The Birthday Dare

I woke up at six thirty the way I always do, before the alarm, and lay there for a minute staring at the ceiling before it hit me that it was my birthday. Thirty-two. Not a milestone birthday, not really, but it landed heavier than I expected. Thirty had been the big one, the one everybody made noise about, and I'd gotten through that with a cake at my mom's house and a card from my sister. Thirty-two was just a Tuesday.

I got up anyway. The shower in my apartment takes forever to heat, which is a thing a plumber notices and a thing a plumber is embarrassed by, since I keep telling myself I'll fix the recirculation issue and never do. So I stood there shivering for the first ninety seconds like every other morning, thinking about my day. Two jobs on the books. A water heater swap out on Maple Street and a slow drain at the laundromat that the owner swore she'd already tried everything on. She had not, in fact, tried everything.

I made coffee and ate standing at the counter, which is a habit I picked up in trade school and never dropped. I was twenty-one when I did the plumbing program at the community college over in Fairmont, two years of crawling through pipes in the training bay and eating vending machine lunches with a room full of other guys who mostly wanted to get licensed and get out. I wasn't close with any of them. There was one guy, Isaac, who sat two seats over in theory class and used to crack jokes under his breath during the instructor's lectures. I remembered him mostly for that. He was funny in a way that didn't need an audience, which is rarer than you'd think.

I hadn't thought about him in years, honestly. That's the thing about a small town like Hazelwood. You assume you know everybody and then it turns out half the people you went to school with moved off and the other half you just stopped seeing because your routes don't cross anymore. I do residential and light commercial plumbing. He apparently ran the feed store on the east end of Main. I'd heard that secondhand from a customer who mentioned it like I should already know, and I'd nodded like I did.

So the day went the way Tuesdays go. The water heater on Maple went fine, the old one came out easier than I expected and the new one went in with room to spare, and I was done by eleven. The laundromat drain turned out to be a wad of something unidentifiable that no amount of store-bought cleaner was ever going to touch, and I snaked it out and charged her for the visit and not the lecture. Then it was noon and I was hungry, and the only place in Hazelwood I ever eat lunch is the diner on Main Street.

The diner is called Rosie's, though nobody who eats there calls it that. It's got eight booths and a counter with maybe ten stools, and the coffee is bad in a way I've made peace with. I've been going there maybe twice a week for six years. The waitresses know my order. I always sit in the third booth from the door because the window is good and the radiator under the table doesn't rattle like the one in the second booth.

I ordered the turkey club and a coffee and was about halfway through my coffee when somebody dropped into the seat across from me like we'd planned it.

"Happy birthday," he said.

I looked up and it took me a second. He was heavier than I remembered and his hair was shorter, but the face was the same, and the grin was definitely the same. Isaac. Thirty-three now, a year older than me, though in trade school that had felt like more.

"How do you know it's my birthday?" I asked, which was a stupid question, because in a town this size if you don't tell people things they find out anyway.

"Rosie's little granddaughter posted the lunch specials and your sister commented on something," he said, waving at Dot behind the counter for coffee. "Also, you look like a man eating a birthday turkey club alone, no offense."

"None taken. It's accurate."

He laughed at that, a real laugh, and I found myself laughing too, which surprised me. I don't usually warm up that fast. But there was something easy about him, the same thing that had made him funny in theory class all those years ago. Dot brought his coffee and he doctored it with about four creams and told me he ran the feed store now, which confirmed the secondhand info, and that he'd been back in Hazelwood five years and I was the first classmate he'd run into properly. I said that seemed statistically unlikely, and he said the town was bigger than I thought, which, fair.

Then he leaned back in the booth and got a look I remembered too, the one he used to get before a joke.

"So here's a proposal," he said. "It's your birthday. You're eating alone. I'm off the clock until four. Let me buy you a shot of whiskey and you have to take it, no negotiating."

"It's Tuesday," I said.

"It's your birthday Tuesday. Different category of Tuesday entirely."

I told him I didn't really drink at lunch. He said he knew, that he'd asked around, and that was exactly why it was a dare and not just a round of drinks. I said I had an afternoon, and he said the laundromat wasn't going to clog itself again before two, and I laughed before I could stop myself, which felt like losing ground.

The thing is, I've never been an adventurous guy. I know that about myself. Same booth, same order, same route to work, same brand of work boots for nine years running. My sister calls it being steady. My mom calls it being reliable. Both of them are being polite about the same fact. And lately, turning thirty-two in an apartment I've rented for seven years, the word I keep landing on for myself is careful. Careful isn't a bad thing in my line of work. You don't want a careless guy touching your gas water heater. But it bleeds into everything, and I'd started noticing that.

I looked at the shot glass Isaac was already signaling Dot for, like the decision had been made without my input, and something in me went quiet and then shifted, the way a pipe shifts when you finally put the right amount of torque on it. Not a dramatic thing. Just a click.

"Whiskey," I said. "Not that well stuff."

"Obviously." He turned to Dot. "Two of the actual bourbon, the stuff behind the glass, not the rail."

She gave him a look that said she knew exactly what he was doing, which meant probably half the diner knew what he was doing, and brought the two glasses anyway. He lifted his.

"To thirty-two," he said. "May it be less predictable than the last ten years."

I picked mine up. It smelled sharp and warm and I took the whole thing in two swallows like I was twenty-one again, back when I could drink cheap beer at a bonfire and feel nothing. This was not cheap beer. It went down hot and sat in my chest like a small lit stove.

Isaac watched me the whole time with that grin, and I want to be careful with how I describe that, because it wasn't teasing exactly. It was more like interest. Like I'd shown him something by taking the shot, and he'd filed it away.

"Good," he said. "Because that was dare one of, I'd say, five."

"Five? Nobody said five."

"Nobody asked. That's how dares work." He stirred his coffee even though he hadn't put anything new in it. "You'll like them. Mostly."

I said mostly like I was going to press him on it, and he just smiled and ordered us both lunch, since apparently we were eating together now, and I didn't argue, which told me something about where my Tuesday was headed.

The turkey club showed up and I ate half of it while Isaac worked through a grilled cheese and a story about a goat that got loose in the feed store in March. It was a decent story. He told stories the way he'd told them in school, building up a lot of ordinary detail before the punchline, and I kept getting caught by the punchlines anyway. Somewhere in there I realized I hadn't thought about my four o'clock job once, which was unusual for me. I'm the kind of guy who has the afternoon mapped before the plate lands.

Then he set his crust down and wiped his hands on a napkin like he was preparing for something official. "Dare two," he said. "You have to tell Dot it's your birthday. Out loud. To her face. And you have to let her do whatever she does about it."

"That's it?"

"That's it. Easy one. Consider it a breather."

I looked over at the counter. Dot had been there longer than I had been going to Rosie's, which was six years of me sitting in this same booth twice a week, and in six years I had told her my birthday exactly zero times. It wasn't a secret. It just never seemed like my information to hand out.

"She's going to make a scene," I said.

"Probably."

"You're the one who has to sit through the scene."

"I'll survive it." He pushed my plate aside an inch, like clearing runway. "Go on. Booth's still yours, no takebacks!"

So I got up and walked the eight feet to the counter and told Dot it was my birthday, which I managed to say in roughly the same tone I'd use to report a leaky fitting. And I was right, she made a scene. She rang a little bell she keeps under the register for no reason I ever knew, and she hollered happy birthday at a volume meant for the kitchen in back, and a woman at the counter I sort of recognized from the church fair turned around and clapped twice. I said thank you and stood there as still as a fence post until it blew over.

And here's the part I didn't expect. Walking back, it wasn't awful. It was embarrassing in the way a hot shower is uncomfortable for the first ten seconds. Dot sent over a slice of pie I didn't