Regular Order

The Daily Dose is the kind of bar where nobody learns your name unless you hand it over, and I never handed mine over, not once in the eight months I'd been stopping in after work, usually Tuesdays and Fridays, sometimes a Sunday when a deploy went bad and I needed a beer I didn't have to earn. Roy Yoshida, twenty-seven, software engineer at a startup so small we have standups in a room that used to be a garage, and three days a week I got to be a ghost in a pressed-tin-ceiling bar that looks out the back patio at the landfill. You would not believe how restful that is, being a ghost. Nobody asks what you do. Nobody asks about your weekend. Shay pours your beer, you drink it, you leave twenty percent, and the whole transaction is a small clean machine with no feelings in it except the ones I was quietly having about the machine's operator.

Shay Watts is thirty and she runs that room the way a good monitor runs a dashboard, everything flagged and handled before you notice it needed handling. She's a trans woman, which I knew because Joe Sharpe told me once in the way Joe tells you things, flat and factual, like reading off a permit. It didn't change anything about how I felt, which was that I had a low-grade crush I had no plans to act on, the kind you keep in a drawer. She had this way of wiping the counter in one long pull, wrist turning at the end, and I had caught myself, more than once, timing my Tuesday arrivals to when the bar was emptiest so there'd be nothing between me and that one long pull.

This particular Tuesday was slow even by Tuesday standards. Rain coming down sideways, which in Portland is just called rain, and the only other customer was Joe Sharpe, sixty-three, retired electrician at the far end with his whiskey and his crossword, watching the room the way he always does, like a chessboard where nobody's in danger. I was on my second pint and my phone was face down, which is my version of meditation, and that's when I noticed Shay was wiping the same spot on the counter. Not the counter, the same spot. Fourth time. Same six inches of wood in front of the well, the rag going out and back, out and back, and her eyes not on the rag at all but on the door.

I thought nothing of it, but I did think something of it, because a bartender who wipes one spot four times is a bartender waiting for somebody, and the somebody wasn't me. I took a drink and told myself it was none of my business, which was true, and then the door opened and a woman walked in with rain beaded on a leather jacket, and she was maybe twenty-nine, dark hair cut sharp at the jaw, carrying herself like the door was lucky to be opened by her.

"Hey, babe," the woman said, and before Shay's rag even stopped moving the woman leaned across the well and kissed her, right on the mouth, a real kiss, hand coming up to Shay's jaw.

Shay did not kiss her back. I want to be precise about this because I got the rest of it wrong, but that part I saw exactly: Shay's shoulders went up, her head pulled back half an inch, and when the woman let go Shay said something low I couldn't hear and put the rag down between them like a fence. The woman laughed like it was a joke and pulled out the stool directly across from me, one stool over from Joe, and sat down like she owned the lease.

And here is where I did the dumb thing, the thing I'd be undoing for the rest of the month. I looked at this woman, this sharp-jawed woman in a leather jacket who called Shay babe and kissed her at her place of work, and my brain, which allegedly handles logic for a living, reached for the simplest available file. Husband. Her husband showed up. The bartender I'd been building a quiet little fantasy around, building for eight months out of long wrist-pulls of a rag, was married, and the fantasy didn't just dim, it went dark all at once, as if a breaker had tripped. I remember feeling almost embarrassed, like I'd been reading somebody's mail. I put my eyes on my pint and decided I'd finish it slow and find a different bar for a while, someplace with no feelings in it at all.

"Her husband, huh," I muttered, mostly to my beer, because that's what muttering is, you think nobody hears it.

"I'd keep my voice down, son," Joe said, not looking up from his crossword, pencil tapping the paper twice. "And you'd get it right while you're at it. That's her ex, Alexia, and as far as I know Shay's only ever dated women. Not that it's your business."

I sat there with my mouth slightly open, which is not a good look for anybody and worse for a guy who just got corrected by a retired electrician over a two-dollar whiskey. "Oh," I said, and then, because the word had already left the building, "she only dates women?"

"She doesn't say much about it, I'm just telling you what I've seen," Joe said, filling in a square, "but Alexia's an ex-girlfriend, fourteen months they were together, and the girl still has a key, which I've told Shay is a fire hazard. So no, not a husband. You want to keep your assumptions in your own pint glass where they belong."

Well. You can imagine how that sat. I had spent, by my count, about ninety seconds being relieved and about eighty-nine of those being ashamed of the relief, because the relief meant I'd wanted the husband not to exist, and I'd wanted him not to exist so that Shay was available, and somewhere in there I had also assumed she was available to me, a man, which Joe had just, gently, with a pencil, taken off the table. I finished the pint in three pulls instead of slow ones, put down a tip that was probably too big, and got my jacket on, and I was halfway to the door when I did something worse than muttering. I turned around and looked at Shay, and Shay was looking at me, rag stopped, and she had this expression, not angry, more like a person watching a bird fly into the same window twice, and she raised one eyebrow about a quarter inch.

"Night, Roy," she said. She knew my name. I had never given it to her.

I walked home three blocks in the rain without my hood up because I felt like I deserved it, and that does not make me noble, it makes me a guy who misread a room and then punished his hair for it. Somewhere around the second block I started actually thinking instead of just cringing, and the thinking went like this: Alexia kissed her and Shay did not want it, that was plain even to a man who'd gotten everything else wrong, and Joe's correction, the only dates women part, had landed on me like a door closing when really it was just a fact about Shay that I had no business turning into either a green light or a red one. I had made her whole self into a vending machine with my assumptions. Husband button pressed, no candy, walk away. That's what I'd done. I'd treated a person like a machine with limited buttons.

I got home, dripping, and stood in my kitchen eating saltines over the sink like a person with no dignity left, and I thought about the way Shay had said my name. Not angry. Tired, maybe, the way you get tired of being a screen people project onto. And I thought about the fact that she knew my name this whole time, that the ghost thing was a thing I was doing alone, that she'd been polite enough to let me keep doing it.

Here is what I decided, standing there with cracker crumbs on my shirt, and I decided it the way a man decides to fix something he himself broke, which means carefully and with an apology first. I was going to go back in. Not to hit on her, the opposite of that, really. I was going to go back in and hand her back the lead on whatever this was, all of it, her terms, her pace, including the term where the answer is nothing and I keep drinking my beer and shut up about it. I didn't have a plan beyond that, because a plan felt like another assumption, and I'd had my fill of those for one Tuesday.

I went back Wednesday instead of waiting for Friday, which felt bold in a way that shows you how small my boldness was. The rain had quit. Shay was restocking the well and she saw me come in and didn't say anything until I sat down and put my hands flat on the bar where she could see them, which I did on purpose, like look, no tricks.

"Roy," she said. "Thought you might ghost us."

"Yeah, well," I said. "I owe you an apology, and probably Joe too, and I'd rather do it sober, so, whatever's on draft that you'd drink yourself."

She looked at me, then reached for a glass. "That'll be the pilsner, then," she said, and poured it in one long pull, wrist turning at the end, and set it down in front of me and waited, arms crossed, for whatever I had.

* * *

So I told her. All of it, out loud, in a bar with one other customer, which was Joe, who had very pointedly taken his crossword to the patio the moment I sat down, which I appreciated. I told her I'd assumed Alexia was her husband, that I'd written off my own dumb fantasy in one breath, that I'd then been relieved she wasn't married and ashamed of the relief, that Joe had corrected me on the rest, and that the whole chain of it made me feel like I'd been reading her mail for eight months without knowing her at all.

"The apology is for the kiss thing?" she asked. "That wasn't yours to apologize for."

"No, the kiss thing is Alexia's to apologize for, and you already handled it better than I would have," I said. "The apology is for the assuming. Husband, available, not available, all of it. I had you sorted into boxes in about four seconds and none of the boxes were yours."

Shay picked up a glass and dried it while I talked, which I took as permission to keep going, and when I ran out she set the glass down and looked at me with an expression I couldn't file anywhere.

"That's a more honest apology than I've gotten in a bar before," she said. "Okay. So what do you want out of saying it? Because guys say sorry like it's a coin they're inserting."

"Nothing," I said, and then, because she raised that eyebrow again, "okay, not nothing, but not tonight and not from you. Here's the actual thing. I like you. I've liked you since roughly my third visit. And I clearly don't know how to want that correctly, so I'm handing you the lead. Whatever happens or doesn't happen, your call, your pace, including nothing. I'll keep showing up Tuesdays either way and I won't be weird about it. I mean, I'll try not to be weird about it. I've got a track record now."

Shay leaned her elbows on the bar, and this was the first time in eight months that she'd looked at me the way you look at a person instead of a tab.

"You know most guys would've just quietly found a new bar," she said.

"I know. I thought about it. It seemed easier."

"And instead you came back Wednesday to hand me a live grenade with the pin out."

"I'm hoping it's less grenade, more, like, a schedule you get to set," I said, and she laughed, actually laughed, one short bark, and it did something to the whole room.

"Okay, Roy," she said. "Here's your schedule. Finish your beer. Come back Saturday, we close at eleven, and you can help me restock the well and we'll talk like two adults who know each other's names. And if you mutter one more assumption into a pint glass, Joe's allowed to throw you out. Those are the rules."

"Those are good rules," I said, and meant it, and finished my beer.

Saturday I showed up at ten of eleven, because showing up exactly at close felt eager and showing up late felt like I was doing it on purpose, so I split the difference and stood across the street like an idiot until my watch said 10:55. The rain had come back, a fine mean drizzle, and the pressed-tin ceiling inside was doing its best impression of a drum solo with the drips coming through the vent over the door. Shay was wiping down the patio tables when I walked in, and Joe was gone, which meant the crossword had gone with him, and the bar had that post-war feeling a room gets right before the lights go up.

"You're early," she said.

"I'm ten minutes early."

"That's early," she said, and handed me a gray bus tub. "Well needs restocking before I can count the drawers, and my back has opinions, so you're on bottle duty. Lager, pale, pilsner, and the IPA goes on the bottom shelf where the drips can't hit anything electrical."

"Copy that," I said, and I should say something here about how strange and good it was to be given a task, because for eight months my entire job at that bar had been sitting still and being anonymous, and suddenly I had a tub and instructions and a person expecting things from me, and my hands were almost steady doing it. I