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Those days are now gone.  Still, in an effort to stay in touch with Jeanie and the few who continue to frequent the place, my husband and I decide to visit Morelli’s on a summer night when the air is wavy with desert heat. Our clammy bodies gradually dry in the bright, air-conditioned room where we pay twice as much as we used to for admittedly better drinks. To our delight, Roy is still there, with his dog, Keno, and soon he and my husband are playing pool. Roy wins most of the time, even with a prosthetic leg that occasionally hampers his balance. Kenny is also there, stroking Keno and blinking hard at his new surroundings, like a man awakened after a long sleep, like a man trying to get his bearings. Kenny is a slight man in his fifties with shaggy hair and two small holes in his not quite white t-shirt. He shifts his weight from hip to hip and orders more beers than usual. I wave at him, and his smile is shaky.

Laverne, another oldie, moves in to claim an empty barstool. Laverne is wearing a man’s flannel shirt, dusty jeans and black work boots. She works construction, and her pockets are frequently full of tools that could be called weapons, such as five-inch switchblade knives. Laverne enjoys speaking of herself in daunting terms, but one gets the impression she’s making up the details as she goes along. As she drinks, she also grows maudlin, talking tearfully about how she misses having Robin behind the bar. “Robin always asked about my friends,” Laverne says, nodding in Willy’s direction. “She always remembered the older customers that came in. The young people were just riffraff to her, you know? Now it’s…it’s different now.” She also speaks of herself as Robin’s defender, telling story after hazy story about the times Robin enlisted her to kick people out of her Nest when they were getting too aggressive. At Robin’s retirement party, for example, Laverne claims she acted as Robin’s personal rescuer. But Jeanie has another version.  “She didn’t save her, she caused it!” Jeanie shouts when she hears Laverne’s description of events. According to Jeanie, it was Laverne who got violent and pushed Robin, nearly knocking her to the ground, after which Laverne was swiftly “eighty-sixed.” But, Jeanie says, “that was when it was still Robin’s so, unfortunately, technically she’s still allowed in Morelli’s.”

It really doesn’t matter anymore who pushed whom that evening. At Robin’s retirement party it was standing room only, and what people remember is a dirty, dimly lit bar with the best jukebox in town playing late into the night. They remember buying each other drinks and talking and squabbling the way they always did. And they remember Robin sitting at the end of the bar, beaming and proud and heartbroken. When she finally left the bar for the last time the only things she took with her were her many robin’s nests. Everything else was hauled off to the dump.

SHARON BLACK worked as a translator in Berlin, Germany, for eleven years before returning to the States to complete a master’s degree in writing at Humboldt State University in 2007. She is still trying to figure out how she ended up in Sparks, Nevada, although she does like its bars.