The Cleanup Job

I'm Brianna Bradford, forty-five years old, and I've been a firefighter for nineteen years. Two years ago my divorce got finalized and I kept the little house on Fenwick Street, with a garage full of gym equipment I actually use and a kitchen table I mostly don't. It's a decent house. It's quiet. Sometimes it's too quiet.

Two blocks down from me lives Donnie Standish, who is thirty-four and owns a karaoke bar called Off-Key. I didn't know any of that when the whole thing started. All I knew was that a silver Hyundai had been parked in my spot on the street for three days.

Now, I should explain the spot. There's no assigned parking on Fenwick. It's city street, first come first serve, anyone can park anywhere it's legal. But the spot in front of my house is the spot. It's flat, it's right by my gate, and after carrying gear up and down firehouse steps all day I don't want to walk an extra block with groceries. For six years I'd parked there and the neighbors knew it. So when the Hyundai showed up, I took it personally. That's a character flaw of mine. I own it.

I left a note under his wiper. The note was reasonable but it wasn't. It said "Some of us work for a living. Find your own spot." No signature, but my handwriting is terrible in a recognizable way and he figured it out fast enough.

He came to my door that evening. I opened it with a glass of wine in my hand and there he was, shorter than me by an inch, dark hair, a little soft around the middle, wearing a bar towel over one shoulder like he'd just walked out of work.

"You're the note," he said.

"I'm the note, yeah."

"Lady, it's a public street."

"I know it's a public street. And you parked in my spot in it."

He laughed. He actually laughed, like this was the funniest thing that happened to him all week, and then he said, "I own the bar two blocks down. I get home at three in the morning. The spot near your house is the first legal one I find. I'll try to do better."

And then he parked there the next night anyway. And the night after that. We traded notes for a week, each one more passive-aggressive than the last, until one of his said "Fine. You win. This is a stupid thing to fight over" and I felt like an idiot and also like I'd lost something, which made no sense.

That was two months ago. He kept his word, mostly. He parks a block down. I still see the Hyundai sometimes and every time I do I get this small hot feeling in my chest that has nothing to do with parking and everything to do with the fact that my life had gotten so small that a parking spot mattered that much.

* * *

Here's the part I don't tell people at work. After the divorce I got lonely. Not sad-movie lonely, just flat. I'd come home from a shift, eat standing at the counter, watch half a show, fall asleep on the couch. My ex and I hadn't even fought that bad at the end. We'd just stopped. And the stop was worse than any fight.

So when I got to thinking about Donnie Standish, I told myself it was revenge. That's what I told myself, anyway. He stole my spot, he laughed at me, and I was going to walk into his bar and be charming and ruin him a little. The plan, as far as I had one, was to be friendly until I wasn't. Older women do it to younger men all the time in movies. Why not me.

The problem was I hadn't been on a date in three years and my flirting muscles had atrophied. I practiced in the bathroom mirror one Saturday. I looked like a hostage reading a statement. I gave up and decided to just show up and see what happened.

I picked a Tuesday because I figured a karaoke bar on a Tuesday would be dead. I put on jeans that still fit and a black shirt I bought when I was still trying to impress my ex, which should tell you how long ago that was. I drove the two blocks, which is ridiculous, but I'd had a beer before I left because my nerves needed it.

Off-Key sits on the corner of Delancey and Ninth, next to a check cashing place. The sign is neon, a blue microphone with a red crack through it. Inside it smells like beer and fried food and that staleness bars get in their carpets. The floors were sticky in the way you'd expect. There were maybe eleven people in the whole place and a woman on the small stage butchering a Journey song with total commitment.

And behind the bar, wiping a glass, was Donnie Standish.

What I hadn't planned for was this. He looked good. Not movie-star good. Just good in a real way. His sleeves were rolled up and his forearms had some hair on them and he moved around behind the bar like he owned every inch of it, which he did. He was laughing at something one of the eleven people said, and the laugh came easy out of him, no effort. My ex had been charming in a rehearsed way. This guy was charming like breathing.

I sat down at the end of the bar and ordered a draft from the other bartender, a kid with a neck tattoo, and spent twenty minutes not looking at Donnie, which took actual work. The Journey woman finished and a guy got up and did something even worse, and the crowd clapped anyway because that's the deal you sign when you walk into a karaoke bar.

Donnie came down my way eventually to restock the cooler. He glanced at me, did a small double take, and leaned his elbows on the bar.

"You're Fenwick," he said. "Bradford. Brianna, right? The note."

"The note. That's me. My whole identity now, apparently."

"Well, the handwriting is unforgettable." He grinned. "What brings you in? You didn't strike me as the karaoke type."

"I'm not. I came to see if the place was as bad as it looks from the street."

"And?"

"It's worse."

He laughed again, that easy laugh, and something in my chest did a thing I didn't authorize. I took a drink of my beer to cover it.

"Can I get you something better than that draft?" he asked. "On the house. Consider it an apology for the parking thing, two months late."

"The parking thing is settled. You lost. You park a block down like a civilized man."

"I do. Every night. At three in the morning. In the rain once."

"Good," I said, and I meant it to come out cold but it came out almost warm, and he heard it too, I could tell, because his grin changed shape a little.

He went back down the bar and I sat there doing the math on myself. Two months of parking war and here I was in his bar on a Tuesday night in the good jeans. Revenge. Sure. That's what this was. I finished the draft and ordered a second one and watched him work and let the plan whatever-it-was keep going.

The woman who'd done Journey got up again. Donnie yelled something encouraging at her. The neck tattoo kid asked me if I wanted to sign up for a song and I said absolutely not and Donnie, down at the other end, said "She's a firefighter, Marco, she could probably carry you out of here" and I hadn't told him that. I hadn't told him what I do for a living. So he'd either heard it from a neighbor or he'd looked me up, and either way it did another unauthorized thing to my chest.

I stayed for two hours. I sang nothing. On my way out he called down the bar, "Same time next Tuesday?" like a joke, and I said "Maybe," and drove the two stupid blocks home and sat in my quiet kitchen at eleven at night feeling something I hadn't felt in three years, which was curiosity about a Wednesday, and a Tuesday after that.

So the next Tuesday I went back. I told myself it was reconnaissance, which is a word firefighters use and also a lie. I wore the same jeans and a different shirt and I told myself that too was a coincidence, that I owned other shirts, which I do, but not ones I'd bought with any hope in them.

Off-Key was about the same as the week before. Ten or eleven people, a guy doing Tom Jones badly, sticky floor. Donnie was behind the bar in the same rolled-up sleeves and when he saw me come in he pointed at the same stool at the end and I took it, because apparently we had a bit now.

"Whiskey soda," I said, before he could ask. "Two of them. I'm pacing myself in a very sophisticated way."

"Fancy. Last week you drank draft like a guy fixing his truck."

"Last week I was pretending I wasn't going to come back. This week I'm not pretending."

He laughed and made the drinks and I took mine to a small table near the stage, because sitting at the bar all night felt like something a person with a crush would do, and I am forty-five years old and do not get crushes. I get plans. Except the plan was foggy by then, honestly. It had started out as revenge, or something shaped like revenge, and somewhere around the second whiskey soda it had turned into a thing with more skin on it.

After the second whiskey soda I did approach the bar. I put my elbows where his elbows had been the week before and I said, "I have a karaoke question."

"Hit me."

"If a person were going to sing one song in this establishment, ever, what would it be?"

"Depends. What's the occasion? Divorce? Birthday? Losing a parking war?"

"You're hung up on that parking war."

"I lost a war, Brianna. It leaves a mark."

"I Will Survive," I said. "That's the song. That's what I'd do."

He stopped wiping the glass and looked at me with what I want to call delight, though delight feels too soft. It was more like a man finding money in an old coat. "That is the correct answer," he said. "That is the only correct answer. You'd have to commit. Full Gloria Gaynor. No smiling."

"I don't smile on duty."

"Clearly." He set the glass down. "Tuesday nights are slow. Nobody would even laugh at you. Much."

"Don't tempt me. I've carried guys heavier than you out of burning buildings. I can survive a laugh."

I said it casual and watched it land. He did the neck thing guys do when they hear a woman talk about strength and like it, some quick recalibration. He came around and took his break about fifteen minutes later, which I pretended was a surprise, and sat across from me with his own drink, a beer with no glass.

"So," he said. "Fenwick. Week two. I'm flattered and also suspicious."

"Of what?"

"Nobody comes to Off-Key two Tuesdays in a row unless they want something."

"Marco's neck tattoo brought me back."

"It is a strong tattoo. What is it, a swallow?"

"A swallow. And you came back for the atmosphere. The sticky floors."

"The floors are character. The storeroom, now, the storeroom is a crime scene. I keep telling myself I'll clean it and I keep not doing it. There are beer signs from the previous owner back there I've never seen because there's a box of karaoke discs in front of them."

"There it is," I said.

"There what is?"

"You need a cleanup man."

He pointed at me. "I need a cleanup person, thank you, it's 2014 at least. But yes. It's on the list. The list is long."

"See, that's funny," I said, "because I also need a cleanup man. Person. A cleanup person."

"Do you? Your place looked fine from the street."

I had not known until that second whether I was going to say it. The whiskey soda helped but did not decide it for me. Loneliness decides things like that, quiet and cold, the way a house decides to be quiet at 11 at night. Two years in a house on Fenwick Street with a kitchen table nobody sits at and a garage full of gym equipment I use so I don't have to think, and I had gotten so a Tuesday night in a bad bar felt like a big outing.

"Here's my situation," I said. "I'm divorced. Two years. I haven't been on a date in three, which means the last person who touched me on purpose was my ex, and he left, so you can do that math. My house is clean because I clean when I can't sleep. Your bar is a dump and your storeroom is worse. And I came here the first time to get back at you for the parking spot, which was petty, I knew it was petty