Summer People by Aaron Stander

license.”
    “That’s what it amounts to. There’s more. I got this from NCIC. Holden was under investigation by the SEC for violations of security laws, but no charges had been filed. Also, he had several civil suits brought against him in recent years by dissatisfied clients.”
    “What happened with those?”
    “They were settled out of court.”
    “He sounds like a perfectly wonderful human being, doesn’t he?” said Ray. “One of the disturbing things you discover in this business is that people who are clever and reasonably affluent can operate for years beyond the edge of the law and get away with it. And some poor bastard who steals a rusty old car….”
    “Gets sent to Jackson,” Sue completed his sentence.

18

    Betty and John Vandenburg built the Last Chance, a bar, on a bluff overlooking Lake Michigan just after John was mustered out of the army. Betty’s father put up the money for the building and liquor license. Six years and two children later, John left her—went off to start a new life in Grand Rapids with a woman he had met in a Traverse City bar.
    Jack Grochoski had wanted to be in the military when he graduated from Fordson High in Dearborn, but his uncle got him a foundry job at Fords (as they say in Dearborn). He worked there until a long strike, coming north for deer season and then deciding never to return to his foundry job at River Rouge. He built a small cabin south of Empire, fished, hunted, trapped, and eventually became the evening bartender at the Last Chance. During one long winter, he and Betty—more out of loneliness than any real attraction—were lovers. Later, she married a car dealer from Kalkaska and sold Jack the Last Chance.
    Jack stood behind the bar washing glasses and surveying afternoon customers. The bar had changed little in his years there. The knotty cedar on the walls had darkened with age, the color change seen when old beer signs were taken down, leaving rectangles, ovals and squares of yellow cedar on the umber walls. But the basic structure, a cement block rectangle with a flat roof, had not been altered save an A-frame entrance covered with shake shingles that had been added in the 60s when A-frames were the fashion. At that time Jack also had the floor redone with vinyl tile, in a pattern of red and black. The pattern was now barely distinguishable and the tiles were worn through to the concrete slab around the entrance and in front of the restroom doors. When the original chairs, chrome tubing with plastic covered seats and backs, started falling apart, Jack replaced them with oak chairs he bought when the furniture from the old Methodist church in Nessen City was auctioned off, its congregation having moved away or died.
    Some of the regulars from his earliest days at the Last Chance were still around. Jack sometimes wondered how they could stand to sit on the same stool in the same bar year after year—and then would remember that he stood at the same place behind the bar year after year. There was a certain constancy that he enjoyed: the same faces, the same drinks, the same stories and jokes. And when one of the old timers died, he was reminded of his own mortality and the fact that the years were slipping by.
    In the winters, he would spend the afternoons and evenings with three or four of the regulars, old timers, who would make a beer last an hour as they smoked, talked, or peered at the TV that was always running above the bar.
    In the summer, like this early July afternoon, Jack was busy. It was more than he could handle by himself. He had a couple of local women who helped with the afternoon and evening crowd.
    The locals held down the right side of the bar and the tables near the pool table. The summer people liked the area near the windows where they could get a glimpse of the lake. The regulars drank beer, the old brands, from long-necked bottles—sometimes with a shot of blended whiskey. This hadn’t changed in more than thirty years.