The Flyer That Reminded Me

I was wiping the same spot on the bar for the third time when I finally noticed I was doing it. Same sixteen inches of mahogany laminate, same rag, same little ring of dried stout that would not come up no matter how hard I scrubbed. I put the rag down. Then I picked it back up and did it a fourth time, because what else was I going to do with my hands?

Upstairs at my house there was a bedroom with a perfectly made bed in it. My daughter's old room, converted to guest room, except nobody has guested in it since she left for state two years ago. The sheets get washed once a month. That's it. The whole life of that room is a monthly wash and a door I keep closed. The house is so quiet at night I can hear the refrigerator think. I took this bar job five years ago partly for the money and mostly so I wouldn't have to sit in that quiet, and here I was on a Tuesday night, forty-one years old, wiping a clean spot on a dirty bar.

The Last Drop is not much. Dim lights, sticky vinyl booths, one TV with the captions on because the sound quit in March, and a jukebox that skips on track seven every single time no matter what song it is. The air smells like stale beer and Pine-Sol, which honestly is a combination I've stopped noticing. It was dead even for a Tuesday. Ray the regular had gone home at nine. Doreen had bussed her last table. I had forty minutes left and I was counting each one.

Then the door opened at 10:20 and it was Kent.

I knew the walk before I saw the face. He's forty-two now, a little gray coming in at the temples, same leather jacket he's had since forever. He sat down at the bar three stools down from where I stood, which is exactly where he always sat, and I swear my stomach did something complicated.

"Whiskey, neat," he said. "Whatever's mid-shelf."

"Weather's turning," I said, because that is what we say to each other. We are people who talk about weather.

"Sure is. Cold one coming Friday, they say."

"Good for the business."

"Good for the business," he agreed, and we were done, and I poured his drink and he paid cash and we let the quiet sit there between us like a third customer. That's how it's always been with Kent, even back when we were together the first time, in our early twenties. He talks when he has something. I fill silence. Over the years I learned to stop filling his.

Here's the history, for those just tuning in. Kent and I dated young, broke up when I was twenty-six because I wanted kids and he didn't, and I went off and had my daughter with somebody else and divorced that somebody else, and at thirty-eight, right after the papers went through, Kent walked into this same bar and we tried again. Three months. Then he ghosted me. No fight, no goodbye, just stopped coming in, and I spent a stupid amount of time wondering if I'd imagined the whole thing.

And now here he was, and I was wiping that spot again.

He pulled something out of his jacket pocket, all crumpled up, and smoothed it flat on the bar with both hands like he was laminating it. It was a flyer, cheap paper, clip-art wreath on top.

"Toy drive," he said. "The church on Delmar does it every year. I've got a box in my trunk."

"A toy drive. You. Volunteering."

"Don't say it like that."

"You hate children, Kent. You told me that on our second date. It's one of the few things you've ever been clear about."

"I don't hate children. I hate noise. Anyway, it's for the community." He slid the flyer toward me. "You should clean out your nightstand and donate your old toys."

I laughed before I could stop myself, an actual bark of it, and Doreen looked over from the dartboard. And then the word toys did a funny thing on the way to my brain, because I have a toy. I have exactly one, and I know exactly where it is, and it has not moved from my nightstand drawer in about three and a half years.

* * *

Here's that story, since we're being honest tonight. During those three months with Kent, the second go-round, I got it into my head that we were going to be a real couple again, a whole new chapter, and I went to that little shop out on Route 9 and bought a vibrator. Purple, sleek silicone, rechargeable, forty-nine dollars and change, the nicest thing I have ever bought for myself on purpose. I brought it home and put it in the nightstand drawer and thought, I'll save it, we'll break it in together.

Then he ghosted me, and that purple thing has been sitting in that drawer ever since like a receipt for something I never got. I never even turned it on. Forty-nine dollars and change for a purple doorstop.

Closing time came at eleven. I locked the front door, flipped the deadbolt, turned the OPEN sign around, and instead of shooing him out I reached under the bar and poured us both a shot of the decent Irish stuff, the one I keep for Doreen's birthday.

"Closing time," I said, setting his down. "You don't have to go home but you can't stay here."

"You quoting that song at me?"

"Somebody has to."

He laughed, actually laughed, and something in my chest unclenched a little. We clinked glasses and drank, and he turned the shot glass in his fingers the way he does, and then he looked at me and asked the question I will be thinking about until I die.

"You still got that purple thing you bought?"

The word purple went through me like a shot of its own. A jolt of heat, right in the chest, spreading down. Three and a half years that thing sat in a drawer and he says one word and my whole skin changes temperature.

"Donated it," I said. Lie. Flat-out lie, delivered smoothly, and he nodded like he believed it, and I turned to put the bottle away so he couldn't see my face.

Because the truth was I could feel the drawer in my nightstand from here, eleven blocks away, four feet from my