She was from Maine and had brown hair and bright hazel eyes and whenever she blinked a tiny indentation appeared above her nostrils. Pop told me she was a good writer, one of his most talented, and one night at Ronnie D’s I sat across from her in one of the booths. Under the bar noise we talked and sipped beer, then went for a drive where we kept talking, and now on weekends it was in her room I slept. It was in Academy Hall on the Bradford College campus. She had a suite and a roommate, a small living room between the two bedrooms. On Saturday nights, Sam and Theresa and Liz and I would meet there, then go down to Ronnie D’s or one of the bars on the river in Haverhill. We’d drink till last call, then end up at Howard Johnson’s. One Friday in the loud smoky noise, we four sat in a booth when Pop walked over from the bar. He only came down to Ronnie’s after all his disciplined rituals and duties were over, when he’d felt he’d earned the drinking he did there, and he usually looked relaxed and glad to be among some of his students, a few lawyers and off-duty cops he’d gotten to know, men from the mills he never would’ve met otherwise, and now his oldest son.
