One Last Round

I was three days into a slow week and one drink into a Tuesday when I saw Billy Hanson at the end of the bar, and I want you to know my first instinct was to leave through the kitchen.

I didn't, obviously. I'm fifty-three years old and I run a graphic design business out of my spare bedroom. I don't flee bars through kitchens. But I thought about it, and I thought about it hard, and meanwhile Kelly Chadwick, who owns the taps at The Rusty Nail and has known me since a design conference in 2003 where we both got food poisoning from the same shrimp ring, clocked my face and came over wiping her hands on a towel.

"You okay?" she asked. "You look like you saw a ghost."

"Worse," I said. "I saw Billy Hanson."

"Who's Billy Hanson?"

"Nobody. Nobody at all. He's a ghost, actually, that's the point."

Kelly squinted down the bar, did the math, and came back with her eyebrows up. "The Army guy? The one from that summer class? The one you, and I quote, do not talk about?"

"The very same."

"Huh. He got old."

"Thank you, Kelly. Very helpful."

And here's the thing about Billy Hanson, except I'm not allowed to open with here's the thing, my editor keeps flagging it, so: thirty years ago, when I was twenty-three and taking a summer studio course at the community college up the road from Fort Kessler, Billy Hanson was twenty-three too, taking the same course because the Army had decided he needed an art credit for reasons neither of us ever figured out. He was built like a mailbox and he laughed at everything and one night in July he kissed me in the parking lot next to my Honda, and then for about six weeks we were a thing, a small local thing, and then one morning in August he was gone. No note. No phone call. This was 1996, so leaving meant physically leaving, and he had done it. Packed up and transferred somewhere and let me find out from the registrar.

I have had thirty years to develop opinions about this, and I have used all of them. I have dated a long string of perfectly decent men badly, armed at all times, flinching at every joke about commitment like it was incoming fire. Kelly has watched this happen for twenty-three years and once told me, gently, over her own bar, that I treat every date like a job interview where the applicant is guilty until proven stupid. I did not speak to her for a week, which is a long time when your best friend works four booths away.

So Billy Hanson, at the end of the bar, in civilian clothes, older and thicker through the shoulders and grayer than the boy I remembered, sitting alone with a beer and looking like a man on leave from something, and my whole body did this stupid warm thing that I overrode immediately with spite. Spite is a much better fuel. Spite gets you through the winter.

I finished my drink. I signaled Kelly for a second one. Then I picked up both and walked down there like I was delivering a subpoena.

"Hello, Billy."

He turned, and I watched recognition arrive in stages. First the polite stranger face, then the flicker, then the full oh no, which I savored, I really did, professionally, like it was a nice typeface.

"Daisy," he said. "Daisy Hahn."

"Small town," I said, and sat down uninvited two stools over, because sitting uninvited is a power move and I was there to win. "Funny running into you."

"It is. It really is. You look good."

"Don't do that."

"Do what?"

"The compliment thing. We're not doing the compliment thing. You're passing through and I live here, and I'm being polite, and that's the whole arrangement."

He took that on the chin, which was annoying, because I'd loaded it to bounce. "Fair enough," he said, and turned slightly on his stool to face me, and up close he smelled like cedar and cheap soap, and I made myself look at the beer taps instead.

"How long have you been in Northgate?"

"Fourteen years. You?"

"I'm on leave. Chandler Holland, you wouldn't know him, he was with my unit for fifteen years, he retired out here by Kessler and kept telling me the town was quiet. I've got six weeks of leave saved up and nowhere to spend it, so here I am."

"Six weeks," I said.

"Six weeks."

"Then gone."

Something crossed his face there, quick, and he looked into his bottle. "Something like that," he said. "Listen, Daisy. What happened back then, I handled it badly."

"Oh, here we go."

"I'm not going to build you a speech. The Army moved me on four days' notice and I told myself you'd be better off not waiting around for some guy who might get shipped anywhere, and that was a convenient story and I told it to myself for thirty years and it doesn't hold up. I should have called. There it is."

I sat with that. The trouble with a speech you've been rehearsing for thirty years is that nobody tells you they're going to skip their lines and apologize, and then your whole script just sits there in your lap useless. I drank some of Kelly's good IPA to buy time.

"You know what I did after you left?" I said. "I drove out to the base gate. Twice. Second time a guard took pity on me and made some calls, and all he could tell me was that Private Hanson had been transferred. Private. You weren't even a corporal yet."

"I made sergeant within the year," he said. "Then staff sergeant. Then a bunch of other things with more stripes."

"Irrelevant. The point is I spent that whole fall thinking I'd done something wrong. I went through every conversation we had looking for the crime. And there wasn't one, was there. There was just you, leaving, because it was easier."

"Yeah," he said quietly. "It was easier."

Kelly drifted past us refilling peanuts, very slowly, clearly listening, and I gave her a look that could strip paint and she drifted away again.

"So what do you want, Billy? Because guys don't sit at the end of a bar in a town they don't live in looking like a lost dog unless they want something."

"I want a beer and a quiet month," he said. "That was the whole plan. And then you walked in."

"I didn't walk in. I was already here."

"Then you were already here. Even better." He turned his bottle slowly on the bar, making a wet ring, and I hated that I noticed. "Here's what I'm not going to do. I'm not going to pretend that summer didn't happen, and I'm not going to pretend we're strangers catching up, because we're not, and this town is too small for the act. And here's what I'm not going to do either, I'm not going to ask you to wait for me, or write to me, or anything else I don't have coming."

"Okay," I said.

"So what I'd like, if you'd like it, is simple. I'm here six weeks. You're here permanently. We're both adults with, I assume, functioning lives. We could spend some of those six weeks together, no history on the table, no future on the table, and when my leave is up we say a normal goodbye and that's the end. Nobody ghosts anybody. Nobody waits."

I stared at him. Thirty years of spite, and the man offers me a lease with an end date and an exit clause. It was, annoyingly, the most honest thing anyone had said to me in a bar in a decade.

"You've clearly rehearsed that," I said.

"Since I saw you walk in, yes."

"You saw me walk in? How long have you been sitting here?"

"Forty minutes. Chandler says I overthink."

"Chandler is wise."

"He is. He also said you'd either throw your drink at me or say yes."

"He's got a fifty percent track record so far. Give me a minute."

I looked down the bar at Kelly, who was polishing a glass that had been clean for ten minutes, and she raised both eyebrows at me in a way that said absolutely not and also do it, which is Kelly's whole range. I thought about the string of dates. I thought about the shrimp ring. I thought about a parking lot in 1996 and a Honda with a torn vinyl seat, which I have no business remembering, the car was a wreck and so was I, and I thought about the fact that Billy Hanson had just done the one thing no man in thirty years had done, which was hand me the ending in advance, in writing, essentially, before anything started.

And the spite, which had been keeping me warm all this time, sat there grumbling, because spite hates a fair deal. It can't work with a fair deal. It needs injustice to burn.

"One condition," I said. "Nobody at this bar finds out. Kelly will know because Kelly knows everything, but if it gets around town that Daisy Hahn is dating an Army boy from thirty years ago, I will never hear the end of it, and I design the newsletter for the garden club. I have to see these people."

"Agreed."

"Second condition. You buy the drinks. Your tab, not mine."

"Agreed."

"Third condition," I said, and here I paused, because I hadn't planned a third condition, and it was arriving live. "You don't disappear. Six weeks means six weeks. You leave early, you tell me to my face. That's the price."

He looked at me and something in his jaw set, the way I remembered it setting back when the instructor used to critique his drawings, which were terrible, and he knew they were terrible, and he never once argued about it.

"That's a fair price," he said. "Deal."

"So," I said, because we were now two adults who had just signed something and there was nothing to do with the paperwork but drink. "Tell me about Chandler. Anyone who predicts drink-throwing is a man I should know about."

Billy laughed, and it was the same laugh, and that was the exact moment I understood I might be in trouble here, the honest kind, the kind with an end date, and I drank my IPA and let him talk and did not think about August 1996 even once.

So here is what I told myself on the drive home that Tuesday, after Billy walked me to my car in a way that was courteous and completely unromantic and therefore drove me half crazy. I told myself this is a transaction. Six weeks, clean terms, and at the end I walk away with the upper hand because I will have gotten what I wanted without once wanting it out loud. That was the story. I told it to myself the way you tell a kid there's no monster, firmly, twice, with the light on.

Then I spent Wednesday designing a flyer for the church bake sale, which is a real job I do, and I thought about it approximately four hundred times while picking a font for "PIE." Kelly texted me Thursday. The text said only, well?

I texted back. Nothing yet. He wants to wait like this is a courtship.

Kelly's reply was a single thumbs up, which from her is a paragraph.

He called Friday morning. I was in my spare bedroom, which is my studio, which is a word for a spare bedroom with a Wacom tablet and three dead monitors I keep meaning to recycle. "I'm off Monday," he said. "You could come by the house. Chandler's got a poker night, so I'll have the place to myself. I'll cook something. Nothing fancy. I'm not going to pretend I got fancier."

"You have not gotten fancier," I said.

"You once put ketchup on lasagna in front of me and I think about it monthly."

"That was an experiment."

"It was a war crime."

He laughed, and I sat there in my office chair with the bad wheel and felt thirty years old in the wrong direction. "Monday then," he said. "Five. If you want. If you don't, no hard feelings, and I mean that in the boring literal sense."

"I want," I said, before my dignity could get a vote.

He'd rented a little house on Sycamore, the kind with a carport and a hedge the landlord pretends is privacy. I changed clothes three times, which is ridiculous for a woman who has been on more first dates in the last two years than some matchmaking services, and finally settled on the outfit I'd have worn to a nice but not remarkable dinner. I was not going to look like I'd tried. I had tried. I brought a bottle of wine as a shield.

Billy answered the door in a plain shirt with the sleeves rolled up, and I want to note for history that fifty-three year old Billy Hanson looks like a mailbox that was left out in good weather. Gray at the temples. Still built like furniture. "Hi, Daisy," he said, and it was so ordinary and so warm that my whole opening speech, the one where I established that I was doing him a favor, died in my throat.

"Hi, Billy. Nice hedge."

"I've developed feelings for the hedge. It's the only neighbor I have."

He cooked actual chicken, on an actual grill, with actual skill, and we sat at a table with four chairs, two of them his, and talked about nothing. His last posting. My garden club newsletter, which he genuinely asked about, which is a trap, because once you get me started on kerning you lose a night. He told me about Chandler, who apparently grows tomatoes with the intensity of a man running a federal program. He asked about my work and listened to the answer, and I caught myself enjoying it, and I