Jacob resorted to heavy artillery.

Raw ground beef.

He left an entire package on the pavement. The dog still wouldn't come. Jacob gave up and crawled into his car to leave. Before he wheeled away, he glanced in his rear mirror.

The dog was eating a pound of sirloin in one bite.

“Started feeding him every day,” Jacob said. “I just wanted him to know somebody cared.”

For two months, Jacob cared. He fed the dog from a distance seven nights per week—even when he wasn’t working.

And on one fateful night, the old dog walked straight toward Jacob and had a seat.

“You shoulda seen how he was looking at me. He was like:…

She and her daughter visited the beach. She's up in age—walking through sand can be an ordeal. She carried a Foldger’s coffee can. The old metal kind people keep roofing nails in.

They walked toward the Gulf of Mexico and removed the lid. They scattered brownish powder into the water.

There wasn’t much breeze. They tell me most of the dust fell like sand. But it was a beautiful ceremony, nonetheless.

“My husband and I kinda grew up coming here,” said the old woman. “Before all the big condos and high-rises. His family had a place down that’a way.”

She was nineteen when she met him. After a few dates with the skinny boy, he invited her along on an annual family beach vacation.

The family stayed in a big camp-house cabin. They went fishing. They sat on swings, stayed up late, talked, watched the moon above the bay.

He was almost three years younger than her. He called her an old lady, it infuriated her.

They

made a nice family. Two girls, they adopted a son. They took walks after supper. They played cards. They traveled.

He inherited his family’s service station. He could fix anything with wheels. It was a lifelong obsession, tinkering beneath hoods. They weren’t rich, but in many ways they were.

A drunk driver killed him.

It was a twenty-year-old girl with friends in her car. Nobody knows what happened exactly. The theory is: he was doing sixty-five and the girl was doing ninety. She tried to pass him. He switched lanes to let her over. She was going too fast. Four people died.

It happened almost sixteen years ago, her wounds have turned into scars.

Ever since his funeral, he’s been sitting on her closet shelf, in a…