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TWENTY-FOUR

Thanksgiving is the biggest day of the year at McCormick’s. We serve a five-course, prix fixe, good old-fashioned traditional American Turkey Day dinner, but Grandpa Mike and Dad love to shake things up by offering some of their signature Irish classics, like colcannon instead of green bean casserole, or Bailey’s Irish Cream mudslide cake in addition to pumpkin pie.

There are three seatings—noon, two thirty, and five o’clock—and we are always booked solid at least a month in advance. Then at seven thirty, when the last of our customers waddles out in a food coma, we lock the front door, and about a hundred of us—cooks, waitresses, bartenders, busboys, dishwashers, and their families—have our own Thanksgiving feast.

Johnny Rollo couldn’t believe it. “You’re feeding all these people for free?” he said.

“They work hard all year. This is one of the things my mother and father do to...”

Out of nowhere, the wave of sadness flooded over me, and my voice caught. I tried to fight it. “It’s what they do to show their...” Again the words stuck in my throat, and this time tears spilled onto my cheeks.

“I get it,” Johnny said, putting his arm around me and walking me to a quiet corner of the room. “You miss your mom. It’s okay. Cry it out.”

I pressed my face to his chest and sobbed into the soft warm fabric of the sweater I had just given him so he’d feel dressed for the occasion.

“I knew I shouldn’t have worn my good cashmere,” he said.

That stopped the flood, and I started laughing. “It’s not cashmere,” I said. “It’s acrylic.”

“And there’s the difference between you and me,” he said. “You can only afford acrylic, so you buy acrylic.”

“And what would you have done?”

“Stolen the cashmere.”

I laughed again, wiped away the tears, and I kissed him. I knew in my heart that there was no future for the two of us, but in 1997 and again decades later when I needed him the most, Johnny Rollo—cold-blooded, hard-hearted, self-proclaimed in-it-for-himself bad boy Johnny Rollo—was there for me. And I loved him for it.

The kitchen doors opened, and a platoon of servers, led by my grandfather, my father, and Chef Tommy Hogan marched platters and trays and tureens and bowls and baskets of food onto a thirty-foot groaning board that had been stretched out down the center of the room.

Only when it was nearly filled to overflowing and ready to collapse under its own weight did Grandpa Mike step behind the bar, clang the brass bell that is usually reserved to acknowledge extremely generous tippers, and called out to the crowd, “Soup’s on.”

The tables had been pushed together so that we could have two long rows of banquet-style seating. Johnny and I filled our plates and sat across from my father, who had Lizzie on his right and Connie on his left.

We ate, we drank, we talked, we laughed, and somewhere around nine o’clock the chanting started. Chef Tommy was sitting ten chairs away from us at the far end of our table. He stood up, and ladle in one hand, frying pan in the other, he banged them together and got the group’s attention.

“God bless Black Monday,” he sang out.

Those in the know chanted back. “God bless Black Monday.”

Then Rubén the line cook stood up, raised his arms in the air, and yelled, “ Dios bendiga el lunes negro .”

The Hispanic contingent among us echoed it back in unison.

Then it was back to the English chorus. “God bless Black Monday.”

Then in Spanish, then in English, then in Spanish, then in English, until everyone in the room joined in, including Connie and Johnny, who had no idea what it all meant.

Finally, my father stood up, and the group broke into applause.

“I want to thank you all for coming,” he said, “and if this is your first rodeo, let me tell you what this tumult is all about.

“The year was 1987, and back then I wasn’t the handsome and dashing, overconfident innkeeper that you see standing before you now.”

Groans, laughter, and applause from the crowd. Dad ate it up. He was in his element now.

“I was, I’m sad to tell you, a stockbroker. A pencil-pushing, number-crunching, short-haired, suit-and-tie-from-Brooks-Brothers, riding-the-Metro-North-to-New-York-City-every-day, midlevel-Wall-Street asshole.”

He waited for the laugh to subside. “And I worked at Lehman Brothers. Did I mention it was 1987? Anyway, on October nineteenth of that fateful year, the stock market tanked. It was a Monday. Black Monday. On Tuesday morning I was fired, and on Wednesday, I woke up with a god-awful hangover, got on the Harley, and rode over to my first and only job interview, and I handed the owner of the business my résumé. Tell ’em what it said, Pop.”

Grandpa Mike stood up. “First of all, it was the most unprofessional résumé I ever saw. It was handwritten. In pencil. It said, ‘Finn McCormick, MBA, Hofstra University, 1979. Seeks challenging opportunity in the hospitality industry. Irish pub preferred.’”

Another round of laughter, and Dad picked up the story. “So, there I was, practically begging my old man for a job, and he says to me, ‘I can’t afford you.’ I say would you rather see me on the unemployment line? And he says, ‘Save me a spot. We’re in the red. We’ll never make it through the winter. I figure I’ll close up shop right after New Year’s.’

“Now I’ve got an MBA. It wasn’t hard to figure out why an old Irishman couldn’t make any money running a pub. When he opened this joint on St. Patrick’s Day thirty years ago, he put a sign in the window. There’s a bunch of so-called Irish pubs here in Heartstone. This is the only one worth a damn. Come on in. First drink is on Mike.

“And come they did—the O’Learys, the O’Sheas, and all the other O-apostrophes who were longing for a taste of the old sod. But twenty years later they’d rather sit at home nights and watch Jeopardy! and Wheel of Fortune . And nobody came to take their place. It was 1987, and McCormick’s was stuck somewhere in the first half of the twentieth century.

“So, I said, I’ll buy the place from you. And he said, you can have the whole kit and caboodle for ten bucks. I said, ten bucks? For this loser? So we haggled, and I wound up getting it for a dollar.”

He looked out at the room. “Now who was here in 1987 when we were a few months from pulling the plug?”

Hands went up.

“And who busted their asses working extra hours without asking for an extra nickel?”

The hands stayed high.

“And who started sharing in the profits when there finally was a profit?”

Same hands.

“McCormick’s is a family business,” my father said. “But a lot of people not named McCormick are part of this family. So now you know why we celebrate Thanksgiving together. And why we say, ‘God bless Black Monday.’”

The room cheered.

“One more thing. This is the first year Kate isn’t running around the room, giving hugs, kissing the kids, and packing doggie bags for you all to take home. But she’s still with us.” He raised his glass. “To Kate.”

Everyone drank. And someone, probably Lizzie, hit play on the sound system and the room filled with the Dubliners singing “Whiskey in the Jar.” Grandpa Mike grabbed Dotty Briggs and twirled her onto the makeshift dance floor. The party was just getting started.

I walked Johnny over to our quiet little corner of the room. “What did you think?” I said.

“You’re a lucky girl, Maggie,” he said. “You’ve got a great family.”

“No, I mean about Connie.”

“What do you know about her?” he asked.

I told him the little she had told us.

“I think she left something out,” he said. “Something big. You’d never pick up on it, but me coming from where I come from, she couldn’t hide it from me.”

“What do you mean you coming from where you come from?” I said.

“Maggie, my father did a six-year bid at Sing Sing. Then he did five more in Dannemora, not to mention county jail three or four times.”

I nodded. I’d known that.

“Over the years, at least half a dozen of his prison buddies would swing by to keep my mother company ... if you catch my drift. A couple Black, a couple white, but they all had one thing in common. No matter how long they’d been out, they couldn’t shake their mess hall eating habits. Did you see how Connie grabbed Felipe’s hand when he reached across her plate to get the salt?”

“Yeah, I caught that. She said he startled her.”

“He didn’t startle her. She was guarding her food. Did you see how fast she ate? She inhaled it before I even got my hands on the mashed potatoes. She’s conditioned.”

I gave him a blank stare. “Conditioned to what?”

“ Institutional dining ,” he said. “That move she made on Felipe was a classic jailhouse tell.”

He paused to see if I made sense of the words. And then he left no room for doubt.

“Trust me, Maggie,” he said. “That woman did prison time.”