Pipe Down

The Backbeat was the kind of place that smelled like old beer and neon ambition, and Faith hated how much she liked it. Twenty-eight years old, a plumber by trade, and still, two years later, trying to forget her ex, she was letting her girlfriend of two years drag her out for a night she had already declared she didn't want.

The floor stuck to her boots with every step.

"Okay, wow," Helena said, peeling her sneaker up with an audible squeak. "I think the floor just took a deposit from me. Non-refundable."

"Say the word and we can go somewhere that doesn't have a biome," Faith said. "I'm serious, Hel. I'll wipe down a rental property bathroom all day, but this floor is asking a lot of me."

Helena, twenty-seven and stubborn in the specific way of a barista who had survived a thousand morning rushes, grabbed her hand and pulled. "Nope. You said *Stu* has been living in your head rent free for two years, and I said we are evicting him tonight. This place has cheap drinks and amateur comedy. It's medically necessary."

"That's not what medically necessary means."

"It is what I say it means. Sit."

They took a little round table near the back, close enough to the tiny stage that the spotlight caught the dust in the air. Helena went to the bar, and Faith sat alone with her thoughts, which was exactly what she'd been trying to avoid all week. Two years with Stu. Dated him from twenty-four to twenty-six, which in her accounting meant he'd eaten almost every weekend she'd had in her twenties so far. He'd ended it on his terms, in his way, with a speech about how she had "stopped growing" and how he needed "a partner with ambition." Then he'd ghosted her book club, which frankly had been the meanest part.

Helena came back with two sweating glasses and a grin. "Okay, so, funny thing."

"Funny how."

"Funny ha-ha. The bartender says the lineup tonight is mostly open mic folks, but there's one guy who does this every month. Apparently he's got, and I quote, 'a following of about six people, all of whom owe him money.'"

"Wonderful. A local legend."

"Shush, it's starting."

The host, a tall man in a corduroy vest, did his bit, bombed gracefully, and introduced the next act. And that was when Faith's night truly went sideways, because the guy who walked out under the light was Stu.

She knew the walk before she knew the face. The little bounce on the toes, the way he adjusted a jacket that didn't need adjusting. Thirty-one years old now, still doing the thing where he acted like every room was an audition.

"Oh no," she said quietly.

"Oh no what?" Helena turned, then went still. "Oh. That's him? That's the guy?"

"That's the guy."

Helena reached across the table and put her hand flat over Faith's. "Okay. Look at me. We are adults. We are mature. We are going to sit here and watch this like it's a nature documentary, and at no point are we going to throw anything. Agreed?"

"Agreed. Probably."

Stu leaned into the mic. "So, um, hey. How's everyone's night going? Mine's been weird. I got a new roommate recently, and by roommate I mean boyfriend, and by boyfriend I mean he has opinions about my cereal."

There was a scatter of laughter. Faith put both hands around her glass.

"He reorganizes everything," Stu went on. "Everything. I came home and my spices were in a ladder. A ladder, of spices. I don't even cook. He does the cooking. Why is he organizing my spices? They're decorative at this point. They're set dressing."

More laughter. It was, Faith had to admit, a decent bit. He'd gotten better since they'd broken up, which was somehow the most annoying possible outcome. She watched him work the room, watched a big guy in a sleeveless shirt near the stage laugh hardest of all, and understood before anyone told her that this was the boyfriend. The cereal ladder guy. He was built like a fire hydrant and he was beaming up at Stu like Stu had personally invented comedy.

"His boyfriend is cute," Helena observed.

"Helena."

"I'm just noting data! I'm a supportive girlfriend who is noting data."

The set wrapped up maybe eight minutes later. It was fine. It was honestly better than fine, and Faith hated herself a little for clapping. Then the host came back out, announced a short break while they reset, and the room did the thing crowded rooms do, which was compress. People moved. Chairs got borrowed. A bachelorette party colonized half the floor.

"Faith? No way. Faith!"

She closed her eyes for one full second before opening them. Stu was standing at their table with the fire hydrant man beside him, wearing the exact expression of a golden retriever who has just spotted a squirrel and a mailman at the same time.

"Stu," she said. "Hey!"

"Oh my god, this is wild. This is so wild. Helena, right? You were, um, after me, right? Timeline-wise?"

"Nice to see you too, Stu," Helena said, in a voice that could have kept meat cold. "This is Faith. You remember Faith."

"I mean, obviously, yeah, of course." He gestured at the big guy. "This is Leroy. Leroy, this is Faith, my, um, my old friend, and Helena, her, um."

"Girlfriend," Helena supplied. "I'm her girlfriend. We've been together two years. She's twenty-eight. I'm twenty-seven. Full data set for you."

Leroy, thirty years old and apparently unburdened by the tension that sat at this table like it was another person, stuck out a huge hand. "Nice to meet you both. Stu talks about you, Faith. All good stuff, mostly."

"Mostly," Faith repeated.

"Okay, mostly is doing a lot of work in that sentence," Stu said quickly. "Look, the room's packed, everywhere's full, can we just, is this table okay for four? There's literally nowhere else. I checked. I did a lap."

Faith looked at Helena. Helena looked at Faith. Somewhere behind them a woman yelled that she wanted to hear the drummer joke again.

"Sit down, Stu," Faith said finally. "Before the bachelorette party claims you as a dancer."

He sat so fast it was almost comedy in itself. Leroy folded himself onto the tiny chair with the grace of a man who knew his own size and had made peace with furniture.

"So," Leroy said cheerfully. "How do you two know each other, besides the obvious?"

"Mutual friends," Stu said, at the exact moment Faith said, "We dated for two years."

Silence. Stu made a face as if he had just missed a step in the dark. "Right. Yeah. We did do that. I was gonna get there."

"Take your time," Helena said sweetly. "The night's young."

Leroy looked between them with genuine delight. "Wait, so this is the ex? THE ex? Babe, you told me she was, what did you say, that she had hands like a surgeon?"

"I said she was good with her hands, in a professional capacity, she's a plumber," Stu hissed. "Why are you like this."

"Because it's fun and you're sweating," Leroy said. He turned to Faith with an easy grin. "Seriously, though. It's nice to finally put a face to the stories. He does this thing when he's nervous where he tells you about his ex like she's a movie villain, but then he gets all quiet at the end and you know it ended bad and he knows it ended bad."

"Leroy," Stu said.

"What? It's true. You know it's true. I'm a personal trainer, I can tell when somebody's carrying tension in weird places. You've been carrying her name around your shoulders for like a year, babe."

Faith felt something complicated happen in her chest, something that was not forgiveness, not yet, but might have been a cousin of it. Helena's hand found her knee under the table and squeezed once.

"So what do you two do," Helena asked, in her customer service voice, the one she used on difficult customers and difficult ex-boyfriends' boyfriends. "For work, I mean."

"Personal training, mostly," Leroy said. "I do a lot of older clients, folks coming back from injuries. It's good work. You get to watch people get their lives back."

"And you design, um, graphics?" Helena asked Stu.

"Freelance. Logos, websites, the occasional album cover. It's going good, actually. Going really good." He said it a little too hard, and Faith recognized it, because she'd heard him say it a hundred times in a hundred kitchens, always a little too hard, always waiting to see if anyone believed him.

"It looks like it's going good," she said, and meant it, which surprised her.

Stu blinked like she'd spoken a language he'd forgotten. "Thanks. Yeah. Um. How's the, are you still doing the plumbing? Because that's, honestly, that's impressive work. I still tell people about that time you fixed the flooded basement at my old place in like an hour."

"Somebody had to," Faith said, and Helena laughed, and to her own surprise, so did Faith.

Helena stood up, draining the last of her drink. "Okay, I have an idea. This table is a death trap and I can feel a bachelorette party eyeing us like we're the next activity. That guy at the bar mentioned there's a back room. A quiet one. The Green Room?"

"It's not really a green room," Stu said. "It's like a storage closet they put a couch in. But it's quiet. There's a little fridge. You need a key from the bar."

"Perfect. Four drinks, a couch, no drummers. Faith, come help me carry?"

Faith followed her to the bar, weaving through elbows and glitter. The barman was a skinny guy with a name tag that said DEZ and a face that said he'd rather be anywhere else.

"Hey," Helena said. "Can we get the key to the Green Room? And four of whatever lager you have on tap."

Dez reached under the bar without looking and came up with a brass key, slid it across, and took her money. "Fridge is stocked. Don't break the couch again."

"Again?" Faith asked, but Dez had already turned away to argue with the bachelorette party about proof of age.

"Okay," Helena said, handing her two of the glasses. "See? Solvable. We get one quiet hour and then we go home and you tell me the whole Stu story start to finish, and I mean the real version, not the version where you skip the parts that hurt."

"There's not really a version where I skip those parts. They're kind of load bearing."

"Then bring the whole building. Come on."

The Green Room door was at the back past the tiny stage, down a short hallway lit by one red bulb. Stu and Leroy were already waiting there, Leroy holding his beers like they were pool balls.

"Ladies first," Leroy said, unlocking the door with a flourish.

The room was exactly as advertised. A sagging plaid couch, a mini fridge humming to itself, shelves of paper towels and spare keg couplers, one framed poster for a band nobody had ever heard of. It smelled faintly of dust and old beer. It was also, Faith realized as they all got in, extremely small. Four adults in there meant shoulders touching if anybody breathed wrong.

Helena shut the door and turned the handle. The handle turned. The door did not open.

"Huh," Helena said.

"That's not a good huh," Leroy said. "That's the huh of a woman discovering a problem."

Helena tried it again, slower, like the door might reconsider. Nothing. She jiggled, pushed, pulled, said a word her customers never heard her say.

"So the good news is we have drinks," she announced. "The bad news is we appear to be locked in a storage closet with Faith's ex-boyfriend."

"Dez gave us the wrong key," Faith said, holding it up. "This isn't even for this door. This says OFFICE on the fob."

"Of course it does. Why would anything go right tonight." Helena knocked on the door a couple times and yelled a general hello in the direction of the bar, and got back the muffled sound of a drummer joke landing well, which told her everything about their odds.

"Okay, nobody panic," Leroy said, sitting down on the couch and patting the space next to him like a man hosting a picnic. "Somebody will want a refill within twenty minutes. These are not people who pace themselves."

Stu was standing in the corner with his beer, as far from Faith as the room allowed, which was about four feet. Faith took the other end of the couch. Helena sat in the middle, a deliberate little buffer zone.

"So," Leroy said. "Fun night."

"Fun night," Helena agreed.

They drank. The fridge hummed. From outside came the boom of the host's voice introducing somebody named Chester the Magnificent, which Faith decided she was not going to think about, because the universe clearly had jokes lined up all evening.

"So how long have you two been together," Helena asked, pointing her bottle at Stu and Leroy. "You look settled."

"About a year," Leroy said. "Year and a bit. We got a couch that matches and everything. That's how you know."

"Two years for us," Helena said. "It started when she came into my shop at opening, covered in pipe grease, ordered a black coffee and apologized to the espresso machine when it made a weird noise."

"It looked stressed," Faith said.

"It apologized to a machine," Helena repeated fondly.

Faith felt Stu watching her from across the room, and looked over, and regretted it, because his face was doing the thing it used to do before arguments, all tight around the jaw.

"What," she said.

"Nothing."

"Say it. You've got the face."

"I don't have a face."

"You have a whole face. You've had it all night. Two years, Stu. You ghosted my book club. You didn't even ghost me politely, you ghosted a group of women who will outlive us all, and they still ask about you."

Stu put his beer down on the floor with a lot of care, like it might otherwise do something he'd regret. "I know how I ended it, Faith."

"Do you? Because I've run it back about six hundred times and I still don't actually know. Was it the job thing? Was it somebody else? Was it that I left wrenches in the sink? Give me one sentence, one real sentence, that isn't 'it's not you, it's the timing.'"

"It was that I was twenty-nine and you had your whole life together and it made me feel like someone who designs logos in his underwear," Stu said, and then seemed surprised to have said it. "And instead of dealing with that like an adult I decided to blow it all up and move in with the first person who laughed at my jokes."

"I laugh at your jokes," Leroy said. "Some of them."

"Most of them are stolen," Faith said.

"A lot of them are stolen," Stu admitted. "Look, I know. I know how it looks. I was a coward about it. I did the breakup in a parking lot like it was a drug deal because I couldn't do it at your apartment where your cat liked me."

"Mr. Wrenches still brings up strangers," Faith said. "You scarred that cat."

"I miss that cat," Stu said, quieter.

There was a silence then that was different from the earlier silences. Not loaded. Just full. Helena reached over and took Faith's hand and squeezed it and did not say anything, which Faith appreciated more than anything she could have said.

"Why didn't you just tell me that at the time?" Faith asked. "The feeling like a guy in his underwear thing. I would have, I don't know, helped. Or left. But you gave me nothing, Stu. Two years of me thinking it was something I did."

"It wasn't anything you did. It was everything I didn't do. That's the whole ugly answer." He rubbed his jaw. "Leroy made me write you an apology email like eight months ago. A whole draft. Never sent it."

"It was a very good draft," Leroy said. "I wept."

"You could have sent a draft," Faith said. "Any draft. A single sentence with the word sorry in it would have done a lot of work."

"I know. I'm sorry. There. One sentence, late by two years, but it's real."

Faith looked at him for a while. He looked older than thirty-one in the red light, and tired in a way she recognized, because she'd been tired the same way for two years and it turned out they'd been tired about the same thing.

"Okay," she said finally. "Okay. That's more than I got in the parking lot."