“You all right?” she asked.
“Oh, uh, yeah,” I said, shaking my head and coming back to the present. “Sorry about that.”
“So, where are we going to go eat? I’m starving, and I might resort to cannibalism if you don’t take me somewhere soon.” She said it with a serious tone. “And just know you are the first on my list of humans to eat.”
“I think the first problem is the fact that you actually have a ‘humans to eat’ list in the first place.” I laughed.
“You never can tell about people.” She smiled. “So, spill it. Where are we going?”
“Dotty’s,” I blurted out, not even thinking.
I watched as Elana’s eyes widened, her mouth dropping slightly open, and immediately I was thinking that I might regret my choice to take her there. It was too late now, though. I had already committed and blurted it out like I was some kind of weirdo. Elana immediately tried to adjust the shocked look on her face, and I cleared my throat, feeling bad about not taking her feelings into consideration when picking a place for dinner. It was just that it had been our usual hangout all through college, and I figured if I was performing an exorcism, trying to get Lillie’s ghost from my life, there was no reason to spare the holy water.
I smiled at Elana as she forced a smile back at me, and I offered my arm to her. I was starting to feel bad, bringing my exorcism and grasp for life down on Elana. I knew that Lillie’s death had affected her to the point where I had heard she wouldn’t even leave her apartment for a really long time. Eventually she did, though, and hopefully, this was going to help her, too. Either way, we were heading deep into the belly of the beast.
Dotty’s Dumpling Dowry was a Madison institution. The place was a staple that specialized in burgers and fries, and it hadn’t even changed the seating in years. You could smell the endless layers of burger patties baked into the wood walls, and I thought it was amazing. I loved the place since freshman orientation when my parents took me there for dinner. They thought it was a bit of a dive, but figured it was just part of the college experience. When we walked through the doors, Elana stopped for a minute and looked around the place. It still had the same charm and a plethora of memorabilia covering the walls, from vintage posters and a small hanging replica of the Hindenburg to the giant metal statue of the person on a motorcycle above the booths.
Elana and I slid into a booth and took out the menus, looking down at the burgers they had added since the last time I had been there. The waitress brought us some water to start with, and we placed our order. I went with the cheese curds, something familiar that I had eaten when I lived there before. In fact, Dotty’s cheese curds had gotten me through many a hangover in my younger years and sobered me up for finals right before I graduated. If walls could talk, I would gag them. This place hosted me many times when hosting me was getting difficult to do. They also had an extensive bar, which was exactly what I wanted at that point in time. I hadn’t had a cold beer at a restaurant in a long time, and I finally felt like I could drink one without attempting to drown my unhappy feelings.
“Cheese curds? Really? What, are you nursing a hangover again?”
“Ha-ha,” I said. “No, not this time. I just wanted something familiar, that’s all. They don’t make things like this in Phoenix.”
“Oh, God, what did you survive on then?”
“Mainly rice and beans.” I laughed. “Not sure why, but it’s like on every menu in Phoenix. You just have to look for it.”
“So, tell me about Phoenix. What did you do while you were there?”
“When I first got there, it was literally just supposed to be a stop on my grand tour of the United States,” I explained. “But I ran into a guy in investing, and one thing turned into another, and suddenly, I had been there for three years, hating the heat of the summer and craving the coldness of Wisconsin. It really was a beautiful place, though.”
I kept it light, not quite ready to dive into the Lillie discussion just yet. I was here with Elana, and I wanted her to remember why I was there. I couldn’t deny, though, being back at Dotty’s was a lot more to take in than I ever thought.
Chapter 6
Elana
Back at the quad, when Ollie had said Dotty’s, I pretty much froze in place, trying to decide whether to run or just go along with it. I hadn’t been to Dotty’s in a very, very long time, and it was difficult being in there now. Everything looked almost the same, and it was almost eerie how time seemed to stand still inside of the restaurant. But what was I to do? He wanted to eat there.
It was hard to even think about where I was sitting. Dotty’s had been “our place,” the place we came to chill and relax, to get away from the craziness of college life. Now it just seemed really uncool to be back there without Lillie. It may look the same as before, but the vibe floating around was painful and awkward at the same time, and it made it really difficult to pay attention to Ollie at all, especially since he fit into the m
emories so perfectly. I wasn’t sure what he was hoping to accomplish, but I was already thinking this was a serious fail. I understood trying to move on, but everyone did it in their own way, and this just wasn’t the way I was used to doing things. Then again, maybe that wasn’t it at all. Maybe he just really liked cheese curds and missed the old days.
When Lillie died, I was destroyed, but the only thing I knew to do was to keep going the same course I had before. I was almost done with my undergraduate program, I had my sights set on my Master’s, and I had known the whole time I would be staying in Madison. I wasn’t even thinking about getting out; I really loved my hometown. So, I stuck around campus, even worked there now, and I’d had time to start seeing the campus spaces that still existed in the days that I called A.L., or “After Lillie.” I got to start having memories of the place beyond just when Lillie walked the grounds, which helped me get from day to day without constantly thinking of her and replaying the pain in my chest. But not Dotty’s. It wasn’t anywhere that I could have even started to think was a good idea to come to. I had learned that it was good to push yourself, to learn to live with the pain and grief, but going to the park or the grocery store was one thing; going to the place that was exclusive to me and Lillie was something completely different.
I was trying to hold it together, I really was, but being back there, sitting in the same booths Lillie, Ollie, and I used to frequent and talking about the past like it wasn’t a significant player in our present was really starting to fuck with me, big time. I swallowed hard and shook my head, blocking everything out around the booth. Maybe this was a place I could create a different memory too, just like I had before, only this would be a lot harder.
“There were barely any people in that small town,” he said, still talking about where he lived outside of Phoenix. “It was really amazing how…”
I nodded my head, but his words just kind of faded into the background. I was trying desperately hard to concentrate on what he was saying, but all I could keep thinking was how wrong everything felt. My pulse was starting to race, and my hands were clammy, sitting in my lap. I picked up my drink and took a big gulp of it, smiling kindly at Ollie as he continued talking. His words seemed like they were a permanent fixture in the background, like the music they play over the speakers in the mall that you barely even notice. He said something else, and I nodded in reaction, but my eyes were fixated on the bar behind him, staring at the bottles of liquor glistening under the low track lighting.
I could almost still see Lillie sitting there at the bar, her hair in a ponytail, wearing her favorite short, blue khaki shorts and white tank top, with the loafers her dad had gotten her as a birthday present the month before. It had been the day of finals, and we were already done, deciding that it was time for some beers at Dotty’s. We sat at that bar for seven hours, eventually eating two meals and drinking more beers than I could even keep count of. We had talked about everything, starting with school, moving to Ollie and how smitten she was with him, and then on to the future. We loved talking about the future and how she was looking forward to teaching, to settling down and marrying Ollie and eventually having a family of her own. She wanted me to be their neighbor, to come over and play with the kids whenever I was home. It sounded like the best kind of future, one that I was really looking forward to settling into after graduation.
Lillie had kept me amused, feeling so good that I wished at times we could just bed down at Dotty’s and never have to return to the real world. It was more than just her being a good person or fun to be around. It was the fact that those moments were so perfect that even when I was in them, I never wanted them to end. It was hard not to want to linger in a place that felt like home, knowing that when you left, that experience would be over. At the time, I could feel that, but I thought there would be more. I thought that this was our life, and we would still be doing those things long after college ended. I guessed I took for granted the fact that life was unpredictable in a way that was almost cruel in the end. It gave you these amazing moments, these time periods that you clung on to like the guy who was the star football player, but after a knee injury spent the rest of his life coaching high school ball, trying desperately to live out his glory days through his players. I knew from the beginning that it wasn’t going to work that way for me, that I couldn’t be stuck walking around the past chasing a ghost. The world was amazing and full of good times, times that were really hard to let go of.
Now, though, that world seemed to have disintegrated, and it was all too obvious that the real world was missing my best friend, and our old sanctuary of beer and conversation, the one that had felt warm and inviting, now felt cold and empty. I blinked my eyes, and Lillie disappeared from the bar, leaving nothing but an empty stool and a hole in my chest. I was haunted, filled with ghosts of Lillie walking around everywhere that I went. I used to see her on campus, in the library, and even on the playground as I passed the park we used to go to talk. Over time, though, I had been able to push her ghost out, and attempt to live some semblance of a normal life again. Here, though, in the capitol of our debauchery, she roamed freely, whispers of her voice catching in my ear as I looked around the barren place, like staring at the inside of an abandoned house, knowing there was once warmth there, but being left with nothing but a hollow, gutted space, all the warmth having escaped through the cracks in the windows. I shuddered in my seat, feeling cold again, like I had the day that Lillie died.
“Earth to Glasses,” Ollie said, bringing my attention back to his face and the liveliness of the restaurant around me.