Just One Night Before I Go

I turned thirty-five at midnight, and I spent the last hour of my thirty-fourth year wiping down a bar that was already clean.

Joyce had her coat half on, which was her way of telling everyone the night was over whether they knew it or not. She's sixty-two, owns the Copper & Rye, and has run this place for twenty years without once letting me close alone. Her husband died when she was fifty-five, and after that she stopped drinking, but she never stopped loving the bar. She just stopped needing it. I respect that more than I can say.

"Bianca, go home," she said, pulling her keys off the hook. "The counter's clean. It's been clean for twenty minutes."

"I'm staying late tonight."

"You never close on Thursdays." She squinted at me the way she does when she's doing arithmetic on somebody. "What's tomorrow?"

"Friday."

"Bianca."

"It's my birthday. I'm taking the day off. First one in three years." I folded the rag over the rail and squared it. "And I want to close tonight my way. There's somebody I need to talk to, and I'd rather do it without an audience."

Joyce looked down the bar at the three people still nursing drinks. Two townies playing cribbage, and Matthew in his usual corner seat. Then she looked back at me, and something in her face softened into a smile she was too polite to say out loud.

"Lock up, put the bag in the safe, and call me if anything feels wrong," she said. "And happy birthday, sweetheart. Whatever you're about to do, do it kindly. He seems like a nice one."

She left. The cribbage players finished their game, paid, argued about who owed whom, paid again, and went out into the cold. Which left Adam, twenty-eight, fifth-year philosophy grad student, loud as a dropped tray and about as subtle. He'd been a regular for two years and had never once read a room.

"You're quiet tonight, Bianca," he announced, to me and to the room and possibly to posterity. "Is it the barometer? I read that pressure changes affect mood. Also, did you know Hume thought the self was a fiction?"

"I knew that, Adam."

"Right, right, of course you did, sorry." He gathered his coat and his giant backpack. "Hey, if anyone asks, I closed the place down tonight. It helps my reputation."

"Your reputation is safe. Goodnight, Adam."

The door clicked behind him and the bar went quiet in that particular way, the ice melting, the neon hum, the radiator ticking. I poured myself two fingers of the rye I never drink on shift, carried it around the bar, and sat down across from Matthew.

He's thirty-six. He started coming in three years ago, right after his postdoc ended, and in all that time I could count our conversations on one hand with fingers to spare. Same seat, same order, the Jameson, though he drinks it slow like it's costing him something. He reads, mostly, real books with spines cracked, and when he's not reading he watches the room, and when he's not watching the room he watches me, though he always looks away first. Three years of that. I'd stopped being flattered by it somewhere in year two and started being curious instead.

"It's my birthday," I said, setting the glass down. "Twelve minutes old. I'm thirty-five, and I decided the one thing I want is an answer to a question I've been sitting on for three years."

He closed the book on his finger. "Okay."

"Why don't you ever talk to me?"

He didn't laugh it off, which I would have forgiven him for. He looked at the glass in front of him and turned it a quarter turn on the wood.

"You'd have made it easy," I said. "I'm right here. I pour you whiskey. I know your order and the fact that you don't like the jukebox and that you tip exactly twenty percent every time. And you've never once asked me a single question about myself."

"I know."

"That's it? I know?"

"That's mostly it." He took a breath. "Can I tell you the longer version?"

I gestured at the empty bar. It's yours.

He sat forward, elbows on the bar, and looked at his hands instead of at me, which I understood, because I'd have made it hard for him if he'd looked at me straight.

"When I started coming here, I'd just finished my postdoc and I was wrecked about it. My whole life had been a ladder, and I got to the top of it and found out the top was just another floor. I was in a bad way. Not dangerous bad, just hollow bad. And I came in here the first night because it was close and the sign said open." He smiled a little. "You were working. You were nice to me without being nice at me, if that makes sense. You didn't ask what was wrong. You just put the drink down and left me alone, and I thought, this is the place. This is where I'll get well."

"And did you?"

"Mostly. Took about a year. And somewhere in there it stopped being about getting well and started being about you, and I told myself, fine, but you don't open with that. You don't walk up to a woman who's working and tell her she's the reason you kept showing up. That's a lot to hand somebody. So I decided I'd wait until I had something to offer. A reason to stay. A reason that wasn't please notice me, I'm fragile."

I drank some of the rye. It was better than I remembered, or I was different than I remembered.

"So you were waiting."

"I was waiting for the job to come through. There was a faculty position here, small college up the road, and I interviewed in the fall and I told myself, when that's real, when I'm staying, then I'll say something. Ask her to dinner in the usual way. Three years of Tuesdays and I'd finally be a normal person."

He picked up the glass and put it down without drinking.

"And then in March the other offer came first. Good job. Indiana. Starts Monday."

The radiator ticked. Somewhere in the back the ice machine dropped a load of cubes, loud as a gunshot in the quiet.

"So you're leaving," I said.

"Sunday night. I drive out at dawn Monday." He finally looked at me, and I'll admit it landed harder than three years of not looking. "I didn't plan on telling you this way, sitting here while you interrogate me on your birthday. But you asked, and I'm tired of the alternative."

"Which is?"

"Leaving town with unfinished business. I've done that before. It sits wrong."

I looked at him for a while. I thought about all the Tuesdays I'd noticed him noticing me and filed it under someday, the way you do, the way I have done my whole life, actually, because I came to this town at twenty-four for a job and I've never once regretted it and never once pushed at anything either. There was a grad student when I was twenty-nine, a brief undefined thing I walked away from clean, and I've always told myself that was discipline. Some nights I wonder if it was just the same waiting, dressed up better.

"Here's my situation," I said. "Today I turned thirty-five and I want exactly one thing, and it's not a party and it's not a raise. It's one good night with a person of my choosing, no strings on either end, no questions, no future promised to anybody. And for three years the person I'd have chosen has been sitting in that seat reading old novels and not talking to me."

He went very still.

"Now it turns out you're leaving at dawn Monday, which is terrible timing, or possibly perfect timing, I haven't decided. Because it means the no-strings part is real. It's not a strategy. Neither of us has to pretend there's a road after this one."

"Bianca," he said, careful, "what are you asking me?"

"I'm asking if you'd like to spend my birthday with me. That's all I'm asking. Just tonight, and then you drive to Indiana and I keep pulling pints, and we both get to say it was good."

He set his glass down with both hands, like it needed steadying, or like he did.

"You should know I'm not smooth," he said. "Three years of silence means I've thought about this a lot and said none of it out loud, ever, to anyone."

"Good. I'm not smooth either. I pour drinks and I own one houseplant that refuses to die and I have eleven mugs from thrift stores and no idea how to do this."

"Eleven?"

"Don't get distracted."

He laughed, and it cracked something open in the room. He turned in his stool to face me fully for the first time in three years.

"Then yes," he said. "Yes. Ask me whatever you want, I'll answer it. And then whatever you want after that, you say it plain, because I'm not going to guess anymore. I've been guessing for three years and look where it got me. Three days left in this town and a bartender I never worked up the nerve to talk to."

"Three days," I said. "And a night."

"And a night," he said.

I told him about the rule somewhere in the next half hour, with the doors locked and the bag in the safe and Joyce long gone home to her cats.

The rule is this: I don't sleep with anybody before a birthday. Only after. It started as a joke I told myself at twenty-five, some nonsense about fresh starts, and then it turned into an actual policy, the way jokes do when you repeat them long enough. I've explained it to exactly two men in my life, and both of them looked at me like I'd handed them a coupon with an expiration date. Matthew didn't laugh, which told me something.

"So tonight counts," he said.

"Tonight counts. It's after, by thirty minutes." I checked my phone to be sure. Twelve thirty-one. "Technically I'm already thirty-five. Which means the last hour of my thirty-fourth year was spent wiping a clean bar and interrogating you, and I regret nothing."

"That's a strange rule."

"It's not a rule like physics. It's a rule like a superstition. I don't sleep with a man in one year and then have him meet me as a new woman in the next. I did that once and it felt like two different people were involved." I slid off my stool, because we were closing, because even on the night I'd been waiting for, the ice machine still needed to be emptied and the chairs still needed to go up. "It's mostly theater, if you want the truth. But I keep it."

He helped me with the chairs without being asked, which is more than Adam has done in two years, and Adam talks enough for four people. I emptied the till, counted it twice, and thought about how I'd been doing this exact sequence for eleven years, just not on Thursdays, and how tomorrow was the first day off I'd taken in three and how I'd decided to spend it mostly horizontal, apparently, with a man whose name I still wasn't sure I knew.

That last part bothered me enough that I said it out loud while I locked the front door.

"I don't actually know your name. I know your drink and your tip percentage and that you read real books with cracked spines, and I don't know your name. That's kind of incredible when I think about it."

"Matthew." He said it the way people say things they've been holding in their mouth for years, careful, like a coin they didn't want to spend. "Matthew Klein." I tried it out. It fit him. Some names fit, you know? "Okay, Matthew Klein. Do you want to walk me home, or do you want to stand on this sidewalk until dawn like a statue?"

"I'd like to walk you home."

Langdon at half past twelve in the morning is the quietest place in Ohio. We went up through the edge of campus, past the library with its one lit window, past the quad where some student government type had left a banner up about an event that ended in June. Matthew walked on the street side of the sidewalk without announcing it, which is the kind of thing you notice after three years of a person not doing anything at all.

I talked more than he did, which is not my habit, but the night had knocked something loose in me. I told him about the job that brought me here when I was twenty-four, a restaurant gig that turned into a bar gig that turned into Joyce deciding I was permanent, the way you decide a coat is permanent. I told him I'd meant to leave twice and never did. He listened the way I imagine he reads, fully, without waiting for his turn.

"You don't regret it," he said. "Coming here."

"I regret exactly two things and neither one is a place. How about you?"

"I regret being patient. Patience is supposed to be a virtue and in my case it was just fear with better posture."

I laughed, an actual laugh, out loud on an empty street, and a dog barked at me from behind a fence and I laughed again at that. He smiled like he'd won something.

My apartment sits above a used bookstore on Corliss Street, up a flight of outside stairs that creak in a specific sequence. I flipped the porch light on for him and unlocked the door and had one moment, standing in my own doorway, of wanting to be the kind of person whose apartment is ready for guests. It is not that kind of apartment. It's small and the ceiling is low and the radiator has opinions about the temperature, and the bookshelf is mostly paperbacks and there is one pothos on the windowsill that I have had for nine years and cannot kill no matter how badly I neglect it.

"Eleven mugs," he said. He was looking at the shelf above the sink, where they all sit in a row because I have no cupboard space and also because I like the row.

"Don't start."

"Eleven thrift-store mugs, and you told me not to get distracted, and I've been thinking about it for two hours."

"Every one of them cost under a dollar. There's one from a church sale in Dayton with a rooster on it, and one that says WORLD'S OKAYEST FISHERMAN, which I bought because it was funny, and one that's just ugly, a genuine ugly mug, glazed some color that doesn't occur in nature. I have a rule about those too. I can't leave a mug behind if it's under a dollar. It's a sickness."