The old man sat in a high-back chair just along the bar from where I nursed a warming beer. I hadn’t noticed him when I came in, but he seemed like he’d always been there, like a decorative feature hired by the owners to add colour.
“You look like they’ve salted that beer,” he said, his voice the timbre of oak barrels and Marlborough Reds. He hunched over his shot glass, not looking up, a heavy coat draped on the back of his chair, one sleeve dusting the floor, the other tucked under his dirty overalls, shirtsleeves rolled to his elbows, revealing thick forearms.
“Eh?” A one-word query was the most I could muster.
“Your beer,” he angled his glass at mine. “You’ve been hanging on to it for a while.”
“Oh yeah,” I said, picking up my glass. “Lost in thoughts.”
“Penny for them,” he said, scraping his chair around and putting a work-boot on the brass rail lining the foot of the bar. He looked up and pushed his cap back on his head revealing a face, which was lined but strongly featured, with a firm mouth haloed by grey stubble, a stubby nose, and dark blue eyes glinting below a prominent brow. “A man not drinking his beer has got to have troubles on his mind.”
“You could say that.” I replied. I offered a drawn smile. It was the autumn of 2008, banks were crashing like drunk drivers on the financial highway to hell, and my second mortgage, the only prop for my business in an increasingly fraught trading landscape, got ticketed as subprime by some cold-eyed, lickspittle, computer jockey.
“Foreclosure is our only option,” the letter said. My wife though, had other options. These were mostly to do with taking the kids to her mother’s. It had been coming for a while; long hours, frayed tempers, the constant battle with bills, and a devotion that drifted away through the holes in our domestic life, all combined to turn the things we used to adore into the things we now despised. Until nothing was left.
“Nothing, huh?” he asked. I guessed I’d been rambling. “You know, I was like you. Standing on the precipice. My business, marriage, and my very standing in the community, gone overnight. I went to my priest and confessed I was thinking of ending it all. He said to me that the things that were precious, the things that mattered, I still had: my life, my health, and my mind. He told me, this is a trial. Just draw a line, he said, and start afresh. So, that’s what I did.”
“What do you do?” I asked.
“I give pennies,” he said, sliding a coppery coin across the wet surface of the bar. “Thanks for your thoughts.”
I picked it up and turned back to him, wondering what I was worried about, but he was gone, with only the echo of beating wings to say he’d been there at all.
