Saturday Night at the Lakeside Supper Club

Julia narrates in 2000-2014.

Julia’s first memory is of the July 4th fireworks when she was three. She likes the end of the noise and lights, preferring quiet. She likes taking walks in quiet winter mornings and dislikes summers, which she spends with her father at Floyd and Betty’s Lakeside Supper Club. Eager to participate in the business, Julia begins doing odd tasks at eight, her father saving half of her pay for her college fund. When she is 10, Ned tells her that she will inherit the restaurant when she is 21; he only owns it in trust until she becomes old enough. She thinks back to her memories of her mother dying from lung cancer, and Julia’s childhood conviction that Mariel could not die if Julia remained at her side.

Ned promises he will help Julia run the Lakeside as long as she wants, which causes her to consider her father’s fundamental happiness when he tends the bar. Though she has heard stories of her father’s obsessive collection of baseball memorabilia and his sad years before her birth, she struggles to align these narratives with the man she knows.

When she is 15, Julia resents the Lakeside, associating its history of allowing smoking with her mother’s death.