A TOAST TO CHRISTMAS AT THE SENECA CAFE

“Pearl,” he said. “Our bet.” “‘11:43, Sunday, December 24’ “Pearl read from her iPhone. “The bet officially begins NOW.”

The terms remained fuzzy. The man, August “Jerry” Bauer, had bet that he would have a full bar, at least all 12 stools, at some point between noon and 6 o’clock on Christmas Eve. It was tradition. Guys got off work early, even if just a little early, and they’d stop at his bar, the Seneca Cafe. For some, it was the only time all year they saw each other. They’d say, “A toast to Christmas” — code for another round. Sometimes the bar stayed open until midnight, for the guys who had nowhere else to be, and then Jerry and Doris went upstairs, said “Merry Christmas” to each other, and went to bed.

Jerry had come back from World War II, did a stay at the Aspinwall VA hospital that he never talked about, and then got a job at Fort Pitt Brewing Co. It covered blocks. By 1949, it was the biggest brewery in Pennsylvania, and one of the top 25 in the country, turning good Sharpsburg water into almost 2 million gallons of beer a year. And then, not even a decade later, they stopped brewing. Just like that. The company went into men’s overcoats and jukeboxes and missile parts. Jerry couldn’t believe it.

He shot a glance at the stopped clock on the Old Shay DeLuxe Beer electric sign behind the bar that he built with his brothersin-law on the ground floor of this house he’d bought for his wife. Doris had grown up on a farm in O’Hara and commuted by streetcar to Pitt. She taught history in the Fox Chapel School District, which she loved because Sharpsburg students went to school with Fox Chapel ones. “Good for both,” she said of “her” kids.

He’d first seen Doris when she came to the door of his family’s Sharpsburg row house selling The Volume Library encyclopedias. His dad said he bought the first one because “the girl” was German, too, which was partly true.

It was Doris who had named the cafe when it opened in 1958, dipping into local history, which she saw vividly everywhere she looked.

“Native Americans canoed along these banks just moments ago,” she’d tell you, adding, as she often did, “in the scheme of things.” She saw them moments before she died in 2015, at age 96, at Lighthouse Pointe Village at Chapel Harbor. She hated that name but enjoyed the views of the Allegheny River and she always liked the housemade bread.

The brewery sign clock had worked decades longer than the brewery but finally stopped, too. Jerry knew nothing lasts forever. But he wasn’t going to be the one to take down a Fort Pitt sign while it still lit.

And he wasn’t going to therapy. Pearl had bet him that he would have NO customers after noon on Christmas Eve. If she won, he had to go back, after the holidays, to therapy, where they’d met. Pearl was a physical therapist assistant.

“Sex therapist!” Spider always said. Spider was a broke, twice-divorced and threetoothed roofer who rented just up the skinny street and who was one of the bar’s very few living customers. Or had been, before Jerry, just after Thanksgiving, had kicked him out and told him to not come back on account of him “sexually harassing” Pearl.

Truth was, even Spider hadn’t been coming in much these days. Jerry heard he’d started drinking the “craft” beers served at the new “craft” breweries on Main Street and in the old Fort Pitt Brewery, in the power plant where the huge coal-fired boiler used to be. Jerry couldn’t figure out what “craft” is. But apparently everybody, even Spider, wanted it.

Pearl had tried to explain. “It’s, you know, local. It’s good.” “Fort Pitt was right there. It was great.” “You should try it, Jerry,” said Pearl’s roommate, Moira. She had brought home a four-pack of cans from Dancing Gnome Beer. Jerry, who only knew six-packs and cases, asked her three times about the name, which every time made him laugh. Then he reached to open a can.

“STOP! That’s not for drinking!” Moira yelled at him. “It’s for trading.”

Jerry had no idea what she was talking about. ••• OUTSIDE THE FROSTY third-floor window above the cafe it was sunny but — Pearl could tell from the smoke and steam rising from the little houses — cold.

she thought, and shivered. As a physical therapist assistant, she’d seen a lot. She knew how fast things can go downhill.

With one foot she covered snoring Moira’s feet with the satin-trimmed corner of her mint green wool blanket, soft but scratchy. She doze-dreamed about them living together someplace else. Someplace flat. Everything on one floor and new.

Their friends loved the apartment for its “vintage” furnishings and decor, but actually, Pearl hadn’t done any decorating. It was just as it was when Jerry and Doris lived there, from the floral cotton sheets on the single beds to the thick Shenango china in the metal cupboards to the gold-flecked brown upholstery of what Jerry still called the “davenport.”

Pearl had tracked him down when he stopped showing up for therapy after just a few sessions. She had been assigned to Mr. Bauer just before last Christmas, when he’d slipped on the icy street and broke his hip and had it replaced by UPMC. The office couldn’t reach him or his family contact, but Pearl knew he was a widower, so she pedaled a Healthy Ride bike to his address and found out it was a bar.

Unable to get up and down stairs, Jerry was living on the first floor, mostly in what had been the cafe’s kitchen. Adapting, which Pearl knew is what damaged muscle groups do.

He seemed to get by just fine between a walker and a wheelchair the occupational therapist gave him. Waving the plastic urinal he’d brought home from the hospital (”I paid for it,” he said, which wasn’t true), he joked with Pearl, “I always did prefer my beer in a bottle.” One night, to keep an eye on him, she took a nap in the apartment. He insisted on pouring her beer into a glass. They clinked and clicked.

Pearl met Moira at work, too, that summer. A torn bicep. Moira said it felt completely healed. Pearl knew better.

Moira did CrossFit and was a climber. Pearl, who was born here — Lawrenceville, about 10 years before Moira — didn’t know Pittsburgh even had climbers.