2 A.M. at The Cat's Pajamas

4:00 P.M

Outside the Red Lion Diner, a girl wearing an expedition coat and pajama bottoms yells into her cell phone that he’d better be coming to pick her up, not whenever he feels like it, but right the hell now.

The lobby no longer has arcade games, but it does have a pay phone. Lorca punches in the number. He holds a plastic container of sausage Mrs. Santiago gave him in thanks for returning her dog. The pajama-ed girl paces outside the window where Lorca stands, listening to the line ring. She wants the person on the other end to explain exactly what kind of asshole he thinks she is. She speaks with the matter-of-fact cruelty of a Northeast girl. They’re making young people younger. Or else Lorca is older than he’s ever been.

Fiinally, a woman picks up. “Mongoose’s.”

“I’d like to speak with Mongoose.”

“He’s not here. May I ask who’s calling?”

“When will he be back?”

“He went up the street for sandwiches.” The voice inhales sharply. “Lorca? Is that you?”

“Yeah.” Lorca closes his eyes. “It’s me.”

Her tone changes to repentant. “Lorca? How are you?”

“I’ve been better.”

“He’ll be happy you called,” she says. “I’ll tell him as soon as he’s back. Take care of yourself, Lorca.”

He hangs up. The sudden, quiet lobby. The walls are blue with deep yellow flecks. Lorca smells syrup and weak coffee. Inside the glass doors, families sit at plastic booths eating eggs. A waitress borrows a ketchup bottle from one table to give to a family whose food has just arrived.

There he is five years ago, untattooed, fiddling with the knobs of the booth’s personal jukebox. It is his first date with Louisa Vicino, snake girl at The Courtland Avenue Club, and he had to bring Alex because the kid threw a tantrum. Louisa doesn’t seem to mind. It is going well. In the car ride over, she and Alex discovered they both like Ray Charles and Swiss cheese with no holes.

“When they say vanilla shake”—Louisa studies the menu—“do they mean French or bean? I like bean but not French.”

“Me too.” Eleven-year-old Alex readjusts himself on the plastic seat so he can sit higher. Lorca is certain his son doesn’t know the difference between the two kinds of vanilla. Alex detests Lorca because he won’t let him play guitar, but detests being without him even more. Louisa is the first woman his father has allowed him to meet, albeit by force. She is an extension of his father ungoverned by obligatory familial resentment. Alex is free to be fascinated by this full-hipped woman who carries a purse the size of a fist and who declared in the car, “Anyone who doesn’t think Ray Charles is the best is a chump.”

They order milkshakes. Lorca wants to play Ray Charles on their personal jukebox, but it is broken. Sweat blooms in the fabric of the only button-down he owns.

The Courtland Avenue Club is a combination strip club/bowling alley, a glowing, neon dome you can see from the highway. Louisa dances three times a night and works shifts at the bar in between. Lorca has never seen her dance, and doesn’t want to. Her mouth is still red from the outside cold. Lorca likes how her chin moves when she is emphatic. “I didn’t finish college,” she says, “but I want to take classes. In what I’m not sure.”

The milkshakes arrive. She swallows a strawful, then turns to Alex. “How is it?”

He thinks about it. “Good.”

“Mine too. If you can flip a spoonful of it over and it doesn’t drip, it’s good.”

A tray of food arrives for the family next to them. The waitress slides each plate onto the table as the family oohs and aahs.

“I have to go to the bathroom,” Alex says.

“Hurry up,” Lorca says. “We have to get back to the club.”

Alex runs off. Louisa stacks a pile of creamers. “You’re rough with him.”

“I’m real with him. He’ll grow up knowing what’s real.”

“Or he’ll grow up hating you.”

Lorca feels the day falling off a cliff. “So,” he says, “how does someone get into the snake lady business?”

She allows him to change the subject but registers it with a tilt of her pretty eyebrows. “The original snake lady is a friend of mine. We were dancers together, legitimate dancers, in a burlesque show. She said it would be easy money. She was right.”

“How do you get them to stay on you?”

“Practice,” she says. “I hold my arms in the tank and they wind around.” She pantomimes holding her arms in a tank. “When I come onstage, the snakes’ heads are down by my hands. I shimmy around, show them to the boys.” She sways in the booth to demonstrate. “Then, I go like this.” She gyrates on the diner seat. Lorca’s neck warms. “They crawl around my belly and legs. I do splits, shimmies, the whole shebang. The snakes are pros. They’re the stars and they know it.”

“The whole shebang.” Lorca is getting a sad feeling. “Do you mix it up every time?”

“I do not,” she says, “mix it up.”

“What kind of future is in snake dancing?”

“It supported my friend for years,” she says. “She’s quitting because she has cancer and she wants to be with her kid, but if she didn’t, she could have done it indefinitely.” She reacts to his grimace. “I like it, Lorca. It’s fun.”

“Fun,” he says. “Do the snakes have names?”

“They have names.” She seems less willing to share their names than to talk about the dancing.

“Give.”

“Don’t laugh,” she says. “Hero and Leander. Like the Greek myth?”

“I know like the Greek myth.”

Alex returns from the bathroom and asks his father to win him a prize from the claw machine in the lobby. They slip into their coats. Every other table’s jukebox works. They walk through several eras of rock and roll, each table its own sad painting: the church crowd, a family, a couple, an old man eating alone. Lorca hears Alex call out the tunes. “ ‘Fill Me Up, Buttercup,’ ‘The Twist,’ ‘God Only Knows,’ ‘Chances Are.’ ” Louisa sings along, her voice Marlboro and terrible.

At the register, Lorca waits to pay while Louisa and Alex examine the pie cases. “Coconut custard,” she says. “You ever have that?”

Alex wrinkles his nose. “Bleh.”

“That’s how I feel about it, too. What about that one, Black Forest? I’m a chocolate girl.”

Alex’s voice is sober. “I’m a chocolate girl, too.”

She tousles his thick curls. Alex tries to hide how happy this makes him.

A gleaming bank of machines in the lobby promises prizes in exchange for skill. Alex points to what he wants: a stuffed owl. Lorca feeds a quarter into the machine and nothing happens.

“Two quarters, Dad.”

He feeds another quarter. “This only took one when I was a kid.”

Louisa says, “Tell it to your plants, old man.”

The claw, activated, lurches over the pile of toys. Before Lorca can figure out the buttons, it takes a directionless swipe and misses. The machine shudders to a halt. Lorca feeds it two more quarters.

The claw jerks to life again. This time he is able to position it over the owl. He lowers the claw; its metal hooks close over the animal but drops it when it ascends.

“You suck at this,” Louisa says.

Again he feeds the machine two quarters. Again the claw holds the owl for a moment, then drops it. “Is this fixed?” he says. Alex avoids his eyes.

Lorca has one quarter left. He asks Alex for another one. The boy digs through his pockets. “Well?”

“Jesus.” Louisa tosses him a quarter from her purse. Lorca tries again. Another failure. He shoves a dollar bill into Alex’s hands and tells him to get it changed behind the counter. “Do you want the toy or not?” he says, when the boy hesitates. He turns back to the machine. “They want you to lose all of your money in this thing.”

“It’s not a big deal,” Louisa says, shifting in her heels.

Alex returns with the change. Lorca loses the dollar in less than a minute. On the second attempt, the claw snatches the owl by its wing but at the last second, releases it.

Lorca elbows through the crowd that waits for available tables in thick coats and stockings. The pies in the case shine. He reaches the cashier. “Can someone talk to me about the machine in the lobby? How can I get my son the owl he wants?”

“One minute,” says the cashier.

“I’ll pay you for one,” Lorca says. “I can’t spend all day playing a game.”

The cashier’s smile is thin with aggravation. “It doesn’t work that way.”

“How about it works that way today?”

The manager is there, asking how he can help. “Why is everything in this place broken?” Lorca says. He leads the man to the lobby, where Louisa and Alex stand by the machine. Alex holds up the stuffed owl. “Louisa got it.”

“Lucky, I guess,” she says.

Louisa Maya Vicino. Louisa from her Italian grandmother, Maya from her Spanish mother, and Vicino which means “near,” because her distant ancestors lived in the vicinity of something important, like an olive grove.

Two weeks later, Lorca’s father, Francis, pauses in the middle of a story to readjust his grip on the pilsner he fills. When his head hits the ground, it makes a metallic sound Lorca can hear from the other end of the bar. His father is already dead by the time Lorca reaches him, beer unspooling around him, eyes fixed on some fascination under the bar. Lorca gathers him in his arms.

Gathers him in his name — Jack Francis Lorca.

We carry our ancestors in our names and sometimes we carry our ancestors through the sliding doors of emergency rooms and either way they are heavy, either way we can’t escape.