The Insurance Adjustor

The motel room in Lubbock had that particular quiet that only chain hotels can manage, the kind where the air conditioner hums at exactly the frequency that makes you aware of your own breathing. I sat on the end of the bed with my shoes off and my tie still on, because taking the tie off feels like admitting the day is over and there's nothing on the other side of it. The lamp on the nightstand buzzed a little. There was a water ring on the particle board dresser from some guest before me, and I caught myself looking at it longer than a water ring deserves.

I'd texted my wife from the parking lot when I checked in. That was a habit more than a hope by then.

"Made it to Lubbock okay. Audit tomorrow. Hope the boys behaved." Two thumbs, three sentences of nothing, sent at 9:47 on a Tuesday night. She's 43 and was probably watching her show with her glass of wine and her phone face-down on the couch cushion, which is where her phone lives now. The message sat there with one gray checkmark and no reply, and I watched it not get answered for a while before I set my phone down next to the lamp.

We've been married sixteen years. I was 28 when I proposed to her, standing in the parking lot of a Sonic in Amarillo because that's the kind of romantic I am. For the first ten years she used to come up behind me when I was at the sink and put her hands flat on my stomach, just rest them there, and that tiny thing was somehow better than anything else in my week. That stopped three years ago and nobody announced it. It just stopped, the way a clock stops, and you don't notice for a while and then you notice all the time.

I lay back on the bed with my tie still knotted and looked at the ceiling. I hadn't been touched, really touched, since March. It was October. That's a long time to go without somebody's hand on your shoulder, and I know how that sounds from a man with a house and two kids and a career, but the math doesn't care about how it sounds. The math is just the math.

There was a knock at the door around ten, and I knew before I opened it that it was Kristen, because nobody else in that motel knew my room number. She's 29, hired six months ago out of the Midland office, and she was standing in the hallway in her jeans and a flannel with the sleeves pushed up, holding a manila folder like a shield.

"Sorry, I know it's late," she said. "I couldn't stop thinking about the Hendricks file. If we walk in there tomorrow without the supplemental estimates we're going to look like idiots."

"We're going to look like idiots in there no matter what," I told her, and she laughed, and I stepped back and let her in.

She spread the folder on the little desk and we went through the paperwork, and I'll be honest in the privacy of my own skull, I liked watching her work. She has this way of putting her finger on a line and tapping it twice when something's wrong, like she's scolding the paper. She's good. She's the best junior I've had in years and I told the regional office that in writing, which she doesn't know.

At some point she glanced at my left hand where it was flat on the desk, and she looked at the ring, and then she did the thing that separates her from every other junior adjustor I've trained. She didn't pretend she hadn't looked.

"Your family back home?" she asked, gentle, like she's testing a floorboard. "Kids?"

"Two boys. Twelve and nine." I nudged the folder. "My wife. We've been married a long time."

"That's great," she said, and something in her voice made me look up. She wasn't doing sympathy, which I would have hated. She was just watching me with these dark eyes that seem to file everything away somewhere I can't see. "You must miss them, being out here."

"Sure," I said, and I didn't sound sure, and she heard that too, because she tapped the paper twice and moved on.

Around ten-thirty my phone rang and it was Ryosuke Burgess, who owns the Lucky Horseshoe out on the edge of town and who has been my friend for going on twenty-five years now. We pledged the same frat back when I was nineteen and he was a senior who should've known better, though the actual adult friendship started when I was 23 and he opened the bar and I wrote him his first business policy for free, which I got in trouble for and never regretted.

"Cooper Matheson, you're in my town and you didn't tell me? Aubrey told me you had a room at the Red Velvet. One drink. You owe me one drink."

"It's almost eleven, Ry."

"It's a bar, dumbass, that's when bars are good." I could hear him grinning. "Bring your auditor. Anybody who can put up with your paperwork deserves a drink on me."

Kristen heard my half of the call and raised an eyebrow, and I shrugged and held the door for her, and she did this little snort of a laugh as we walked out into the parking lot.

"You look like a man being dragged to the dentist," she said.

"I look like a man who knows Ryosuke's idea of one drink."

The Lucky Horseshoe was six blocks from the motel, all neon and gravel parking lot, a country-and-western joint with a mechanical bull in the corner that hasn't worked since 2019 and never will, because Ryosuke keeps it there the way other men keep a mounted deer head. It was dim inside, jukebox country, a handful of locals at the rail. Kristen, who I'd expected to be nervous in a strange bar with her boss, walked in like she's been coming here for years.

Ryosuke is 47 and built like a fridge and he came around the bar and grabbed my hand and pulled me into a half-hug shoulder slap that nearly takes my feet out from under me. "There he is. The man who's been robbing me on premiums for two decades."

"You overcharge for your liability class, that's all I'll say." I introduced Kristen and he shook her hand with genuine courtesy, which I didn't expect, and Aubrey came down the bar to take our order.

Aubrey Carmichael is 32 and has been tending bar at the Horseshoe for eight years, which means she knows every secret in a twenty-mile radius, and she has the kind of easy warmth that makes you tell her things anyway. She looked at me and said "bourbon, water back" before I opened my mouth, and I felt weirdly seen by that. Kristen surprised me.

"I'll do a whiskey. Neat."

"You sure, hon? I've got sweeter options."

Kristen just grinned and said neat again, and Aubrey poured it, and I decided officially that I liked her.

Ryosuke refused to let us pay and refused to let us sit at a table where he couldn't reach us, so we ended up at the rail with him on the other side of the wood, and the second round arrived before the first was finished, unprompted, Aubrey setting it down with a little shrug like it was nobody's decision.

"Ryosuke," I said, warning in my voice.

"I'm just being a good host." He was absolutely not being a good host. He leaned on the bar. "All right, you two. You want to earn your drinks? Questions Only. You know it?"

"I know it," Kristen said, and I did too, from college, which was a hundred years ago. You can only speak in questions. If you answer in a statement, or you stumble, you lose, and the loser buys a round of body shots for the table.

"Body shots," I repeated. "I'm 44 years old, Ry."

"That's exactly why. Aubrey! You're referee." He was already looking way too pleased with himself. "Loser buys. Kristen, you in or are you going to let the old man chicken out?"

Kristen turned on her stool to face me, whiskey in hand, and there was a light in her eyes that I haven't seen from her at the office, some mischief she's been keeping under the flannel all this time.

"Oh, I'm in," she said. "Mr. Matheson, when did you last lose at anything?"

And I was already losing, because that was a question I couldn't answer in a question, and Aubrey was laughing, and Ryosuke was calling for our shots, and I was thinking, dimly, that the quiet motel room seemed very far away.

So I lost the first round in about four seconds, which Aubrey said was some kind of house record, and I got to sit there and watch while the game continued, because apparently losing once only buys you a seat at the table, not an exit. Ryosuke and Kristen went back and forth, questions flying, and she was good. Better than good. She was merciless. She asked him things like "why is your bull broken?" and "who taught you to pour, a raccoon?" and he laughed so hard he broke the rule twice, which meant technically I should have been buying a round too, but nobody was counting against the owner.

"Focus, Matheson," Aubrey said, wiping a ring off the bar in front of me. "You're up."

I was up. I turned to Kristen. I had to ask her something, only a question, and my brain, which files claims for a living, had gone completely blank. I ended up with something dumb like "how'd you learn the game?" and she smiled like she'd been waiting for it.

"College," she said, in a statement, on purpose, and I realized a half-second too late that she'd thrown it. She'd just handed me the win. Or she was toying with me, letting me think I was winning, and either way Aubrey was already reaching under the bar for the shot glasses and the salt.

"Wait," I said. "She lost."

"She lost," Aubrey agreed, cheerfully, pouring three shots of something that smells like vanilla and regret. "And the loser buys a round of body shots for the table. Table's you, me, and Ry, and Ry's driving, so he gets a pass, and you get mine, and she gets yours."

I looked at Kristen. She was looking at the salt like she was doing math on it. I should