Last Call for Us

I had one more night in Meridian and a list of things I never got done.

The residency ended Friday. Saturday morning I was on a plane to Portugal for eight months of painting in a stone building that some foundation gave me for cheap. You would think a guy would spend his last night packing. Instead I was at The Shade, which is this bar tucked behind the campus block, all dim light and old wood, smelling like cheap beer and the forty years of spilled drinks soaked into the floor.

I was thirty-six years old, and I was sitting there with a notebook of unfinished business. Not the kind you think. I mean literal business. Two canvases that needed varnish. A crate I had not sealed. A conversation I never had with a professor who retired before I could thank him properly. And one person I never got to say a real goodbye to, though I told myself that door had closed a long time ago.

Haley and I dated for four years. We met at a grad opening six years ago, she was twenty-nine then, fresh in the art history program, and I was thirty and pretending I still wanted to be a sculptor. We broke up a year and a half ago, when she was thirty-three, and it was the most polite breakup I have ever been part of. No yelling. No thrown glassware. She said we wanted different things, I said she was probably right, and we hugged in her doorway like it was a graduation.

We stayed friends after that, the distant kind. Christmas texts. A like on a post here and there.

So when I looked up from my beer and saw her waving at me from a booth in the back, my first thought was that I had imagined it. My second thought was to wave back before she changed her mind.

"Bo! Get over here," she called. She was thirty-five now and looked about the same as I remembered, dark hair short, the same old denim jacket with the paint stains on the sleeve.

I carried my beer over. There were two other people in the booth with her. A woman in her late twenties with a shaved head and rings on half her fingers, and a guy in a clay-spattered apron who had apparently not bothered to take it off after work.

"You remember me telling you about Bo," Haley said. "Bo, this is Doris and Randall. Doris is a sculptor, Randall teaches ceramics. Guys, Bo is the reason I passed my first seminar, because he let me photocopy his library card."

"It was his library card, so it was a weird crime," the guy said. Randall, I guessed, because of the apron.

"We never actually met," Doris said, standing up a little to shake my hand. "Haley talks about you like a folk hero. I've been curious for two years."

"Only two? Haley and I have known each other for six."

"Two years since I took her seminar," Doris said. "She mentioned you the first week, actually. Said she knew a former sculptor who quit because he figured out painting was more honest."

"Did she put it that nicely?"

"She did not," Haley said, and everyone laughed, and some knot in my chest that I had been carrying around all week came loose.

I sat down. Randall moved over and made room without making a thing of it, which I appreciated. It is a strange thing, joining a table of people who already have their jokes worked out. Some groups make you feel like a guest at your own funeral. These two did not.

"Is it true you knew Professor Achterberg?" Randall asked.

"Knew him? He supervised my thesis. Best worst experience of my life. He told me my sculpture looked like a cow that had lost an argument with a fence."

"Haley told us that too," Doris said. "Word for word."

"She collects my failures. Ask her sometime about the opening where I spilled wine on a collector."

"That was not your fault," Haley said. "The guy stepped backward into you."

"He stepped backward because you were telling him a story with your arms," I said. "You have always talked with your whole body. You knocked a wine glass into the pocket of a man worth forty million dollars."

Doris put her face in her hands. "Please tell me there are photos!"

"There are no photos," Haley said, "because I paid the photographer to delete them."

"You did not."

"I gave him twenty dollars. It was worth it."

The conversation went on like that for a while. I do not know how to explain it except that it felt easy. It had been a long year of packing crates and paperwork and polite emails with the foundation, and I had forgotten what it was like to sit at a table where people interrupted each other on purpose. Randall told a story about a kiln that failed because a raccoon got into his studio. Doris argued that the raccoon was an artist in its own right and deserved credit on the glaze.

"You would say that," Randall said. "You name all your pieces."

"Because they have names. They come to me with names."

"What's the current one called?" Haley asked.

Doris got quiet in a way that meant she was proud and embarrassed at the same time. "It's called One More Night."

"That's a good title," I said.

"It's about leaving," she said, and looked at me a little too directly. "Things you did not finish saying before you went somewhere far away."

I did not know what to do with that, so I drank my beer.

Haley rescued me, the way she always used to. "Bo flies out Saturday. Eight months in Portugal. Some residency where they give him a room with a view of the ocean and expect gratitude."

"You're complaining?" I said.

"I'm jealous. There's a difference."

Randall asked me what I was going to work on over there, and I told him the truth, which was that I had no idea. Painting had been good to me in a way sculpture never was, but lately everything I made looked like a study for something I was too scared to actually paint. I said some of this out loud, which surprised me, because I do not usually talk like that after one beer.

"Eight months is long enough to get over that," Doris said.

"Or long enough to get worse."

"Those are often the same thing," Randall said, and raised his glass, and we all drank to that.

Somewhere in there I noticed the tension in my shoulders was gone. That was what defined Haley. Even broken up, even at a table with strangers, she made rooms feel less heavy. When we were together she used to do it without trying, just by being loud about the world. I had missed that more than I had let myself admit.

"Can I ask you something?" she said, leaning in under the noise of the bar. "Are you going to be weird about this all night? Because I invited these two specifically so you would not be weird."

"How would I be weird?"

"You know how. You do that thing where you get polite."

"I am not polite."

"You are extremely polite when you are uncomfortable. It's your worst quality."

Doris laughed at that, a real laugh, head back. "She's right, isn't she. You've been polite since you sat down."

"I bought a round of drinks," Randall pointed out. "Nobody's accused him yet."

"I will buy the next round," I said, "out of spite."

"Good," Haley said. "Spite I can work with."

The bar was filling up behind us. A couple of grad students argued about a show at the university gallery, loud enough that we could hear every word, and Randall joined in under his breath just to be a nuisance. Doris sketched on a coaster with a pen she pulled from her bag, quick little lines, a figure bent over something I could not identify.

"What is that?" I asked, leaning over.

"It's you," she said. "You lean forward when you're interested in something. You did it the whole time Randall talked about the kiln."

I had not noticed. I looked at the little drawing. It was good. It was better than good, it caught something, and I felt a small honest jolt of the thing I get when I see work by someone who is actually serious.

"That's a gift," I told her. "Do not waste it on ceramics people."

"He's insufferable when he's impressed," Haley said. "You'll see."

* * *

Around ten, Haley went to the bar for another round and Randall got pulled into a conversation about wood firing with some guy from the department. That left Doris and me at the table with the coasters and her pen.

"So," she said. "Two years of stories. You're taller than I expected."

"People usually say that or the opposite."

"Which do you get more?"

"The opposite, mostly."

She smiled and went back to her coaster. "Haley says you never really said goodbye to each other. After you two ended things."

"She would know."

"She said it like it bothered her. Like it was a job left undone." Doris looked up. "I got the feeling she wants to fix that tonight."

The bar was loud and dim and the old wood smelled like every night anyone had ever had in it, and I sat there feeling something open up that I had nailed shut a year and a half ago.

"Well," I said. "I did have unfinished business in this town."

Doris put the pen down and turned toward me in her chair. "Show me your hands," she said.

"Why?"

"Because you're a painter now. I want to see if it changed them."

I held them out over the table and she took them and turned them palm up. Her rings were cold against my skin. She ran a thumb across the callus at the base of my index finger, where the brush rest sat, and she talked the whole time about the sculpture series I never finished, the small welded figures from my thesis years, and how she had seen two of them in a storage show back in March.

"The one with the shoulders," she said. "I stood in front of it for twenty minutes. Haley told me you took it apart."

"Scrapped most of them. Kept two."

"Which two?"

"The shoulders one. And the one I never named."

She was still holding my hand. It was not an accident, and I did not pull back. Haley came back with the round then, four glasses balanced between her two hands, and she set them down and looked at Doris's grip on my fingers and raised an eyebrow.

"Am I interrupting?"

"We're discussing his sculpture," Doris said, not letting go.

"Sure you are." Haley sat down and took a drink. "Look, it's loud out here, and the back room's empty on Fridays. There's a couch and quiet and nobody stepping on my feet. Anybody object?"

Nobody objected. Randall came back from the wood firing argument looking pleased with himself, and we carried our glasses through a door at the back of the bar that I had never once noticed in six years of knowing this place. The room back there was small and warm. A worn leather couch against one wall, a low table with a stack of coasters, a lamp with a crooked shade. It smelled like dust and old leather.

We settled in. Doris next to me, Haley on my other side, Randall across the table. Someone put music on from a phone, something quiet. I remember thinking the room looked like a hundred private jokes had been told on that couch.

Haley had brought a pitcher of water from the bar along with the glasses. "Nobody's past two drinks," she said, "and I'd like to keep it that way. Water first. We sit, we talk, and anybody who wants to say no, at any point, for any reason, just says it." We drank the water. We talked for half an hour about kilns and Chicago and Professor Achterberg's cow, and by the end of it I was sober enough to count my own fingers.

"So this is goodbye," Haley said, something in her voice I recognized from six years of listening to her talk about other people's art.

"Eight months," I said. "I'll be back."

"You said that about Chicago, and you stayed away a whole year."

"That was different."

"How?"

I did not have an answer, and she knew I did not have an answer. Doris turned on the couch to face me. Her shaved head caught the lamp light.

"Can I kiss you?" she asked.

There it was, plain as anything. I looked at Haley. She was watching me, not angry, not wounded, curious if anything.

"Yes," I said.

Doris kissed me hard, one hand coming up to the side of my jaw, and she kissed the way she drew, fast and committed. Her mouth tasted like the beer we'd been drinking and I felt my hand find the back of her neck and she made a small sound into it. When she pulled back I was breathing differently.

"Okay," I said.

"Okay," she agreed.

I looked at Haley again, because it felt wrong not to. She reached over and took the hem of my shirt.

"This okay?" she said.

"Yes!"

She pulled it up and over my head in one motion, off my arms, tossed it on the table, and put her hand flat on my chest for a second like she was checking that I was real.

"I want to watch you with her," she said. "That's my goodbye present to both of us. Do you want that?"

"I want that."

"Randall," Haley said, turning. "You in?"

He had been sitting very still, a man aware he was at someone else's family dinner. "If everybody's sure."

"Everybody's sure," Doris said. "Get over here."

He came around the table and sat on her other side and leaned in and kissed her while I watched, and she kissed him back with a hand on his clay-spattered chest, and Haley moved closer to me on the couch so our