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night, as I refilled Sam’s coffee cup, he reached into the pocket of his Yankee jacket and handed me a napkin with “Briar Patch 2nd” written on it.
    Oscar, looking over my shoulder, said he lost his shirt on the last tip Sam gave him. His dark eyes filled with sadness. He was in a mood to lament. “Someone being killed is the worst thing that can happen to a bar,” he told us all.
    Sam said there were shirts for sale at 96th Street, and crying towels too.
    All of this was on the surface. No one said how sad it was that Angelina was dead. We didn’t try to comfort one another. These were hard guys; they’d already suffered through the holes in their hearts. But, every few minutes, talk would stop. The men would stare into their glasses or at the bottles lining the back wall. Oscar would rattle the pages of
The Racing Form
. These moments, I knew, were for Angelina. We did miss her after all.
    Later, after I’d done last call, I poured a final coffee for Sam and some for me and took a chance. “What do you think happened to Angelina?” I asked. It wasn’t a question to ask Sam, and, up to this point, I’d been working pretty hard on pretending to myself I didn’t care who killed her, so I was a little bit surprised at myself.
    â€œShe was crazy,” Sam said. “You can’t do those kinds of things.”
    â€œWhat things?”
    â€œThe weirdos.”
    I walked away from him to the other end of the bar. I felt that pang you get when you discover something terribly embarrassing about someone close to you. Sam seemed to think I knew what he meant, and I was too embarrassed for Angelina to ask.
    At the end of the bar near the door, Nigel and Carl talked quietly. I heard Carl say she must have a family.
    They’re sending her body back to Springfield,” Nigel said.
    â€œThat’s gruesome,” said Reuben across the semi-darkness from a couple of bar stools away. “It’s just a fucking body now. What difference does it make what you do with it?” He was drunk and ugly, trying to provoke Nigel.
    â€œCut it out, Reuben,” I said.
    â€œThat’s what we all are. Nothing special—rot in a couple of days. In a week no one will remember her. You,” he said to Nigel. “When you die, no one will remember the next day.”
    I sent Reuben home.
    â€œMaybe we should send flowers,” someone said from the darkness. Whoever it was, his words were slurred, so it took us a while to get his meaning. But, despite this heroic effort at community, it wouldn’t work. The winos came anonymously to the bar precisely because there were no obligations. They wouldn’t send flowers; they wouldn’t go to her funeral if it was down the street. They wouldn’t go to my funeral.
    Carl van Sagan was thoughtful. He’d liked Angelina, too. Sometimes, after the bar closed, she and I stopped off to visit him in his little booth off the lobby in the big West End Avenue building where he worked.
    â€œI think we should go to her funeral,” Carl said.
    â€œWhat did you say?” I asked, my first response to words that take me by surprise, even when I’ve heard them perfectly.
    It took quite a while, until well after closing, till everyone was gone except Carl, for me to give in. I thought, at first, Angelina would go away from my life now that she was dead. Nothing connected me to her. But I couldn’t get rid of the feeling that I owed her. I thought maybe I was supposed to have loved her after all and taken care of her—that my hard heart had helped kill her.
    The next afternoon, Carl and I, both wearing borrowed suits, went to Springfield on a Peter Pan bus. We took a cab from the bus depot to a funeral home just outside the city in a town called Chicopee that looked like a set from a 1950s movie. I recognized a bank and a gas station, a liquor store and a bar. I saw a used furniture store, then a street of