Sooner or later, everyone grows a mustache.

In keeping with tradition, New Year’s Eve 2017 was like no other New Year’s at Smugglers’ Inn, ever.   Nothing happened.  As in no fist fights.  No nudity.  No employee walk-offs.  No appearances by former employees, feared dead, who had been secretly living in the attic crawlspaces for weeks.  The three seatings in the dining room filled, emptied and re-filled like clockwork.  Our regular customers complained that the New Year’s menu items were half as numerous and more expensive than they were normally while the folks who go out once a year smiled and ordered splits of $6 champagne for $18.   It was hardly worth writing about.  So, I didn’t.

Instead, I waited, hoping that something freaky would occur on Valentine’s Day that would be worth sharing with the loyal followers of this blog.  All 26 of you.  As they say in the comic books, be careful what you wish for. 

Next to New Year’s Eve, Valentine’s Day is the busiest day of the year for Smugglers’ Inn’s hospitality division.  If you have a sit-down restaurant and you aren’t busy on February 14, you may wish to consider throwing in the towel.  If Ihop took reservations, they would be booked on V-Day.  Smuggler’s Inn was over-booked.  While we do not do three seatings as we do on New Year’s Eve, we pretty much assume that every table in the place will fill at least twice between seven and 10, the hour when our kitchen closes during the week.  We assume that some people who make reservations will not show.  Just like the airlines. Unlike the airlines, though, we don’t employ any fancy algorithms to predict how many people out of 100 reserved seats would otherwise go empty.  We leave that to whomever is taking reservations, usually the seating hostess.  Karin.

I’ve not mentioned Karin before in this blog.  That’s because she’s new.  And now gone, so I can say what I think, which is that Karin was the only Smugglers’ Inn seating hostess to have been challenged by the job.  Nice person, lovely human being--don’t get me wrong.  But the woman couldn’t say “no” (or lots of other words that had only a few more letters, if you’ll permit me to be blunt. ) When someone would call on February 13 and request a table for six February 14th at eight o’clock, Karin would look at our reservation book and see a line through eight o’clock along with all the other o’clock’s.  Karin would apologize and explain to the party in question that we were booked after which, the party in question would say, “Pleeease!” and spin some hooey about a boyfriend on leave from Afghanistan or a girlfriend just out of the hospital.  Karin would buckle and say, “Well, just show up and we’ll squeeze you in.”  

It's hard to know what Karin was thinking, exactly, because when Carol, the day manager, discovered a sheet of names and times that had been folded and stuck in our (completely full) reservation book, she called the off-duty hostess up and fired her.  I wouldn’t have fired Karin, but then, I’m the good cop.  It did provide us with an excuse to give to people who had made reservations when they had to wait, on average, 20 minutes to be seated.  We offered everyone a complimentary glass of champagne for the inconvenience and most people seemed mollified.  Hey, you don’t want to look like a sour puss on Valentine’s Day.

In the end, the weather came to our aid.  While Minnesotans are famous for not letting snow or ice keep them off the roads, a mini-blizzard was in the forecast and couples who may have been tempted to spend a little more time holding hands under the table and staring off into space opted to skip dessert and coffee in order to make it home before the predicted ten inches of the white stuff.

I would almost say that Karin’s crappy reservation-taking had ended up being a positive thing, were it not for one party that showed up 15 minutes before our kitchen was set to close. There was no record for a party of five under the name, “Fannig”, either in the reservations book or on Karin’s informal waiting list, but I wasn’t about to turn them away.  One of their number was confined to a wheelchair and judging from how the man pushing it was panting, they had ignored the handicapped access on the side of the building and had manhandled the chair through a couple of inches of new snow in our parking lot.

“Right this way,” I said and seated Los Fannigs at a six-top that had been set for two all evening.  It was pretty clear they were a family, maybe our first one of this Valentine’s night.  None of them looked under 55.  I’d assumed that the woman in the wheelchair was the matriarch.  A metallic, heart-shaped balloon was attached to a fun-sized Oxygen tank protruding from a vinyl pouch on the back of the chair. Its buoyancy had been compromised from the short push outside in the cold weather.  The heart was trying its best to stay afloat.  Much like the Fannig’s, I thought. 

“Thanks a lot,” said Erin, the server in whose section the Fannig’s were now seated.  “I was worried you'd stopped loving me.”  Erin knew she would likely be hanging around an hour and a half for a five-dollar tip.  She had been our seating hostess before switching to serving, where the money was.  Erin was not particularly well-suited to either of these jobs, but her sharp wit and writing ability(she claimed a degree in English Lit from the National University of Ireland, in Galway) made her an indespensible part of Smugglers’Inn, the advertising agency.  A venture that was seeming like something that I had only imagined.  On this cold night in February, anyway.

The anticipated snow fall had begun.  Within, I’d say, ten minutes a third of the patrons in the bar had evaporated.  The dishwashers and the cooks were no less anxious to get home, but they were stuck until the Fennig’s ordered.  I thought I would remind their server of this fact.

“Erin...”

“No, I don’t have their fookin’ order, boss,” said Erin, not waiting for me to finish my question.  (I hate when Erin calls me "boss", but somehow when she says "fookin" I find it charming.) “It’s some sort of send-off for the old gal.  They’re blubberin’ like she’s dead already.  Poor gal.  You'd think they'd give her a shave with the perm."

I offered to get the Fennig’s order myself and Erin called my bluff.  I came back twenty seconds later.  Without an order.

“Jesus!  I said, "They’re reading poems.   In Hebrew, I think.”

Erin correct me. 

“It’s Welsh”.

“Welsh? Who speaks Welsh?” 

“Tom Jones is Welsh,” Erin volunteered.

I ran down the lyrics to “What’s New, Pussycat?” and “It’s not Unusual” in my head, but what was coming from the Fennig’s table sounded decidedly more ancient.  And sadder.

The heaviousity emanating from the Fennigs’ table swept across our dining room like the wave at a football stadium.  Couples who had been touching foreheads and petting arms disengaged.  Hands went up, signaling for checks.  $22 plates of Surf ‘n Turf were cleared away, half eaten.  
 

“Who let the stink bomb off?” 

April, not the month, the cocktail waitress, was surveying what had been a full dining room when she’d finished her shift 20 minutes ago.  She peered out from the kitchen, still left-swiping messages on the iPhone that every 21-year-old seems to come with. Unlike me or, I gathered, Erin, April had a Valentine who would be waiting for her. 

“We had an active shooter situation while you were on the phone.  Twenty dead. You just missed the news cameras.”  Erin delivered in a deadpan voice.  By now, she had turned in the Fennig’s order and was just hanging out with me by the hostess station, shooting the shit.  Every tab but the Fennigs’ had been paid and change given.  It was 10:08.

April looked at the Fennigs, who, except for the old woman, were working on their salads. 

Erin made a shooing motion with her hand. 

“Run along, youngster.  Get laid for the rest of us.”

April did not run along.  She walked very deliberately through the dining room to the kitchen, turned around and walked back, each time passing very close by the Fennig’s.  She said one word and that was “dead”.  Actually, April said a lot of words, but they all meant the same thing: the guest of honor at the Fennig’s dinner was almost certainly a corpse.

“How can you tell?”

 I’d seen dead people before, but they’d been in coffins.  Where they belong.

“They’ve tried to cover it up with make-up, but she has lividity on the left side of her face, which indicates that was the side she was lying on when she died.  Plus, she isn’t breathing.”

Erin crossed herself.  Irish.

“You need to call an ambulance ,” April said. “It’s against state law to transport a body without a license.”

“I guess we’d better, then.  Thanks, April.  I’ll get on it. Oh, April? I’d appreciate if you wouldn’t…”

“Don’t worry.  I am, like, the scroll of discretion.”

April left then to rendezvous with her date. And, I had no doubt, to tell anyone on her contacts list that there was a dead lady at the restaurant where she worked. 

“You never called the ambulance, did you?” Erin asked after she’d returned from cashing out her last couple of tables and returned to see me rooted in the same spot.

“I was just about to,” I said. “Then, the old gal sat bolt upright in her chair, looked about and, seeing the joy-filled faces of her clan gathered about her, clapped her hands once, which seemed to be the signal for everyone to pull out their phones and take selfies with grandma, then, after maybe a minute of seeming lucidity…” I snapped my fingers. “--back to dreamland.  The old gal hasn’t stirred again.  Sucks getting old.”

“You’d have to tell me about that,”said Erin, then added, “They tipped me fifty--the Fennig’s.  Fifty on 78 (dollars).” 

“No kidding? And what do we tell April, when she insists that the woman was deceased?”

“That she made a mistake, that’s all. No harm done.  Say, do you think the old lady could have narcolepsy, waking up like that and going back to sleep?”

“Narcolepsy?  Hmm. I’ve never seen someone with narcolepsy.  Until tonight, I mean.” 

And that was Valentine’s Day 2018 at Smuggler’s Inn.  Having to serve dinner to a corpse might have gone down in restaurant lore for the ages, but the narcoleptic who was mistaken for a dead person was not that great a story and everyone immediately forgot about the Fennig’s.  Well, I’d forgotten about it.

Until today, when I came to work and saw a bit of red foil sticking out of a pile of snow from the recent Easter blizzard. (Why do I still live in Minnesota?) I don’t know why, but I pulled it out and it was a completely deflated heart-shaped balloon. Written on it in a Sharpie was, “Thank you, Smugglers Inn!”

Whomever had written the message had left out an apostrophe, but I didn’t care.  I pinned it to the whiteboard in my office with a magnet.  Then, I called the previously-fired Karin back and asked if she wanted any hours. In my opinion, the girl hadn’t been guilty of any crime save having a big heart.  If you can’t have a big heart on Valentine’s Day, what’s the point of showing up?

Next time I write, I will have advertising activity to report.  Turns out April’s uncle didn’t have a funeral home.  He had five and was in negotiations to buy two more.  April, quite kindly, suggested to her uncle that he really needed some outside marketing help and didn’t she know just the guys?  Anyway, a bit of good luck.  Or maybe just Karma.

Happy New Year and Valentine’s Day and Easter from the new agency of record for Washburn-Benson family of funeral homes.  Remember, you’re alive as long as your relatives are still speaking to you.