Last Call at the Rusty Anchor

My name is Claude, I'm sixty-four years old, and I've been running the pharmacy on Harbor Street for eleven years now. Two years ago, when I was sixty-two, a woman named Lilly walked into my life at the Rusty Anchor, sat down across from me in the back booth, and asked me if I was any good in bed. I'm getting ahead of myself, but not by much. That's pretty much how it happened, and I've never quite gotten over the novelty of it.

The Rusty Anchor sits two blocks off the water, wedged between a bait shop that closed in 2019 and a nail salon that keeps odd hours. Inside it's dim in a way that isn't depressing, just dim, like the owner Harold figured out years ago that nobody in a bar wants to see each other too clearly. There are leather stools along the bar that are worn down to a shine in the seat, a jukebox that mostly plays old soul records because that's all that's in it, and a back booth with a curtain that Harold pulls for regulars. I'd been a regular for maybe eight years at that point, sitting in that booth with a beer after closing the pharmacy, reading the labels on the condiment bottles because there was nothing else to read.

It was a Thursday in October when Lilly walked in. I remember it was a Thursday because Thursday was when the pharmacy did its big insurance reconciliation and my head was full of rejected claims and prior authorizations. I remember it was October because the bar smelled like wet wool and whiskey that night, that damp coastal chill that gets into everything from September through April. Lilly would tell me later she remembered it was raining, and I'd say I didn't remember any rain, and we'd go back and forth about it the way couples do until one of us laughed.

She was sixty-one then. I learned that early on, because she told me flat out, the way some people tell you their zip code. She'd retired from the bank downtown three years before, the branch with the drive-through window that always smelled like exhaust. She had white hair cut short and reading glasses on a chain around her neck, and she carried herself as if she had stopped asking permission for things somewhere around 1995 and never looked back.

She didn't ask if the seat was taken. She just slid in across from me with her whiskey neat and set her glass down on the coaster with a definite little click, and looked at me over those reading glasses.

"You look as if you count pills for a living," she said.

"That's because I do," I said.

"Well," she said, and took a sip. "Are you any good in bed?"

I could say I came back with something clever, but I didn't. I sat there for a second with my mouth slightly open, sixty-two years old and struck dumb in a dive bar by a retired bank teller. Then I heard myself laugh, an actual laugh, one of the real ones that comes up from the chest, and I said something like, nobody's ever asked me that before, and she said, well, somebody should have, and that was the start of it.

Harold, who was forty-four then and is forty-six now, saw the whole thing from behind the bar and later claimed he'd never seen anybody get picked up that fast in his establishment. He pulled the curtain on our booth without being asked. He's the kind of bartender who reads a room and then quietly manages it, which is probably why the tip jar does as well as it does.

We talked for three hours that night. That's the part people don't expect when you tell them the opening line was that blunt. We talked about her years at the bank and how she once caught a guy passing counterfeit twenties and talked him into just leaving, and about the pharmacy, and about her mother's recipe for clam chowder, and about whether the jukebox had played the same B.B. King record four times in a row or whether we were both losing our minds. She was funny in a dry, unhurried way. She'd finished her sentence before the joke landed, so when it landed you had a moment alone with it.

She asked me to stay over that first night. I did. And I'll say this for her, she asked the same way she asked everything, straight out, no hedging, sitting on the edge of her bed untying her shoes. But that part comes later in the story, and anyway the point of tonight is that two years on, we're still doing this. Still meeting at the Anchor. Still her asking and me saying yes.

* * *

Tonight was a Tuesday, which matters because Tuesdays the pharmacy closes at six instead of eight, and also because Tuesdays the Anchor empties out early. I locked the register at six, counted the Schedule Twos twice like I always do, and stood in the back room for a minute under the fluorescent light just breathing. Some days the job is fine and some days it's a hundred small conversations with people who don't feel good, and today had been the second kind. Old Mr. Denny came in for his refills and stayed twenty minutes to talk about his late wife. A young mother had a crying baby and no insurance. You carry it home with you a little, that's all. Not heavy, just there.

I drove the six blocks in my Corolla, which is eleven years old and has a crack across the windshield from a gravel truck on Route 9. The fog was coming in off the water the way it does, not thick yet, just sitting out there over the harbor like it was thinking about it. The Anchor's sign had one letter out again, the U, so it said THE RSTY ANCHOR, and I remember thinking that Harold was going to leave it that way until the whole sign died, because that's how Harold is about maintenance.

Inside, the bar was down to three guys watching the ball game on the TV over the register, and Harold was doing inventory on the well bottles, making little marks on a pad. The jukebox was on but quiet, something slow with horns in it. The cooler hummed. Through the window behind the bar you could just make out the water, gray on gray.

And there she was.

Lilly was in our booth, back booth, third one down, with a whiskey neat in front of her and her reading glasses pushed up on top of her head. She'd come straight from her apartment, evidently, because she had on the green scarf I bought her for Christmas two years ago, the first gift I ever gave her, and her coat was still draped over the end of the bench like she'd only just settled. She had her hands wrapped around the glass, not drinking, just holding it, and when she saw me come in she didn't wave or anything. She just took her glasses down off her head, put them on, and looked at me over the top of them, which is her way of saying I've been waiting and I'm deciding whether to be annoyed about it.

I set my coat on the barstool nearest the booth and Harold gave me the nod. Not a big nod. Harold's nods are calibrated instruments. This one said, she's been here forty minutes, she's on her second, and she told me to leave the curtain alone until you got here, so don't screw it up. Something like that. Maybe less words. Harold poured me my beer without my asking and had it on the bar by the time I'd hung my coat, which is another thing about him, he remembers what regulars drink and in what order they need it.

I took the beer and my coat back to the booth and sat down across from her. The bench squeaked the way it always does. Up close she looked like she'd had a day too, in a good way, if that makes sense. There's a look she gets when she's got plans, and it was on her face tonight. She lifted her glass at me a half inch.

"Long shift?" she asked.

"Long enough," I said. "You been here long?"

"Long enough to be annoyed about it," she said, and smiled, and took her hand off the glass and put it flat on the table between us, palm down, like she was claiming the territory.

Harold came over then with a bowl of the little pretzels nobody ever orders and set it between us, and on his way back past the end of the booth he reached up and pulled the curtain halfway across, the way he does, unhurried, not looking at us, like he was just tidying up. The booth went dim. The cooler hummed. Out past the window the fog had made up its mind and come in over the parking lot, and somewhere behind the jukebox the B.B. King record ended and another one started.

Lilly took off the scarf, folded it once, and set it beside her coat. Then she looked at me across the table with both hands flat now, hers on the wood, mine around the beer, and I could tell this wasn't going to be a one-drink night.

She didn't say anything right away. That's a thing about Lilly, she lets a silence sit there until you either fill it or squirm, and after two years I've learned to wait her out, because whatever comes after one of her silences is usually worth the wait. She turned her glass a quarter turn on the table, slow, watching her own hand do it, and then she reached across with one finger and traced the rim, around once, around twice, and looked at me the way she looks at me when she's already decided something and is just telling me so I know.

"I've been thinking about you since about four o'clock," she said. Her voice was low, low enough that I had to lean in a little to catch it, which I suspect was the point. "Not anything fancy. Just you. Your hands. That look you get when the counter's backed up and somebody's asking about their copay and you keep your voice level anyway. I like that look. I want to get you out of that shirt later, and I want to take my time about it, and then I want you to come home with me and I'm not going to let you leave before morning. That's the plan. I didn't want to spring it on you at closing time like some kind of ambush."

"That's not much of an ambush," I said. "That's more of a schedule."

"I'm a retired bank teller, Claude. Schedules are what I have." She smiled around that, took a real drink of her whiskey, first one since I'd sat down, and set the glass down softer than she needed to.

I thought about that. Two years, and she still does this, tells me plainly what she wants instead of making me guess, and every time it lands on me harder than it should, like it's new. When we met, that first Thursday in October, she'd done the same thing, asked me in six words whether I was any good in bed, and I'd nearly knocked my own beer over laughing. Sixty-one then. Sixty-three now. I'm sixty-four and my knees know it, but none of that had anything to do with what was happening under this table tonight.

So we drank for a while and talked about nothing, the fog, Harold's sign, the ball game the three guys were half watching. At some point one of them paid up and left, and then there were two, and then Harold called last round to the whole room at ten forty, which is very Tuesday of him, and the two stragglers drained their glasses and went out into the fog. The door shut behind them and the bar went down to just the three of us and the cooler hum and the jukebox, which had worked its way around to something slow again.

That's when Harold came back over. He didn't ask anything. He picked up the pretzel bowl, took the empty glass off the bar where I'd left my coaster, and then, standing at the end of the booth, he drew the curtain all the way around, both panels, the heavy dark one, the kind you can't see through from the bar. He did it with the same face he does inventory with. Then he said, "I'm gonna be in the back doing the keg lines for a while," and he was gone, and the office door clicked, and it was done. Forty-six years old, owns the place, and he runs it as if he understands exactly what his back booths are for and prefers not to be consulted.

"He's a good boy," Lilly said, watching the curtain settle.

"He's a good businessman."

"Same thing, in a bar."

She slid around the bench then, came around the table on my side, which the booth sort of forces, and sat down next to me with her hip against mine. The bench squeaked twice, once for each of us. Up close she smelled like whiskey and that soap she uses, the plain kind, and her hair was doing the thing it does in bar light where the white goes a little gold at the edges. She put her hand flat on my chest, over the pharmacy logo on my shirt, and just left it there, feeling my heart do what it was doing.

"Well," she said. "Somebody's awake."

"Somebody's been awake since four o'clock, apparently."

"Four o'clock," she agreed. And then her fingers went to the top button of my shirt, and she looked up at me, right in the eyes, reading glasses still on, which shouldn't be attractive and is anyway, and she said, "Yes?" Just like that. One syllable. That's Lilly, she asks, always asks, even when the answer's been sitting in the room for an hour.

"Yes," I said.

The jukebox had cycled around to Al Green by then. I don't know how Harold keeps that thing stocked, or who puts Al Green on a Tuesday night jukebox, but there it was, quiet, those horns and that voice, and Lilly worked down my buttons one at a time, unhurried, the way she does everything. She's not a fumbler. Her nails are short, kept, teller's nails even five years out of the bank, and each button came open clean and she smoothed the fabric aside with her palm as she went, like she was making a bed. When it was all the way open she pushed it back off my shoulders and I shrugged it off my arms and laid it on the bench beside me, and I sat there in the dim booth in my