I owed Jen a favor, is how it started. She had bailed me out a few months before, so when she asked me to help her move, I couldn’t say no. It was New Year’s Eve when she asked, at the end of my shift. It was ten o’clock and my only plan for the night was to go home and drink. Jen stopped me on my way out the door, touched my arm and asked if I could help. That’s how I found myself, early on New Year’s Day, waiting on the sidewalk outside Jen’s apartment with Tim Cole, who was also there to help. He said he owed Jen a favor, too, but I think he just wanted to be involved, wanted to see inside Jen’s apartment.

It was one of those days when everything was gray, the street, the sidewalk, the windows, and Tim and I looked gray, too. He was a regular at the bar and we weren’t used to seeing each other in daylight. At night, his shuffle seemed manic; during the day it seemed nervous, shy. We stood a few feet apart, smoking, not saying much. It was too early, and I was hung-over.

Jen pulled up in a dirty white moving van. She was all oranges and browns – red hair, brown sweater, brown corduroys.

“Have you been waiting long?” she asked, sliding the side door open.

“Yes,” I said and Tim Cole chuckled nervously. It wasn’t true, but I wanted to make sure Jen knew I was annoyed.

“Sorry,” she said. We went upstairs and Jen made coffee while Tim and I poked around. Everything was in boxes, for the most part, and the bare walls showed yellow. The bed was stripped down to the mattress and boxes were piled on top. Tim Cole looked at a box of books and I stared out the window.

Jen came in with coffee cups and we sat on the floor. She and Tim talked about some guy who had been in the bar the night before.

“He’s the same guy you threw out before Christmas,” Tim said.

“I know,” she said. “I thought I’d give him another chance.”

I drank my cup, poured another one from the pot on the floor.

“Sorry to get you guys up so early,” Jen said.

“On New Year’s Day,” I said, not looking at her.

“I know,” she said. “I’m sorry. I have to work tonight, otherwise I never would have started so early.” She smiled apologetically and I knew I shouldn’t be mad at her, but now I was and it was too late.

“Why do you have to move out today?” Tim asked, but he wasn’t mad.

“Fucking Jeremy fucked everything up,” Jen said, and if you knew Jeremy, that was really answer enough. Jen’s body didn’t show her age yet, but her face did, and her years with Jeremy had added weather to her tan. She had changed, in her time at the Tavern, from the hot young bartender, to the bartender/mom, in charge, loved but not always liked. The favor I owed her, the bail, had been on a stupid possession charge. I’d never been arrested before, and when I was allowed my phone call, I called Jen.

But today I was fed up and tired and I wanted her to know. I drank my black coffee in silence. Jen got up, streched up on her toes, put the coffee pot back in the kitchen. Tim Cole got up, too, and they took a couple boxes downstairs while I sat and finished my coffee. I heard them coming up the stairs, so I waited until they came in, then got up, took a box off the bed, and went downstairs. I tried to time it right, so that I wouldn’t have to deal with them much, but every time we passed on the stairs, Tim Cole would fake a grimace and chuckle and Jen would give me a sympathetic/thank-you smile.

Everything went the way you would expect. Up and down the dusty stairs. No one else in the building was up and you didn’t even hear any TVs or anything. Through the open tops of the boxes, you could see little bits of Jen’s life. Nothing much, just the colors, the edges. Smells of things and sounds of things as they shook in your arms, bouncing down the stairs. A ribbon had slipped out of the top flaps of one box, a red ribbon with “2nd Place” glued on in glitter. I pushed it back under the flap before I picked up the box.

The van filled up with reasonably neat rows of brown boxes and beer boxes from the bar. Jen found places between the rows for unboxed things, a frayed broom, a purple and black Rothko print. The street was still quiet and gray.

Everything was done except the bed. It was the only big thing and Tim and I huffed it – mattress, then box spring – down the stairs, while Jen walked behind us, not able to help, but not wanting to abandon us either. On the stairs, on the way down, I realized Tim Cole and I had done this before, performed this same chore before. The memory made me blink. Years before, a friend had died, a mutual friend named Zach. Zach was a bartender, the one who had trained me how to be a bartender. I had just moved to town and Zach took it as part of his duty to show me around the neighborhood, too. A few years later, he overdosed and his mother had come to the city, sought us out. She wasn’t like you expected Zach’s mother to be. She was younger than I thought and her grief had made her beautiful, exquisite somehow and full. Dark hair and dark eyes and long white hands. We’d helped her empty Zach’s apartment. She sat in a chair and packed Zach’s things into boxes and cried while Tim and I went up and down the stairs, wordless except for short, occasional instructions – “watch your feet,” “right behind you.”

This day, this other wordless day, helping Jen, as Tim Cole and I levered the box spring out the front door, I thought about Zach and looked at Tim. He was holding in a smoker’s morning cough and his face was red. His eyes met mine and I thought for a second he was thinking about Zach, too. He raised his eyebrows, not asking. Jen wouldn’t have known Zach – he was before her time at the Tavern – so I didn’t say anything. I felt grim and stupid and immature and didn’t know what to do about it.

We carried the box spring to the back of the van, where we were going to slide it in through the back doors, on top of the mattress which was already on top of the boxes. Tim lifted his end in first, up kind of high, and I started shoving. I got it about half-way in when it got stuck.

“Wait a second,” Jen said, and opened the sliding door to see if she could rearrange anything. “Wait a second,” she said again, louder, but I started shoving, kind of hopping and shoving until something gave and the box spring slid in. “Wait,” Jen said louder but I was done and there was a thud and a crash.

I came around the side of the van. A box had spilled out, onto the sidewalk, and Jen’s things lay at her feet. A big silver hair brush, a wooden jewelry box. A small plate, too, had fallen out and broken and when Tim Cole bent down to pick it up, I saw that it was a souvenir plate, painted in bright blues and reds and yellows, a scene from some campground or state park. Tim looked at the two pieces in his hands, down at the smaller pieces on the ground among the other things.

“God damnit,” Jen said, and she held her hand to her nose like she was going to cry. I was about to say sorry, when Tim threw one of the pieces down, hard. It smashed and pinged as shards of plate went everywhere.

“Look,” he said, holding the other piece high above his head. “We’re Greeks!” Then he yelled, “Opa!” and threw the plate near Jen. It smashed, white and color on the gray pavement. Jen didn’t move, so Tim stomped on the pieces with both feet and yelled again.

“Opa!”

Jen shook with a little laugh, then Tim grabbed her hands. They jumped up and down on the shards. Jen threw her head back and let out a thin, high laugh.

“Opa!” they yelled. Jen let go of Tim’s hand, held her hand out to me. I smiled down at my feet, took her hand, joined the circle.

“Opa!” we yelled and jumped up and down on the remnants of the plate. When we finally broke the circle, we were all red-faced and winded. Jen touched my shoulder. Tim lit a cigarette. I picked up the brush and the jewelry box and the jewelry, put them back in the box, put the box in the van.

We smoked for a minute, then Jen got in the van. Her new place was two miles away and the van was full, so I rode over with Tim. I had never seen Tim drive before, and when he got behind the wheel of his big Buick, it seemed like a very grown-up thing for him to be doing. At night, in the bar, his hands were always touching him somewhere – his face, his forehead, his nose and ears. Behind the wheel with a cigarette, his hands were still and calm. He rolled the window all the way down, cold air blasting in while he smoked. I lit a cigarette, too, and cracked my window.

The streets went by outside the way streets go by. I mean, you want to think that you’re seeing something or witnessing something, but the streets go by like that for everybody. Stores you’ll never go in, some you never even notice. My father grew up working in a store like that, a store his father owned on a street like this. Signs everywhere, and criss-crossed power lines and telephone lines. Everything was suspended and quiet and slow and I remembered it was a holiday. We stopped at a light.

“I was thinking about Zach,” I said finally. Tim nodded, kept his eyes on the road. We were going under the highway, now, and traffic clunked overhead. I could picture Tim at Zach’s funeral. We were all a bunch of young stupid morons, unkempt and unclean in harsh sunlight, but Tim Cole showed up in a blue, tailored suit, a shine on his shoes. I’ve seen Tim a thousand times at night, but maybe only four times during the day, and that was one of those times.

“I’m still mad at him,” I said. Tim nodded again, looked out his window. I didn’t feel like explaining it. Tim knew, we all knew. We were all mad at Zach for a long time, for doing what he did, for putting us through all that shit, that bullshit. Picturing his mom sitting in his apartment, picturing his funeral, brought it all back and I felt the anger again in my neck and in my eyes.

“Me, too,” he said at last, then turned to me. “He never told us his mom was so hot.” I looked straight ahead, then out my window. Then I rolled my eyes and laughed through my nose. Tim giggled. I threw my cigarette out the window, lit another one, rolled the window all the way down. Cold air blasted around us as we smoked. I was overcome with giggles and Tim started giggling again and we smoked and giggled the rest of the way.

Jen’s new apartment was in an old brick building, a big house cut into four apartments. There was a black fence around the back yard, a path of cracked red bricks up to the front door. The sun was fully up now and the grayness was started to fade. The front door was open and the van door was open, so Tim and I grabbed a box each and went inside.

The stairs were wide and well-lit and Jen’s new apartment was small and smelled of paint. The walls were white, whiter even against the dark hardwoods. Jen was in the kitchen, which was really just an extension of the living room, plugging in the coffee maker. Tim Cole and I set down our boxes. Tim went to check out the bedroom and the bathroom. I stood next to Jen, waited for coffee. Something occurred to me.

“Where’s Jeremy, anyway?” I asked and Jen looked at me and smiled.

“We broke up,” she said. “That’s why I’m moving out, dumb-ass.” She smiled bigger, because I was a dumb-ass, because she knew I’d wanted her to break up with him for a long time, or maybe just because it was New Year’s Day and I was there and Tim was there and we were drinking coffee in an apartment that smelled of fresh paint.

Jen and Tim were finishing their coffee, so I went downstairs to have a cigarette. I sat on the front step, looking at the sky. The wind was cool and dry. There was a small church down the block and a faithful family walked by, didn’t notice me. When I was a kid, my mother went to church every Sunday, sometimes more often, and she would always make me and my sister get up extra early. She liked the early Mass, liked to go to confession. My father, who didn’t go with us, would stand by the doorway and kiss her as she left.

“A more suspicious man would think you had a lot to confess,” he would say. Mom would pretend to be more prim, would fuss with her purse.

“You have to be forgiven if you want to take communion,” she would say and my father would laugh.

“Yes,” he’d say, smiling as she herded us out the door. “But you have to sin if you want to be forgiven.”

It took an hour or so to unload the van. Jen ordered a pizza and Tim ran to the corner for beer. We sat on the floor among the boxes and ate and drank. Then Tim had to go and he was my ride, so I got up and Jen came over to hug me good-bye.

“Sorry about the plate,” I said. She smiled, a big open-mouth smile, and hugged me again.

“Please,” she said. “Don’t worry about it.”

That night, Tim Cole and I sat at the bar while Jen served us. She bought our drinks, poured them heavy. The Tavern was a little place, dark and brown and smoky. It was New Year’s Day, the bar was slow. Everyone was with their families. I played Lefty Frizzell on the jukebox and we did shots of bourbon. Tim’s hands went from his cigarettes to his shot glass, to his mouth, to his ears. Tim got drunk and I got drunk. I got drunk and I couldn’t help it – every once in a while, I’d grab Jen’s hand and say, “I’m sorry about the plate,” so that she’d have to smile and say, “Don’t worry about it.” And then Tim would yell, “Opa!” and we’d all laugh.