Last Call for Sloan

The breakup was three weeks old when I finally walked into McGee's alone. I'd been avoiding the place the way you avoid a street where you used to live. Leo and I had spent three years in that bar, from the time I was twenty and he was twenty-two, and I figured the jukebox would turn on me the second I crossed the door.

It didn't. It played Lindsay Webb, same as always, and the floor creaked under my boots in the same two spots it always had.

Alan looked up from restocking the well and didn't say anything for a second. Then he reached for the bottle of rye like it was the most ordinary thing in the world.

"You're late," he said. "Your usual's been sitting in my head for an hour."

"Alan, I..."

"Rye ginger, two lime. I know. Sit down before you fall down."

Dutch was in his usual corner booth, twenty-eight years old and looking like he'd been poured into that seat sometime around the last election. He raised his glass at me. "Well, look what the cat dragged in. Thought you'd moved to another state."

"Thought about it," I said, and took the stool.

I'm twenty-three, by the way, in case you're keeping track. Alan's twenty-four. Dutch's twenty-eight and acts about sixty. That's the cast so far, minus Samson, who shows up later and has been opinionated at me since I was twenty-one.

Alan set the drink down in front of me and leaned on the bar. "Three weeks," he said. "Three weeks you don't answer your phone, and then you walk in here looking like you slept in your car."

"I did sleep in my car. Actually no, that's a lie. I slept in the pro shop cot. There's a difference and the difference is dignity."

"Suzette."

"It's fine. I'm fine. Pour me another one of these and stop looking at me like that."

He didn't stop looking at me like that, but he did pour me another one. That's the trouble with a friend who's known you since you were both sitting in a community college accounting class pretending to take notes. He knows which of your sentences are lies, and he just quietly files them away.

I drank. Dutch came over at some point and told me a story about a guy who'd tried to pay his tab with a jar of pickled eggs, and I laughed, and then somewhere around drink four I stopped laughing, and somewhere around drink five I went to the bathroom and cried like a drain.

The bathroom at McGee's has one flickering fluorescent tube and a mirror with a crack shaped like a river. I looked at that crack for a long time. Three years with a man and I couldn't even tell you the exact day it went wrong, which felt like its own special failure. Golf, I can diagnose. I can watch somebody swing and tell you in four words what's broken. My own life, not so much.

When I came out, Alan was wiping down the bar and pointedly not watching the door.

"I'm okay," I said.

"Sure you are. You've got mascara on your chin."

I scrubbed at it. "Great. Very dignified evening all around."

"Hey." He came around the bar and stood close, not touching. "You don't have to be okay in here. That's the whole point of the place."

"That's the whole point of a bar?"

"Of this bar. Other bars are for meeting people. This one's for hiding from them."

I laughed, which set off the crying again a little, and he stood there and let me do it, which is more than most people will do. After a while he said, "Come on. I'm closing the well. I'm driving you home."

"Alan, I can walk. I live eleven blocks away."

"Not tonight you can't. You can barely spell blocks right now."

* * *

He has an old Honda with a passenger seat that reclines too far, so you ride in it like an astronaut. I lay back and watched the streetlights go by and he didn't talk, which I appreciated, because I was busy constructing the sentence I'd been avoiding for three weeks.

"I don't know what I want," I said, finally, to the ceiling of the car.

"Okay," he said.

"No, I mean it. Everybody keeps asking. My mom asks. Samson asks, in his way, which is mostly hitting golf balls at me until I confess something. And I don't have an answer. Three years with Leo and I don't even know what I'd want if anything was possible."

"That sounds about right, honestly. You went straight from his plans to no plans. Nobody has plans three weeks out of a ditch."

"You're very comforting."

"I'm not comforting. I'm correct. There's a difference."

We pulled up in front of my apartment, the one Leo and I had picked out together, which is a whole other wound I'm not opening tonight. I sat up in the reclined seat like a puzzle piece going back in.

"Why are you being so good about this?" I asked him. "Most guys would've told me to pull myself together by now."

"Most guys don't get anything out of you falling apart."

"That's a weird way to put it."

"It's an honest way to put it." He drummed his fingers on the wheel. "Suzette, look. I've been sitting on something for a while. This isn't the night for it. But I'm not going anywhere, and I'm not in a hurry, so whenever you figure out what you want, even a little bit, even one percent, you tell me. Until then I'll just keep showing up."

"Showing up with what?"

"Coffee, mostly. You're impossible to shop for."

I got out of the car and stood on the curb in the cold and watched him drive off, and I thought, well. Huh. Which is not an answer either, but it's a start.

* * *

Tuesday I had a new client at the course. Nine-hole public track on the edge of town, cracked cart paths, geese with attitude. My boss had handed me a name, said the guy was thirty-three and wanted to fix a slice, and I said fine, send him over.

It was Samson Jekyll.

"You have got to be kidding me," I said, walking out to the first tee.

"Language, instructor," he said. He was thirty-three now, had been my first boss back when I was twenty-one and terrified of every member, and he'd retired from playing professionally with a back that filed complaints every time it rained.

"You said you wanted lessons. You taught me half of what I know."

"And you've improved the other half, which is why I'm here. My slice came back. It's your fault. I taught you everything and you got good, and now I have to pay one of my former employees to fix me. The irony is heavy and I resent it."

"Swing," I told him.

He swung. It was ugly.

"See? Ugly."

"It's your right hand. You're strangling the club like it owes you money. Loosen the grip, and stop lifting the left heel like the ground insulted you."

"You always were mouthy. It's why I hired you."

He fixed about sixty percent of it in forty minutes, which is a good rate for a thirty-three-year-old set in his ways. And here's the part I noticed while we were working: I was having fun. Actually fun. Standing on a beat-up range tee in October explaining grip pressure, and something in my chest had come unstuck.

That's when I heard the crunch of gravel and turned around and there was Alan, walking across the grass carrying two coffee cups like a man delivering a hostage exchange.

"Are you lost?" I called. "This is a golf course. No alcohol for a quarter mile."

"Dutch told me you'd be on the range till ten. I come bearing coffee and no agenda."

Samson looked between the two of us with the expression of a man who has watched a lot of slow games and knows how to read one. "This the coffee fella?"

"This is Alan. Alan, Samson. He used to be my boss and now he's my problem."

"Charmed," Samson said, and hit a ball two hundred forty yards to establish dominance.

Alan handed me a cup. "How's the lesson business?"

"Busy, apparently. He actually paid money for this."

"You used to love this part," Alan said. "Teaching. You talked about it all the time, back in the accounting class you were failing."

"I was not failing accounting."

"You got a C minus, Suzette. I was there."

"The point is," I said, "yeah. I used to love it. Somewhere in the last two years I stopped noticing. Leo hated that I worked evenings, so I guess I stopped talking about it, and then I guess I stopped feeling it. You can do that. Things just quietly shut off."

Alan nodded into his coffee. "Things come back on too. Saw it happen just now, in case you missed it."

"I didn't miss it."

"Good." He checked his watch. "I've got an inventory shift at noon. You coming by McGee's this week, or do I have to keep ambushing your workplace?"

"I'll come by. Thursday."

"Thursday. I'll have your usual waiting."

He walked back across the grass, and Samson watched him go and then watched me watching him go, and said nothing, which from Samson is a whole speech.

"Hit another one," I said. "And grip it like you like it."

"Yes, ma'am," he said, and grinned at me the whole way through the swing.

Thursday came, and I went.

McGee's at seven was the same as McGee's had always been, which was the problem and the comfort of it. Cracked wooden floor, jukebox that only played country, the same two guys arguing about the same hockey game from 2011. Leo and I had put in three years here, from when I was twenty and he was twenty-two, and every booth had a memory stapled to it. I picked the one farthest from all of them and ordered my usual, rye ginger with two lime, and Alan set it down like it was a peace treaty.

"You remembered."

"I said I would. I'm a man of my word and also I had nothing else to think about at inventory."

"Inventory went okay?"

"Inventory is forty boxes of the same six beers. Inventory is always okay." He glanced at the corner booth, where Dutch Ronnie was holding court over a plate of fries. Dutch was twenty-eight, had worked with Alan at his old bar for six years, and now occupied that booth with the devotion other people gave to church. "Fair warning, he's in a mood."

"What kind of mood?"

"The kind where he's decided something about me and won't say what."

I sipped my drink. "He's decided something about you and me, hasn't he."

"I didn't say that."

"You didn't have to. You get a specific face. Like a dog that heard a can opener but isn't sure."

"Wow," Alan said. "Poetry."

He went off to serve the hockey historians, and I settled in, and honestly it was fine. It was better than fine. We talked about nothing for two hours, accounting class horror stories and whether the geese at my course qualified as a hate group, and somewhere in there I stopped bracing for Leo to walk through the door, which was new.

* * *

It was slow by eleven. Dutch came up to the bar for his third refill and leaned on it with his elbows, watching Alan restock glasses with the focus of a surgeon.

"You know," Dutch said, "you've wiped that spot on the bar nine times since I sat down."

"Clean bar is a happy bar."

"Uh huh. And she's sitting in booth four, in case the spot-checking was a map to something."

Alan didn't look up. "You want another rye or you want to narrate my life?"

"I've known you six years, Wilkinson. You worked two feet from me at Moneybags's and I never once saw you polish a counter like it insulted your mother." Dutch took his drink. "I'm just saying, the girl's funny, she's easy to look at, and you've been bringing her coffee at a golf course like a love-struck mailman."

"It's coffee. People drink coffee."

"People also breathe. You don't deliver breathing to her at ten in the morning."

I coughed, loudly, from booth four. Dutch turned around with the total lack of shame I'd have paid money for.

"Evening, Suzette. Tell me I'm wrong."

"You're not wrong," I said. "But keep going, this is the best thing happening in this bar."

"Betrayal," Alan said.

"He brings you coffee," Dutch said, pointing at me with his glass. "Does he bring the rest of us coffee?"

"He brought me a coffee once."

"Once," Alan said, very firmly.

"Fine. Once, plus the three other times." I grinned into my drink. Dutch raised his glass to me like we'd settled something, and went back to his booth, and Alan wiped the bar one more time, which I counted, and then came and stood across from me and gave up on pretending.

"She's relentless," he said.

"She's correct."

"That's the worst part."

* * *

Saturday I closed the course. That mostly means I put the flags in the shed and pretended the goose situation would resolve itself, and then I had a golf course to myself for an hour of daylight, which is honestly the best perk of the job. So I texted Alan, because apparently that's a thing I do now.

Come watch me play nine. I need a witness.

A witness to what, he texted back.

To whether I still know how to do this. Also I'll buy dinner.

Deal, he wrote, and twenty minutes later his old Honda rattled into the lot, the one with the passenger seat that reclines too far, so anyone riding in it plays golf at a forty-five degree angle. He climbed out and looked around at the empty course with his hands in his pockets.

"This is eerie. Where's everybody?"

"Gone home. It's October and it's cold and people have sense." I handed him a bag of tees to carry, because if he was going to witness, he could work. "First tee. Watch this."

I watched this. I topped the ball so badly it traveled nine yards, rolled into a divot, and stopped, face down, like it had given up on life.

There was a pause.

"Don't," I said.

"I'm not saying anything."

"You're making a noise. I can hear you making a