The Boss Said My Father Drowned His Brother, So He Took Me to Stand in the Water novel · Chapter 5 of 24

Chapter 5: The Supper Club

The Kivela Supper Club in Two Harbors had been shut for three winters, and Stellan unlocked it himself.

Joel stayed in the truck with the engine running.

The lake was a gray wall at the end of the street, and the wind came off it and pushed at the door.

Inside, the supper room smelled of old fryer oil, cedar paneling and cold.

Chairs sat upside down on forty tables, and a long mahogany bar ran down one side with every bottle still on its shelf.

"Why closed?" I asked.

"It was Lauri's," Stellan said. "He ran it for two years, and I haven't had the heart to sell it."

"Or open it."

"Or open it."

He crossed the room and turned on one lamp over the corner booth.

Two old men sat in that booth.

I hadn't seen them in the dark, bundled in wool caps and quilted vests, with a cribbage board between them and a pot of coffee going cold.

They looked up at me and then at Stellan and said nothing.

"They come every day," Stellan said quietly. "Nobody asked them to."

I nodded and said nothing.

On the wall above their heads hung a framed photograph.

A young man stood in the doorway of a fish house on the ice.

He was lean and fair, and he had his cap pushed back and a grin that took up half his face.

He held a perch up to the camera by the gill.

"That's Lauri," Stellan said.

I stood and looked at the grin.

I had imagined a spoiled boy, a foolish boy, a boy who got himself killed.

I had not imagined anyone I would have wanted to sit beside at a bedside.

"How old was he there?" I asked.

"Twenty-three," Stellan said. "He caught that one through a hole he'd drilled with a hand auger, at the end of a long day, because his sled was stuck."

"He looks happy."

"He was. He was always happy, and it made me crazy," Stellan said.

He sat down at the end of the bar, and I took the stool beside him.

The old men went back to their cards.

"When he was twelve, I took him out to the fish houses for the first time," Stellan said. "He sat on an upturned bucket for six hours and never caught a thing, and he told my father it was the best day of his life."

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