The Moonlight by Nicholas Guild Read Free Book Online

he might have been a boxer once—his nose, at least, had been broken, probably more than once.  And then, as if by way of apology, “we don’t get many new faces in here.”
    “You know the old Moonlight Roadhouse?”
    “Sure.”  For some reason the bartender’s face appeared to darken.  “I had my first job there, as a busboy during the War.”
    Somehow it didn’t seem to be a pleasant recollection.
    “I own it,” Phil said, trying hard not to make it sound like a boast.  “I inherited it—I just moved in yesterday.”
    “You kin to old George Patchmore?”
    “Some kind of nephew.  I’d never heard of him until a week ago.”
    “I’ll be damned.”
    The bartender didn’t seem to want to talk anymore.  He moved to the other end of his bar and started polishing glasses, leaving Phil to wonder what sort of local taboo he had violated.  Or maybe it was simply that Uncle George hadn’t been universally loved.
    But after a while he was having a good enough time.  The television over the bar was running a tape of yesterday’s baseball game, and someone was always feeding quarters into the juke box.  Phil fell into conversation with a guy who worked in the hardware store around the corner, who seemed to have a lot he wanted to get off his chest about home repairs—it was an education just to listen.
    He was working on his third beer when a couple of women came in wearing white, long-sleeved blouses and black rayon skirts.  They were waitresses from the Lobster Pot, which was across the street, and one of them was his waitress.
    She seemed to recognize him and smiled.
    “Hi!” she said, hopping up on the stool next to him.  “We missed you tonight.”
    Phil, who was not used to being picked up by pretty ladies, didn’t know what to say at first, so after a few seconds, when he hadn’t answered, she turned away, as if looking for the bartender.
    “Did you just get off?” he managed at last.  It was stupid—why else would she be here in her uniform?—but at least he was talking.
    She turned back to him, rediscovering his existence as a pleasant surprise.
    “Eleven o’clock,” she said.  “We close at eleven.  We could’ve just as easily closed at ten tonight.”
    She cast her eyes at the ceiling in comic dismay.
    “Will you let me buy you a drink?”
    She would never know how much it cost him to ask, but as he waited for her crushing refusal she just smiled and said, “Sure.  Why not?  Dave—a Coors!”
    Was it really eleven o’clock already?  Was he really having a drink with the woman of his dreams?  Find one like our Calendar Girl.   Well, it would appear that he had.
    By the standards applied by the rest of the world, she probably wasn’t anything extraordinary, but Phil wasn’t the rest of the world.  The rest of the world doubtless was spoiled rotten.  The rest of the world hadn’t been thrown over by Peggy.  To Phil she looked marvelous.  He found himself wondering, if only just for an instant, if her hair was that faded honey-color naturally or if she dyed it, and then he decided he didn’t give a damn.
    “You live around here?” she asked, and then remembered that they had had that conversation before.  “That’s right—you just moved in or something.  I remember.”
    And then she laughed, which was a delicious sound, full of promise.  When she laughed she looked as if she understood everything about you, that you had the biggest letch in the world for her, and that she thought it was just fine.
    “I’m still cleaning out the cobwebs,” he said, as if to apologize for not inviting her straight home to his motel-style double bed.  “It’s the old Moonlight Roadhouse.  It seems that nobody’s lived there for years.”
    “That big spooky place up the road?”
    “That’s it—that describes it perfectly.  The big spooky place up the road.”
    Why did he sound as if he had taken offense?  After all, it wasn’t exactly the Old Homestead.
    “I