Sparks and Letters

I'm Piper Blackwood, twenty-eight, and I fix cars for a living. I moved to this town five years ago for a job at Hollis Auto on Route 9, and in that time I've made exactly two friends, one of whom is a menace. But we'll get to her.

Thursday nights are slow at The Grinding Wheel. That's the dive bar on the edge of town, the one with the cracked vinyl booths and the neon sign out front that only lights up half the word. I go there after work sometimes because it's two blocks from my apartment over the garage, and because the bartender is Tyrone Brinkley, who is thirty-one, funny in a tired way, and built like he was assembled on purpose.

I've been nursing a thing for him for about a year. I never did anything about it because that's not how I operate. I operate by changing brake pads and keeping my mouth shut. But Thursday I'd closed out a double shift, my arms were still shaking from wrestling an axle, and I'd had two beers on an empty stomach, which for me is basically truth serum.

So I did something stupid. I grabbed a napkin and a pen from my coveralls and wrote him a note. It said, and I quote because I rewrote it in my head a hundred times afterward: "You're easy on the eyes and the beer's cheap. A drink sometime? Piper." Then, because the empty stomach had taken the wheel completely, I folded it up and shoved it under the base of his tip jar while he was hauling the trash out back.

Then I panicked, paid my tab, and left. Normal behavior. Very cool.

* * *

Here's the part I didn't know about until later. Abigail Dobson was at the bar that night. She's twenty-nine, she's been coming to the Wheel since I started showing up, and she dated Tyrone once, years ago, which somehow ended with them being better friends than before. She's also the kind of person who sees a locked car with keys in it as a personal invitation.

She watched me shove the napkin under the jar. Then she watched Tyrone come back in, spot it, and leave it under the jar while he went to the back. And instead of letting the universe handle my business like an adult, she did what Abigail does. She asked Tyrone to help her carry a box of limes to the back, then returned and swiped the napkin from under the jar, and wrote a replacement on a fresh napkin in handwriting she'd apparently practiced copying off my old work orders.

The new note said: "Come to my place tonight. Don't knock, just walk in. I'm off at 11." Plus my phone number, which she knew, because of course she knew.

Then she put it back under the jar and sat there sipping her drink like a cat on a warm windowsill.

* * *

Tyrone texted me at 9:40 that night. I was on my couch in oil-stained sweatpants, eating cereal for dinner, when my phone buzzed.

"Got your note. Tonight then?"

I stared at it for a good minute. I ran back through my whole day. I hadn't written anyone. I hadn't given anyone my number except the guy at the parts counter, and he was sixty and called me "son." My number was on my work cards though, so strangers got it all the time.

I texted back: "What note?"

He replied maybe thirty seconds later: "Don't play coy, grease monkey. Midnight. I'm bringing beer."

And here's where my brain made its one fatal turn. I read that text and thought, this is a bit. Tyrone does stand-up, or he tried to for years, he talks about it constantly, and he's got this dry delivery where he'll commit to a joke for a full hour until you cave and laugh. Somebody at the bar must have told him I said something about him, or Abigail put him up to it, and now he was running with it. That had to be it. Because the alternative was that I'd written a napkin note I couldn't remember writing, and my brain refused that one flat out.

So I played along. Bad idea. I texted: "Sure, midnight. I'll leave the door unlocked, Prince Charming."

I figured we'd both have a laugh about it Friday. I even started drafting the joke I'd tell.

* * *

Then at 11:15 there was a soft knock at the building's stairwell door, and footsteps, and then a letter slid under my apartment door. An actual letter. On Wheel stationery, which is just order pads with a logo.

I sat there with my cereal bowl getting warm in my lap and read it twice.

"Piper. I'm serious. I'll be there at midnight. Wear nothing but grease. I've been hoping you'd say something for a year and I'm not letting this one sit in a tip jar. Tyrone."

I read it a third time. Then a fourth. Wear nothing but grease. My heart was doing something I didn't appreciate, and my face was doing something even worse, and I had to admit that no comedian on earth commits to a bit this hard with a handwritten letter at 11:15 at night. There was a real date on it. Real words. Real hope, if I'm honest with myself, and I wasn't ready to be.

But I still had an escape hatch. If this was real, then what happened at the bar must have gone sideways somehow, some crossed wire. If it was a joke, then the joke had grown legs and I'd better steer it somewhere I could survive the landing.

So I did the only thing my rattled brain produced. I texted him a challenge, thinking nobody would actually take it.

"Fine. Prove you mean it. Take your shirt off before you even step in the door. Then we'll talk."

There. If he was joking, I'd just raised him and he'd fold, because that's how the game goes. If he was serious, well. Then I'd have a shirtless bartender at my door at midnight and a problem I'd been avoiding for a year, showing up in the flesh, and I'd deal with that when the door opened.

I put the phone face down on the couch and told myself that whatever happened next, I was an adult, he was an adult, and the worst case was one very awkward Friday at the Wheel.