The Call at Langford

*This story is a slow burn about a man who's done with surprises and a woman who's full of them. The dress just does something to the air in the room. Thanks for reading, pour yourself something strong.*

Sid had been in Langford eleven weeks, and in that time he had learned three things about the town. The parking was a rumor, the coffee was better than it had any right to be, and the quiet he had moved here for was real, mostly. He pushed open the door of The Brass Gavel at half past seven on a Thursday, ducked out of habit under the low lintel, and scanned the room for an empty stool.

The bar had been a bank once, or so Clarissa claimed. Exposed brick, a long oak counter worn pale where a hundred forearms had rested, and lighting dim enough to be kind to everyone. There were maybe fifteen people in the place. One empty stool near the door, one near the far end, where a man in a corduroy jacket appeared to be arguing with a crossword puzzle.

"Sid. Get over here before somebody else takes my good stool."

Clarissa's voice carried the way it always did, without any apparent effort. She was fifty-eight and had owned the place for twelve years, and she had been pouring him whiskeys since his first week in town, back when he still introduced himself as an auctioneer and people still asked follow-up questions about it.

He crossed the room and sat. "Evening, Clarissa."

"You look like a man who sold something difficult today." She was already reaching for the bottle, which was the kind of service Sid had decided he could not live without anymore.

"Sold a whole estate. Dead man's furniture, forty years of it. The family cried at the right lots, so I'd call it a success." He took the glass she slid toward him. "Whiskey's the correct diagnosis, anyway."

"Whiskey's always the correct diagnosis." Then she lowered her voice and tipped her head toward the corner table by the window. "You've got an admirer, by the way. She asked if I knew when you usually came in. I told her Thursdays, because I have no loyalty and I wanted to see what happened."

Sid turned on his stool. At the corner table sat a woman he knew, and the knowing of her was a small, odd story. Two weeks ago, at the coffee cart outside the art history building, where he went on the days he pretended to still have a schedule, a grad student had struck up a conversation with him about a painting on the cart's paper cups. She was twenty-nine, she said, writing a dissertation on something to do with Dutch still lifes, and she had talked for ten minutes while his coffee went cold and he had not minded a bit. Her name was Sunny. He remembered being surprised that the name fit her.

She caught him looking and raised her hand in a wave, unhurried, like they were friends who had merely mislaid each other for a fortnight.

"That's Sunny," Clarissa said. "She's in here a couple nights a week. Reads actual books at the bar, which I tolerate because she tips."

"I know her. Coffee cart, up at the college."

"Then go be sociable, because she's been watching the door for an hour and it's making my other customers nervous."

Sid picked up his glass, told himself there was nothing strange about a grown man relocating four stools, and walked over. Sunny looked up at him with an expression he could not quite file. She was in a green sweater, hair down, a paperback face-down on the table to keep her place.

"Mr. Auctioneer," she said. "Sit, unless you're meeting someone."

"I'm meeting no one. I'm meeting my whiskey, which is getting lonely." He sat across from her and noted, without deciding to, that she had the kind of face that made a room quieter. "I didn't expect to see you here. Langford's got what, three bars?"

"Three, and one of them is a beer garden with no roof. This is the best of the options and the second best is a vending machine." She closed her book with a finger in it. "How's retirement? Or is it not retirement if you still show up at the coffee cart every Tuesday looking for something to do?"

"It's not retirement. It's exile with good light." He drank. "I did forty years of talking fast. I'm practicing talking slowly. It's harder than you'd think."

"You were at an auction last week, I heard. The estate sale over on Kerr Street."

"That was me. The dead man's furniture."

"I heard you did the bidding yourself, out loud, like in a movie."

"Somebody has to keep the old ways alive." He found he was smiling, which was fine, and that he did not want the evening to end at the bottom of this glass, which was less fine, or more fine, depending on how you counted. "What about you? How's the dissertation?"

"Slowly murdering me. I'm writing about vanities, still lifes with skulls and clocks, all that cheerful stuff about how everything rots. Very upbeat reading." She turned the book around so he could see the cover. "Chapter three is due Monday and I've been hiding from it in this bar, which Clarissa thinks is charming and my advisor would think is a confession."

"Chapter three can wait one more drink, surely."

"That's the kind of enabling talk that got me into grad school."

Sid looked at his glass, then at her, and heard himself say a thing before he had approved it. "I've got a decent bottle at home. Better than this one, anyway. If you've got nowhere better to be."

There was a pause of about two seconds, during which Sid catalogued several possible exits from the sentence. Sunny let him off the hook by grinning.

"You're inviting me for a nightcap? You're sixty-two, you know. You're supposed to be respectable."

"I am sixty-two and extremely respectable. That's why the bottle's decent." (He had decided years ago that the number did not embarrass him, and mostly it didn't.)

"Well then." She gathered her book and her bag and stood. "Lead the way, Mr. Auctioneer. I can't resist a better bottle, and I definitely can't resist chapter three."

Clarissa watched them go with the satisfaction of a woman who had engineered the whole thing and would deny it under oath.

* * *

Sid's bungalow sat six blocks from the bar, on a street where the maples had been allowed to grow shaggy. He had rented it furnished, which meant it felt like a house wearing someone else's coat. The spare room still held boxes marked BOOKS and BOOKS 2 and MISC, and the living room had a good couch, a bad lamp, and a full-length mirror left by the previous tenant that Sid kept meaning to move and never did.

"Nice place," Sunny said, stepping in and looking around with the frank interest of someone who appraised rooms for a living, in her way. "It smells like new paint."

"Smelled like new paint when I moved in. Now I think it mostly smells like whiskey." He got the bottle down from the cabinet, a bottle he had been saving without a reason, and set out two glasses. "Ice? Water?"

"Neat is fine." She sat on the couch and put her bag beside her, close to her, the way people do when the bag has plans in it. "So. Forty years of auctioneering. What's the strangest thing you ever sold?"

"A set of dental tools owned by a nineteenth-century dentist who turned out to be a counterfeiter. The family had no idea. We got a federal agent in the audience by lot sixty."

"See, that's better than anything in my dissertation." She took her glass and held it up a little. "To the old ways."

They drank. The whiskey was in fact better, and he told her so, and she said that auctioneers probably knew whiskey the way grad students knew instant noodles, and the conversation went on comfortably for another ten minutes. Then Sunny set her glass down, stood, and said, "Bathroom?"

"Down the hall, second door. The second door is a closet full of boxes I haven't confessed to yet."

She went. Sid refilled his glass and sat, and thought the evening had turned out well in an ordinary way, a drink with an interesting woman, and that in fifteen minutes he would walk her back toward campus like a gentleman, or offer to call her a cab, or something reasonable.

Then the bathroom door opened and Sunny came back down the hall, and reasonable left the building.

She had changed. The green sweater was gone, and in its place she wore a black lace dress that ended a hand's width above her knee, with a slip of shadow under it where the lace gave way. Black heels. Her face was done now, subtle, a line of color at her mouth, and she had put her hair up with two pins, so that her neck was bare. She stopped at the end of the hall, one hand on the wall, and looked at him with an expression that was asking and answering at the same time.

"Okay," she said. "So I had this in my bag."

Sid discovered his glass was still in his hand and that he had forgotten what to do with it.

"I've been thinking about it since the coffee cart, and I thought, well. If tonight ever came to anything, I'd rather you saw me like this."

Sid felt the heat go up through his chest and into his face, which at sixty-two he had thought was a retired reflex. He put the glass down on the side table so he would not do anything embarrassing with it.

"You like what you see?" Her voice was steady, amused, and not asking in the way people ask when they already know. She wanted the answer out loud.

"Yes," Sid said. "Very much."

"Good." She came down the hall, one step at a time, heels clicking on the