Free The Grandfather Clock by Jonathan Kile

Claudette
confirmed what I had suspected. She was divorced from her husband.
She still used the term, “my husband,” but there was a distance to
it. I had learned to listen and not pry. I never asked too many
questions, but I knew Claudette was my friend when she started
showing up when Robert wasn’t playing.
    Every visit was a process of
formalities. First, she would order her drink, as if she’d never
been there before. She would taste it, to make sure it was to her
liking, and then she’d light a cigarette. Then, as the smoke
drifted into the air, she became my friend. She usually arrived in
the mid to late afternoon, and stayed for two or three drinks. She
always left when the rowdier crowd began to arrive.
    It was probably a month after I first
saw her, and the second visit she’d made that Robert wasn’t playing
that I realized she was there to talk to me. So I asked her the
question I usually avoided.
    “ What do you
do?”
    “ What? Besides drink a dry
martini and smoke?”
    I laughed. “No. You aren’t a tourist.
You’re French. What are you doing here?”
    She put out her cigarette, I think to
be polite, and explained, “I teach French. U.N.O. and Dillard. Some
of my students even learn French.”
    I nodded. “I took three semesters of
French in college, and I can order a beer and find a
bathroom.”
    “ You have to use it,” she
said. “You have to need something. Or you’ll never learn
anything.”
    As I learned Claudette’s story, she
learned mine. I told her about how a grandfather clock had led me
to New Orleans. I hadn’t told many people about the clock, because
it was just this odd thing. Every once in a while, when someone
would have something interesting happen in their life, whether it
was a new girlfriend, or leaving town for another job, she’d say
something like, “They have a grandfather clock too.” It was like
she was reminding me, or reassuring me, that I was there for a
reason.
    With Claudette at the bar, I began
brushing up on my French. There were plenty of opportunities to use
French in New Orleans, although, it isn’t as widely spoken as
Spanish. Everywhere you went, there were French place-names, and
French foods, and French visitors. I was genuinely interested in
learning more French, but mostly I just liked her eager attempts to
teach me. I could tell Claudette was lonely, and maybe she didn’t
know it. Maybe she did. When I thought about that, I wondered if I
was lonely. I didn’t feel lonely.
    By October, the weather was getting
cooler and the sun was going down earlier. It was a welcome change.
I’d been sweating since February. Sam came to visit. He arrived off
the plane and came straight to the bar. It was a Friday so I was
getting off work around the same time Claudette was closing out her
tab. It was happenstance that Sam and I were walking with Claudette
toward Canal Street. I felt it necessary to tell Sam that I didn’t
plan on bartending forever.
    “ You should not fear time,
Michael,” she said. “In French we have a saying. ‘Le temps est un
grant maitre.’ ‘Time is a great teacher.’”
    “ Wow,” said Sam, taken
aback by the impromptu wisdom. “That’s deep.”
    She continued, “Dit-on, le malheur est
qu’il tue ses eleves.”
    I laughed. Catching most of the
meaning.
    “ What’s that?” Sam
asked.
    “ Time is a great teacher.
It’s too bad it also kills all of its students,” she
smiled.
    “ Damn,” Sam
sighed.
    “ The clock is a lesson for
Michael,” she said.
    “ If the clock is a lesson,
what’s the gun?” Sam laughed.
    “ Gun?” Claudette
asked.
    I had almost forgotten about the
gun.
    I explained, “When we were moving the
clock, we found an old gun that had been stored inside the clock.
It’s like an old muzzleloader. I haven’t had a chance to really
look at it, honestly.”
    “ All these old things,”
she said motioning to the window of an antique shop, “they have
stories they want to tell.”
    “ So the