Free Let Go by Michael Patrick Hicks

LET GO

    Everett Hart hadn’t set foot inside Brown’s Fish & Chips in three years, not since his wife, Lucille, had died from breast cancer. When she was alive, they’d been regulars at the joint, coming every Sunday evening except during Lent, when they came on Fridays, which was when Brown’s was at its busiest. Getting a table had often come with a long wait, regulars or not.  
    Brown’s had been a staple in their relationship for going on twenty years, and it had seemed to Everett that the family-owned restaurant would always be there, same as his Lucille. She was gone; the restaurant remained.
    Little had changed about the small restaurant. At the front was a glass display case with the counter on top, empty save for the single wooden shelf that divided its interior, with room enough for two cash registers, although he could only recall ever seeing one of them manned, even during peak Lent hours. Two walls of the dining room were lined with a row of brown vinyl booths, the upholstery shiny and spiderwebbed with white lines and the occasional crack where the stuffing hemorrhaged its way out. In between were blue Formica tables with four chairs, the metal rimming polished and bright beneath the overhead lighting. Everything about the restaurant screamed “relic,” Everett included.
    The walls were unadorned, save for a single clock mounted at the front over the glass display case.
    Unassuming, maybe even dull, Brown’s attracted the elderly, primarily, thanks to its cheap food and barren interior, although families and children were certainly welcome and occasionally even seen.
    Everett did not consider himself elderly, even if retirement was fast approaching and he had his AARP card. He was well aware that death was close and that his birth was a quaint, forgotten notion that could only be smiled at, even if just with a meaningless, wistful smile. Lucille’s passing had made that abundantly clear, more so than his hair loss—and the whitening of what little hair remained—and all the damnable wrinkles that marred his face and body.
    “What can I getcha?” the waitress asked. She appeared roughly five minutes after a young Mexican boy had come to fill his water glass, not that Everett was logging the minutes. He didn’t mind waiting and revisiting old phantoms.
    Everett hadn’t bothered looking at the menu. There was no need; he always ordered the same. “Fried perch. Coleslaw. Fries.”
    “You got it, hon,” she said, making a quick scribble on the order pad and sauntering away.
    She looked like that waitress from Alice , he thought. Her hair was a miniature peroxide-blond beehive, and her uniform was brown. She was larger, too, and older. And maybe she didn’t look all that much like that one from Alice after all.  
    I think you’re thinking of Mama, from Mama’s Family, Lucille said from inside his head.
    You know, I think you’re right, hon.  
    The waitress’s name tag said Maddie, and she had a big caboose that he watched with morbid fascination as it swung side to side with each step toward the rear of the dining room, to the swinging door that must have led to the kitchen. He caught a brief glimpse of activity beyond, bodies hustling back and forth.
    He sat facing the inside of the restaurant because Lucille had always liked to take the seat facing the door and the front window. She was a people watcher and had always been oddly absorbed by who was coming in. Back then, he and Lucille had probably been the youngest customers Brown’s had ever seen.
    Lucille’s parents had introduced them to the place. It had been her father’s eightieth birthday—his last, as it happened—but the food had been good enough that they came back once in a while when neither felt like cooking. “Once in a while” turned into once a month, and that had turned into once a week.
    Lucille watched the people, occasionally commenting to him on who was coming or going. He would listen attentively, sipping ice