Jeff, of Allentown, PA

	Jeff stood at the case holding all of the bakery’s delights on display, cup of coffee in one hand and pumpernickel bagel in the other.  He took a bite of the bagel, eyes closing like a whingy baby who’s finally dropped off to sleep.  Then he opened them and began to chew slowly, rapturously.
	“Ah, a Rockaway bagel,” he said.  “You can’t beat them.”
	The woman who’d served him only moments before and now was in the process of helping the next customer in line glanced over at him long enough to say, “Thank you.”
	Very courteous, Jeff thought.  And friendly.  New Yorkers get a bad rap.  They were friendly people.  He’d never met friendlier people.  Especially the ones here in Rockaway.
	“I heard some goofball say on TV that Montreal has the best bagels.  Montreal.  Can you believe that?  I’ve had Montreal bagels, young lady, and I can tell you they don’t hold a candle to these,” he said, raising the bagel, which was about the size of a catcher’s mitt.

	The woman was boxing up an order of a dozen, mixed.  She didn’t say anything in response to his Montreal comment but did nod in his direction.  Yes, despite being busy, she took the time to nod.  Jeff wished now that he’d given her the change from his bagel and coffee.  She was the only person working the counter, and the line was getting longer.  She deserved a tip.
	“Now, I’m sure people will tell you that bagels are better in the city.  Well, I’ve had bagels in the city, and I’m here to tell you they don’t hold a candle to Rockaway bagels.”
	Each time Jeff said “the city,” he waved the bagel in what he was pretty sure was the direction of Manhattan.  That’s what natives meant when they said “the city”:  Manhattan.  Jeff wasn’t a native, of course, but he didn’t want these people to think he was some yokel who thought “the city” referred to the whole damn five boroughs.
	Jeff swept his gaze from the woman behind the counter along the line of customers that extended across the little shop to the door.  No one acknowledged him with a word or nod or even a look back.  Why should they?  They were all there to grab a bagel or pastry on their way to work.  Busy people.  Industrious people.  Look at the city they’d built.
	Jeff took another bite of bagel.

	“Mmm.  By golly, that’s good.  I haven’t had a Rockaway bagel in twenty years.  I tell you I feel like I’ve come home.  No, I’m not a native, but Rockaway and I go back a long way.  I spent some of the best years of my life here.”     
	The man at the front of the line looked at him for one instant without expression and then turned to the woman behind the counter and asked if they had any bialys.  No, said the woman.  They were out of bialys.
*
	“My kids used to call these trees ‘phony trees’,” Jeff said.  “That was when they were little tykes, of course.  Lisa and Joey.  Twenty years ago or more.”
	“Oh yes?” the man said.  He was bent over sorting through envelopes in a big brown leather bag attached to a pull-cart like Jeff used to have back in the days when he played golf.  After the divorce, when he moved into the little one-bedroom apartment, he didn’t have room for his clubs.  No matter.  By then he’d given up playing anyway.

	Only at that moment did Jeff become aware of the man’s blue uniform and connect it with the bag and envelopes.  The fellow was a mailman!  Jeff worried about himself sometimes, walking through life in a daze.
	“It was the way the bark would peel off the trees in raggedy sheets like paper, you see.  I’d tell the kids the trees were made out of paper, so they called them phony trees.”
	The mailman seemed about to reply but instead took a handful of envelopes and walked toward the front porch of the house they were standing before.  Then up the steps.
	“Oh,” Jeff said, an almost inaudible moan of pain.
	These trees, he’d just realized with dismay, weren’t his trees, the ones he’d remembered.  He didn’t know what kind these were—in fact, he’d never known the name of the phony trees, either—but these had slender trunks with unremarkable bark unlike the trees he, Lisa, and Joey would walk beneath on their way to PS 114, where they’d play stickball and basketball on the asphalt playground.

	“No no, I had it wrong,” Jeff began explaining before the mailman reached the bottom steps of the house where he’d just made his delivery.  “These aren’t the phony trees.  Hurricane Sandy killed off most of those.  All that saltwater.  Ah, but here I am a visitor telling you about your own home.”
	“I’m from Roxbury,” the mailman said.
	Roxbury.  Jeff knew that wasn’t far off, but he wasn’t sure how that fit in vis a vis the hurricane damage to Belle Harbor, the village in the Rockaways where he and his family had spent a week in the summer and a week over the holidays every year, year after year until it all ended.
	“Roxbury’s nice, too,” Jeff said, following the mailman on down the sidewalk.  “I love Rockaway—all the Rockaways.  Wait.  Is Roxbury considered part of the Rockaways? . . . No matter.  I’m sure it’s nice, too.  I spent the best years of my life here.”
	The mailman stopped at the next house and began sorting through his bag.
	“Damn Sandy anyway,” Jeff said, hands on his hips as he gazed around him.  “A lot of change.  A lot.  Not all bad, though, I’m not saying that.  It’s still a great place.”

	The mailman suddenly looked up from his bag.
	“Change?  You talking about change?  Have you seen 136th Street?  Those enormous houses they built after Sandy?  You won’t believe the place.  Go take a look.  That direction.  136th Street.  No use coming this way.  That’ll just take you away from it.  That way.”
	“Great idea.  Thanks,” Jeff said.
	He was well aware that the mailman was trying to get rid of him.  Couldn’t blame to poor guy.  Some tiresome old fart comes along and . . .
	Jeff came to a halt.  He’d just remembered something.  He turned and called back to the mailman, “Hey, buddy!  136th Street.  That’s where I was heading.  Some guy in the deli on 129th Street told me I should check out the big houses on 136th Street.  That’s where I was heading when I ran into you.  Funny!”
The mailman went on delivering the mail.
*
	Even though the mailman had pointed him in the direction of 136th Street, when Jeff got to Newport he became disoriented and wasn’t sure which way to turn.  Then he heard the music coming from the direction of the sea.
	He really wanted to see those big houses.  Built to replace homes in the flood plain destroyed by Sandy, they looked bizarre, he’d heard somewhere, like a sudden outcropping of skyscrapers amongst cottages.
	He’d had a dream once about a little village outside of Allentown that he used to drive through on the way to visit some old girlfriend.  In his dream the little town had been remarkably transformed, still only a very few blocks long but those blocks towered over by enormous new chrome and glass buildings that gleamed in the sun.  That dreamscape was still vivid in his mind although the girlfriend, alas, he could not remember one thing about.

	Would the big houses on 136th Street beguile him like his dream?
	But he did not go to the big houses.  It was the music from the sea that summoned him.
	He crossed Newport and continue toward the ocean.
	People started coming out of their houses and joining him on his walk southward as if he were some quaint and clueless pied piper.
	When he got to Rockaway Beach Boulevard, he didn’t cross and continue the final block to the beach because, he realized, the music wasn’t coming from the sea after all.  It was coming from the east, coming ever nearer, coming down the boulevard right toward him.
	A parade!

	He remembered the date:  March 17th.  Of course, the St. Patrick’s Day parade.
	They came on toward him, then past him, strutting and high-stepping and dancing and marching as to war.  School bands and social-organization bands and motley crews who looked like the bars on 116th Street had kicked them out but handed them instruments on their way and commanded, Go make music, you drunken Irish bums.
	Jeff cheered for the Rockaway Hibernian Society, striding out splendidly in their green and black tartan kilts and tall black palace-guards’ hats, bagpipes moaning and whining out that song you always hear with bagpipes, that song . . .
	He turned to ask the old gent next to him what the song was you always hear with bagpipes, but before he could get the wording of the question straight in his mind, the Rockaway Hibernian Society band had marched on, their place taken by a school band, youngsters.

	Jeff let out a roar of laughter.
“St. Camillus!” he said, elbowing the old gent and pointing.  “St. Camillus!”
	“Yes, I see,” the man said, edging a step away.
	Jeff watched the band a moment, then laughed again.
	He turned to the old gent to explain and, when he saw there were now a couple of yards separating them, closed the gap.
	“My wife—my wife that was—went to St. Francis De Sales, you see.  A long time ago, of course.  She was in the St. Francis band, would go to band competitions and the like. They were good, St. Francis, but they never could beat St. Camillus.  And here they are, here they still are, St. Camillus!”
	He laughed as if it were a delightful thing but also a bit scandalous, St. Camillus, still at it after all these years.
	The old gent turned his back to him.

	Jeff tapped him on the shoulder.
	The man turned back halfway toward him.
	“My wife—my wife that was—she didn’t march in this parade with St. Francis, this little parade.  Not that I’m knocking this little parade, understand.  I like this one.  But I’m talking about the big one, the one in the city.  That’s the one she marched in.  Played the fife.  About froze a couple of times, she said, my wife said.  My wife that was.”
	The man turned fully toward him and studied him a moment.
	“I’m sorry for your loss,” he said.
	“Pardon me?”
	“Your wife that was, you said.  You’ve said it several times now.”
	“Oh.  Ha, no.  I mean she used to be my wife.  Divorced now.  You thought she was dead?  Ha, no.  She’s alive as we speak, living right here in Rockaway.  Neponsit, actually.”
	“I see.”
	The man turned his attention back to the parade.

	Another school came marching down the boulevard.  Jeff couldn’t tell by the initials on the bass drum where they were from.  He recognized the song they were playing, though.
	He began to giggle.
	“Ha.  ‘MacNamara’s Band’,” he said to the man, who apparently took no notice.  “Grand old song.  There’s a really funny version of it, pretty raunchy version, if you get my drift.  Want to hear it?”
	“Not interested,” the man said without turning.
	“It’s really funny.  The first line goes—”
	The man turned and said, “Not interested.  And isn’t it a little early in the day, buddy?”
	“Early in the day?”
“To be drinking.  You’re drunk.  No, don’t bother.  Now look, I’m going to move on down this way.  Do me an enormous favor and don’t follow me.”
	Jeff watched him move off to the west.  He chuckled as he said to himself, He calls this drunk?  
*
	“I know you’re a serious man.  We’re all serious men here.  But that’s not what this is about.  All I’m asking you is if you’ve got The Ramones on the jukebox.”
	The bartender stopped wiping the bar top and laughed.
	“Not that kind of serious,” he said.  “The music Sirius thing.  S-I-U-R . . . whatever.  We get our music through a Sirius hookup.  We haven’t had a jukebox since I’ve been working here, pal.”
	Jeff finally got it, and then he laughed, too, briefly.  But he was disappointed about The Ramones.
	“Time was you couldn’t walk into a bar anywhere in the Rockaways without hearing The Ramones on the jukebox singing ‘Rockaway Beach’.”
	“Right you are.  That and ‘The Wild Colonial Boy’.”

	It wasn’t the bartender who said this but an old gent sitting at the end of the bar.  Wait.  Was he the same old gent Jeff had talked to at the parade earlier that day?  No.  This fellow wasn’t that old.  Probably no older than Jeff.  Maybe younger.  Forty years old, maybe, but looked twenty years older the way a man will sitting in a cheap bar by himself.
	Jeff looked in the mirror but couldn’t see himself because of the big Harp decal plastered across it.
	He looked down at his beer.  Was he drinking Harp?  Took a taste.  Well, that didn’t do him any good.  He didn’t drink enough beer to tell an ale from a lager from a pilsner.  Whiskey, though.  He could tell you a Scotch from an Irish or a Canadian or a bourbon or a rye, tell you one Scotch from another Scotch, one bourbon from another, right on down the line.

	“Yuengling,” the bartender said, and Jeff thought it likely that he’d asked what it was that he was drinking.
	“A Pennsylvania beer!” Jeff said.  “That’s me, Pennsylvania.  Allentown born and bred.”
	“Oh?  I would have taken you for a local, the way you’ve been doing a Rockaway travelogue here for the last hour.”
	Jeff reared back on the barstool and gave the bartender a closer look.  Was he being critical?  Jeff decided that he wasn’t.  Nice fellow, he looked like.
	So, Jeff had been in here for an hour talking about Rockaway.  News to him.  This time of day—or night—his memory tended to take him back no farther than his latest drink.

	“Just taking a sentimental journey,” he said.
	He took a sip of the Yuengling and was just about to ask the bartender if they had “Sentimental Journey” on the jukebox when the fellow at the end of the bar began to sing.
“There was a wild colonial boy,” he sang but got no farther.  Apparently he couldn’t remember the colonial boy’s name.
	“Andy Byrne,” Jeff called down to him before remembering that Andy was his brother-in-law—or had been before the divorce.

	“Andy Byrne was a great pal of mine back in the day,” Jeff explained to the bartender to cover his embarrassment for calling out the name.  “I wonder if they still live here—the Byrnes.”
	“Couldn’t tell you,” the bartender said, glaring down at the end of the bar where the old guy was getting into an increasingly heated argument about the identity of the colonial boy with someone at the table behind him.
	“Keep it civil down there,” the bartender called to them, then turned back to Jeff.
	“No, I couldn’t tell you about any locals.  I’m from Arverne myself.”
	“Ah, Arverne.  I’ve had good times in Arverne, too,” Jeff said.  A lie.  He’d driven through Arverne, always careful to keep his doors locked.
	“Oh?  The only good times I have in Arverne is every time I drive out if it.  How come you know so much about the area?  I thought you were from Pennsylvania.”
	“I am.  Allentown born and bred.  But I married a girl from Belle Harbor.  Beth Byrne.  My Belle Harbor Belle, I called her.

	“Called her.  So she’s . . . not with us any longer.”
	“No, divorced is all.  All my fault, it won’t surprise you to hear.  She lives right here in Rockaway.  Neponsit, actually.  Not five blocks from where she was born.”
	“I see.  So you’re back on business, I guess,” the bartender said, not waiting for a reply but moving off to fill an order from the waitress.
	He came back a minute later and wiped at the bar, a dreamy smile on his face.
	“I’m trying to remember how that song goes.  ‘Rockaway Beach’.”
	“No idea,” Jeff said.
*
	It was thirty blocks from the bar on 116th Street to Neponsit.  The blocks were shorter walking west to east than if he were walking the numbered streets from north to south, Jamaica Bay to the beach.  Still, he was exhausted by the time he got to Neponsit.
	He stood across the street from the big brick house, leaning against a tree—not one of the phony ones but one of the new ones.  He was having trouble catching his breath, panting, his legs rubbery, his shoulders, arms, and hands trembling.  Thirty blocks.
	Why had he come?
	It hadn’t been a conscious goal, to see Beth, the wife that was.  But why else drive all this way, what point to this sentimental journey?  If there was any point at all.

	Now that he was here, he was frightened at the possibility of seeing her and being crushed, annihilated by the enormity of all that he’d lost.  And what if she saw him, saw what he’d become?  A wheezing, stumbling remnant.  Bloated bag of whiskey-soaked memories.
	The first floor of the house was dark, but two windows on the second floor were lit.  Across the lowered blind over one window a shadow passed.
	Beth!
	Maybe.  Impossible to tell.  Could as easily be him, the man, the son of a bitch.  He was likely to be a son of a bitch, wasn’t he, Beth with her poor taste in men?
	He couldn’t bear it.  He released his hold on the tree and watched his shadow, thrown by porchlights, stumble south down 145th Street toward the beach.
*
	He stood on the sand, eavesdropping as the waves murmured to one another.
	He had been to the beach many, many times with Beth and the kids, but they’d never come at night.
	It had been an overcast day, and there was no moon, no stars.  Still, it was beautiful enough to kill a man.
	He had not come for that, though—to walk into the sea.  No, he had come to create this new memory for himself alone.  He’d take it back to Allentown and wait for what was inevitably coming for him, a thing he probably wouldn’t even recognize when it came, so in thrall would he be to the stars and moon that did not shine this night on Rockaway Beach, the waves that spoke to one another, but not to him.
	
	
	  Dennis Vannatta is a Pushcart and Porter Prize winner, with essays and stories published in many magazines and anthologies, including River Styx, Chariton Review, Boulevard, and Antioch Review.  His sixth collection of stories, The Only World You Get¸ was published by Et Alia Press.