Dinner Reservation by Bruce Harris

My grandfather’s hands were still thick from his days delivering ice. He taught me math. There was a number tattooed on his arm and we did all kinds of math problems with it.

“May I check your hat?” The coat-check girl was young.

My grandfather liked to sit in his chair and worry.  That’s what he did. He wore a newsboy cap to keep warm. I never saw him without it. A bottle of Slivovitz on the table next to his chair also provided armor against the cold and the shivers. His skin was wrinkled and cracked. So was the chair’s leather. He chained smoked Chesterfields while he sat and worried. I’d see cigarette butts at all angles, their tops twisted and black forming a mound in the stand-up silver ashtray. It was as if the ashtray and the worry chair were one. I’d stare at the design that reminded me of plastic palm trees. The ashtray had a place for a lighter near one of the drooping branches. He didn’t use the lighter much. He preferred lighting a new cigarette with the one he had just finished. He was systematic. He’d lower his hand, his index finger acted as a noose, and with a quick back and forth twist of his wrist crushed out the doomed Chesterfield’s 4-minute life against the silver stand. The cigarette butts eventually disappeared. I loved that magic, until I once saw him push down on the bulbous sterling knob and the butts tumbled into a newly created abyss in the ashtray and I knew the secret. It reminded me of the coins on a bus that piled up until the bus driver decided it was time to depress a lever and the coins spun and fell into oblivion, all the while making a strange whirring metallic sound that played over and over. My grandfather liked watching wrestling. One of the wrestlers wore black trunks and was completely bald. My grandfather worried about them, including the bad ones. He wouldn’t believe it was faked. He even thought the blood was real.

“How many have gone unclaimed?”

Bruce Harris is the author of SHERLOCK HOLMES AND DOCTOR WATSON: ABOUT TYPE, published by The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box (www.batteredbox.com).