The Bitter Stack

*This one came from thinking about how anger can be a kind of clarity. Not every date is sweet, and that doesn't mean it's bad. Thanks for reading. Hope it made you smirk.*

I want to start by admitting that the whole thing was a dare I gave myself, which is a stupid way to begin any story, but there it is. My friends had spent the better part of three months telling me that online dating was a swamp and that I, Dora Rice, twenty-three years old and freshly out of the worst year of my life, was going to drown in it. And I hated being told what I was going to do. That has always been my fatal flaw, right there. Tell me I can't and I'll do the thing out of spite, even if the thing is a terrible idea.

So I had the app, and I had swiped through the usual parade of guys holding fish and guys holding other guys' babies, and then Bill Hardy's profile came up and I stopped scrolling. Fifty-five years old. Divorced. A photo of a man sitting on a porch with a dog, not smiling, not scowling, just looking at the camera like he had somewhere better to be but was willing to wait around for a minute. No fish. No sunglasses perched on his head. His bio said he liked old paperbacks and fixing things and that he was done with games, and I remember thinking, well, buddy, everyone says that, but at least you didn't write that you like to laugh, so congratulations on clearing the lowest bar in existence.

I swiped right mostly to be contrarian. I told myself I'd message him something dry, he'd fail to get the joke or get it wrong, and I could go back to my friends with proof that the swamp was real. Except he messaged back in complete sentences. Then paragraphs. Then he asked actual questions and waited for the answers instead of charging ahead with his own agenda like every guy my age had done since I turned twenty-one and made the mistake of existing in public. The fling with Adam from work happened right after that birthday, and it ended badly in the ordinary way: he wanted to keep it secret and I wanted to keep it and neither of those things survived contact with reality. I hadn't trusted a man's stated intentions since. Bill's messages were patient. That alone was suspicious.

By the time we'd been talking for two weeks, he suggested meeting, and he suggested the reading room at the Fitzgerald library, Thursday night, because it stayed open late and it was quiet. I'd never even heard of it. The main branch closed at six like everything else in this city that used to be free, but the Fitzgerald had this one stubborn room that ran until nine, all old newspapers in metal shelves and dim yellow light and a radiator that clicked like something was loose inside it. He said he went there to read because his apartment was quiet and the reading room had better light. I said fine, Thursday, and then spent the whole drive over constructing elaborate scenarios in which this was a terrible mistake.

The rain had been coming down all afternoon and the parking lot outside was slicked with it, orange streetlight bouncing off every puddle. I sat in my Corolla for four full minutes doing the breathing thing my sister taught me, which is where you exhale longer than you inhale and pretend it helps. Then I went in.

The reading room was exactly as advertised, which annoyed me. Two long banks of metal shelving stacked with bound newspapers going back decades, the kind with spines cracked and gold lettering worn off. The radiator ticking away under the window. And two armchairs facing each other by the big window, one of them occupied by a man in a flannel shirt and a gray jacket, reading a paperback so beaten up that the cover had gone soft at the corners. That was Bill. He looked exactly like his photo, which annoyed me further, because I'd been counting on something to be wrong.

He looked up when I came in and closed the paperback around his finger to mark his place. On the cover, in letters that had survived better than the plot presumably had, was the title of some novel I'd never heard of by some author I'd never heard of, and I opened with the absolute worst possible greeting, the one I'd been composing in the car instead of breathing properly.

"Wow," I said. "That book looks like it predates the printing press. Did you dig it up?"

He didn't blink. He turned the book over and looked at the cover himself, as if checking it for the first time. "Nineteen sixty-two," he said. "And it was already old when I found it. Good to meet you too."

And that was the tone of the whole evening, more or less, established in the first ten seconds. He pointed at the other armchair and I sat down in it, and we spent a while just taking each other's measure while the radiator clicked. He asked if I wanted coffee from the machine down the hall and I said yes even though I didn't, because I needed something to do with my hands. The machine produced coffee that tasted like it had been filtered through an old gym sock. I said so. He said that was the machine's one genuine talent, ruining coffee, and I decided against my will that this was funny.

"So," I said at some point, once we'd burned through the weather and the parking situation. "You're fifty-five. That's not a typo or a joke profile. You actually put your real age on there."

"It's the age I've got," he said, turning his coffee cup slowly on the armrest. "Seemed dishonest to round it down. Why, did you come down here expecting a ninety-year-old, or expecting me to lie?"

"Neither. I came down here expecting to be bored in forty minutes and go home with a story about how right my friends were."

"What do they say about it?"

"That a fifty-five-year-old who messages a twenty-three-year-old wants either a nurse or a trophy, and possibly both."

He nodded at that, actually nodded, like I'd made a fair point at a meeting. He didn't get defensive, didn't laugh it off, didn't do the wounded dignity act I'd seen from men half his age when I so much as mentioned the age gap. He just said, "Fair," and then told me a little about himself in a flat, unbothered voice. Retired electrician. Thirty-one years in the trade, started at twenty-two, knees gave out before the desire to stop working did, so he retired at fifty-three and now fixed things for friends and neighbors out of stubbornness. Divorced at forty-eight, no kids, dated casually since fifty and found the apps "a strange country where I don't speak the language." His words. I asked what he did all day and he said he read, fixed things, walked the dog, and came here on Thursdays, and he said it without apology, which was somehow more disarming than anything else he could have told me.

Then he turned it around on me, because of course he did. He wanted to know what I did, and I told him I dispatch tow trucks, which is the job I fell into after two years of community college and one year of waiting tables, and I told him about it with what I'm sure he could hear was spectacular irritation. Because it is an irritating job. People call in furious, drivers get lost, the software crashes twice a shift, and my boss thinks morale is a free pizza once a quarter. I went on about it for longer than a first meeting warrants. I described the woman who called Tuesday screaming about a wait time that the screen clearly said was forty minutes, and the driver who got wedged in a garage entrance because he refused to accept that his truck was twelve feet long.

Bill listened to all of it with his finger still holding his place in that ruined paperback. He didn't once tell me to relax, which is the phrase that has ended more conversations in my life than any other. When I finally ran down, he asked one question, and it was a good one. He asked what the best part of the shift was, the actual best part, and I had to stop and think, because nobody has ever asked me that about that job, including me.

"Nothing," I said first, automatically. Then I thought about it. "Okay. When a driver gets a car out of a ditch in the rain and the guy who called in screaming suddenly goes quiet and says thank you. That. That's the only part."

He nodded again, slow, like I'd confirmed something he'd suspected. The radiator clicked. Out the window the rain kept coming down in the streetlight, and I realized I'd been in that ugly yellow room for over an hour and hadn't once done the breathing thing.

"So what's the book about," I said, nodding at the paperback, mostly because I'd run out of ways to be mean about it that hadn't already landed wrong.

He held it up. "A man who inherits a house he doesn't want," he said. "And can't figure out why he stays."

I could have made a joke about that. I opened my mouth to make a joke about that. And then the coffee machine down the hall clicked off, or the radiator clicked twice, or something happened in that quiet room that made me close my mouth again, and Bill waited, patient as ever, to see whether I was going to keep sniping or start actually talking. I looked at the rain on the parking lot and thought, well, Dora, you came here to prove them wrong, and proving people wrong turns out to be a lot of work.

The question came a little later, after we'd both gone quiet in that way rooms go quiet when two people stop performing at each other. He marked his page with the receipt he'd been using as a bookmark, set the book face down on the arm of his chair, and asked it plainly. He wanted to know why I'd actually agreed to come. Not the version I'd texted him, which was sure, whatever, Thursday works. The real version.

And that's a question you can deflect. I deflect things professionally, honestly. I spend forty hours a week telling furious strangers that the truck is coming and I cannot make it come faster, which is a kind of deflection too, now that I think about it. But sitting there in the yellow light with the rain on the window, deflecting felt like it would cost more than the truth. So I gave him the truth, and the truth was ugly and I knew it was ugly when I said it.

My friends had a pool going. That's the actual fact. Sally and Carmen and my sister had literally, actually, physically put money in an envelope at Carmen's kitchen table two Sundays ago, betting on whether I'd go through with meeting him or find some excuse by Wednesday. Carmen said I'd cancel. Sally said I'd go but sit there with my arms crossed the whole time like I was doing him a favor. My sister, traitorously, said I'd go and like it, which I took as an insult at the time and did not take as an insult now, sitting in that chair. I told Bill all of this. The envelope. The bets. The fact that I drove forty minutes in the rain in a Corolla with a squealing belt specifically so that Carmen would lose her bet.

I want to be careful here not to dress it up, because dressing it up is what I did in the messages, all week, all breezy and ironic. But the plain fact was that I'd agreed to meet a stranger from an app, a man thirty-two years older than me, in a library reading room, out of spite. Not curiosity. Not hope. Spite. It was a dare I'd issued to myself on behalf of other people, which is maybe the worst possible reason to do anything, and I sat there waiting for him to be insulted by it, because he should have been, a little.

He wasn't. He laughed. Not a big laugh, he wasn't a big laugh kind of man, but a dry single syllable of a laugh, the kind you keep for things that are genuinely funny rather than things you're obligated to find funny. Then he said that spite was an underrated fuel. He said most of the good decisions people credit to wisdom were actually spite wearing a coat. He'd taken a night class in his forties on the strength of a coworker who said he couldn't do it. He'd gotten through the divorce paperwork in under a year partly because his ex said he'd drag it out for years. He said the trick was knowing which spite to burn and which to let sit in the garage until it expired.

I didn't have a comeback for that. Usually I have a comeback ready before the other person finishes talking, that's my whole personality, ask anyone at the dispatch desk. But he'd just reframed the thing I was ashamed of into something almost respectable, and my brain kept reaching for a snipe and finding nothing there. It was the strangest sensation. Like reaching for the brake and finding the pedal goes to the floor.

So instead I asked him why he'd agreed. Fair's fair, and I figured he must have his own version, because nobody messages a twenty-three-year-old tow dispatcher on an app because the algorithm spoke to them. And he thought about it, actually thought, didn't have the answer loaded, and finally said he was tired of games and tired of performing and had decided that anyone half his age who wasn't performing was worth an hour of his time, because they were rare, and he wasn't wrong, apparently, because here I was not performing, which was true, annoyingly.

Then he said something else, quieter, that I keep turning over. He said he liked that I'd told him the ugly version. He said most people he met told him the version of themselves they'd rehearsed, and the ugly version was the only one worth talking to.

* * *

We stayed past the point where the reading room emptied out. The last other person, a guy with a laptop and a sports coat, packed up around eight and gave us a look on his way out that I chose to interpret as envy. The librarian at the desk started doing the closing shuffle around quarter to nine, reshelving, killing lights room by room, the way librarians do, a passive aggressive ballet of stacking and clearing throat. Bill ignored it with the ease of a man who has ignored it every Thursday for a year. I kept checking the clock and being surprised by how late it was.

Somewhere in that last hour the conversation stopped being an exchange of positions and became something else. I don't know exactly when it turned. I remember telling him about Adam, the guy from work I'd seen for a few months after my twenty-first birthday, how it ended with him telling a whole break room that I was dramatic, and Bill listening without rushing to call Adam names, which was its own kind of courtesy. I remember him telling me that when his marriage ended he'd moved into an apartment where the only thing he owned was a bed and a dog, and how he'd sat on that bed for three nights deciding whether that was freedom or failure, and how on the fourth night he'd decided it was both and