The Last Call Assignment

I walked into The Rusty Tap at 8:42 on a Tuesday night in late October, and I know it was 8:42 because I checked my phone on the sidewalk outside like a coward before pulling the door open. The chime over the door did its little clang right in the middle of a jukebox cover of Friends in Low Places, some guy with a voice too smooth for the song, and a handful of heads turned my way, which is exactly what I had been hoping would not happen. I am 29 years old, I have been a librarian for six years, and I can count on one hand the number of times I have walked into a bar alone, so standing in that doorway with my coat still buttoned I felt about as natural as a book left in the rain.

There was one empty stool at the end of the bar, down by the dented brass rail, and I made for it the way you make for an exit, quick and without eye contact. The bartender came over wiping her hands on a rag that had seen better decades. She looked to be about 35, dark hair pulled back, the kind of face that has already heard every story and will not be impressed by yours.

"What can I get you," she said, not really making it a question.

"Whiskey, neat," I said, and then, because I felt the need to explain myself the way I always do, "it's been a day."

She raised one eyebrow, just the one, and I could see her doing the math on me, the cardigan, the sensible boots, the wedding ring. But she poured it anyway, a decent pour too, and set it down on a napkin she'd obviously placed there before I even sat. I wrapped my hand around the glass and felt immediately both completely out of place and weirdly defiant about it, like I had gotten away with something just by ordering it.

* * *

Here is how I ended up there, because I promised myself I would tell this straight.

That morning Tomas had sat me down at the kitchen table before he left for work, which should have been my first clue something was up, because Tomas never sits down in the morning, he's an IT consultant and his whole life runs on a schedule he keeps in three different apps. But there he was at 7:15, sitting across from me with his coffee going cold, with the look of a man who had rehearsed something in the car and was now checking his notes.

"I need to say something and I need you to hear me out before you argue," he said.

"That's never once worked in your favor," I said, because we had been married three years at that point and I know my lines.

He laughed, kind of, but then he got serious again, and he said, "I can't be the one to wake you up, Jo. I've tried. A year of me trying hasn't done anything except make us both polite, and I'm tired of polite. I'm not leaving you and I'm not mad at you, so don't do the thing where you hear the first sentence and build the rest of it yourself."

I think I took that well. I did not take that well. I said some things about how maybe the problem wasn't only mine to solve, and he said he knew, he knew, and that he wasn't assigning blame, he was describing a situation. Then he said the part I have been chewing on all day, which was that he wanted me to go somewhere tonight, alone, his idea and not a test, and the somewhere he had in mind was The Rusty Tap, this bar over on Delmore he used to drink at before we met. He said, "Stay until last call. Talk to people. See if anyone makes you remember what it feels like to be wanted, and then come home and tell me about it, or don't, but come home." And then he kissed the top of my head, picked up his laptop bag, and left me sitting there with two eggs going cold on my plate and absolutely no idea what my husband had just done to me.

I went to work. I shelved biographies. I helped a man find a book about Civil War trains. I thought about it approximately four hundred times, and by four o'clock I had decided I wasn't going, out of principle, and by six I was standing in front of my closet realizing I had dressed for it anyway, which told me something about where the principle had gone.

* * *

So there I was at The Rusty Tap, whiskey in hand, jukebox rolling through the early 90s like it had never heard of anything else. The place was worn in the good way, not the fake way, with a brass rail that had been dented sometime during a presidency and a floor that sloped slightly toward the door like the building itself wanted you to be able to leave quickly. The regulars outnumbered the strangers maybe two to one, and I could tell who was who because the regulars all had their drinks and their expressions before I even arrived.

The bartender came back around and I asked her name, mostly to have someone to talk to, and she said Aurora, and I told her mine, and she said, "You're not from here."

"Is it that obvious?"

"You ordered whiskey neat in a cardigan," she said, "and you looked at the jukebox like it might bite you. But you picked the right stool, I'll give you that. That one's got the least wobble."

I laughed for real, which surprised me, and she grinned and went off to pull beers for two old guys at the other end who were arguing about the price of lumber like it was a national emergency. I sipped my whiskey and felt it do its warm spreading thing and thought, okay, I am here, I stayed past the first ten minutes, that is more than I gave myself credit for.

The guy two stools down had been folding a napkin into smaller and smaller squares for the last twenty minutes, and somewhere in there he turned on his stool and said, "You're staring at that jukebox like it owes you money."

"I'm deciding whether I'm allowed to touch it," I said.

"It's a jukebox, not a church," he said, and stuck out his hand. "Dwayne."

I took it. His hand was big and dry and calloused in the spots you'd expect from a guy who works with them, and he was maybe 34, with a laugh already loaded behind his eyes like he was waiting for a good moment to use it. I told him my name and that I was new to this bar but not new to the city, and he nodded like that was useful information and not the least interesting thing anyone had told him all week.

"First time alone in a bar?" he asked, and when I said how could you tell, he pointed at my coat, still buttoned, still on, three drinks' worth of escape hatch sitting right there on my shoulders. I took it off. It felt like signing something.

He was a contractor, he told me, kitchens and baths mostly, and he talked about his work the way people only talk about work when they actually like it, with his hands going, describing a bathroom he'd just finished in a house old enough to have character. I asked questions. I found out I was leaning my elbow on the bar toward him at some point and I don't know when that started. Aurora passed by refilling my water without being asked and gave me a look I couldn't read, one eyebrow doing that thing again, and I thought, whatever you think is happening, it's probably less than that, and then Dwayne said something else and made that laugh of his happen and I thought, or maybe it's exactly that, I honestly don't know yet.

The jukebox clicked over to another song I knew all the words to and hadn't heard since college, and I looked at the clock over the register and it was only 9:30, which meant I had two and a half hours until last call, two and a half hours of staying put like my husband asked, and the strangest part of the whole night so far was that I wasn't watching the clock to leave. I was watching it to make sure nobody could make me.

Dwayne moved down to the stool next to mine somewhere around the third song, not in a way that felt like a move, just in the way that people drift toward the conversation they're having instead of shouting past an empty seat, and he waved at Aurora and ordered whatever I was having, which turned out to be the same whiskey I was drinking, and when it came he lifted it an inch off the bar in my direction before he drank, no speech attached to it, just the smallest acknowledgment that we were now two people drinking the same thing at the same bar on a Tuesday. I found myself cataloguing him the way I catalogued everything, it was six years of library work leaking into my private life, the forearms, the watch that had survived better than most of his clothes, the way he sat with one elbow on the bar and his body angled toward me without crowding the space, and I thought, this is what attention looks like when it isn't being performed, it just sits there and waits.

"Okay," he said, settling in, "I have to know. What's your deal with the jukebox, because you've looked at it four times in ten minutes and you haven't played a thing."

"I don't know what the rules are here," I admitted. "Like, is it rude to play something when the regulars have a rotation going? I've been to bars where touching the jukebox uninvited starts a war."

"Nobody here has touched that thing in a year except Aurora, and she only plays the same six songs," he said. "You'd be doing everyone a favor. That rotation died in, I want to say, spring."

"You're telling me there's an opening," I said. "A vacancy."

"I'm telling you the seat's yours if you want it," he said, and there was that laugh, low and warm like a furnace kicking on in a house you just moved into, and I got up before I could talk myself out of it and stood in front of the machine reading the laminated pages like they were a menu, and he shouted over the music, "No pressure, but if you pick something with a fiddle in it you'll have made two friends for life," and I scrolled and scrolled and finally picked something slow and stupid from the mid nineties that I used to hear in my roommate's car, and when it came on the two old guys at the end of the bar both nodded without looking up from their lumber argument, and Dwayne raised his glass to me like I'd just passed a test I hadn't studied for.

I came back to my stool feeling lighter than I had any business feeling at 9:40 on a weeknight. He asked what I did and I told him, library, six years now, and he said that explained it, explained what, I asked, and he said, "You ask questions like you actually want the answer. Most people ask so they can talk next." I didn't know what to do with that so I drank some whiskey and let it sit there, warm and unclaimed.

We talked about nothing for a while, his worst kitchen job, a client who wanted a farmhouse sink in a house with no room for a farmhouse sink, the guy who had paid him in fishing gear once because cash was, quote, tight but the gear was top shelf, and I laughed more than I had laughed in months, real laughs, the kind that make you touch your own sternum afterward like you're checking for damage. At some point Aurora drifted past and topped us both off, water not whiskey, and Dwayne said thanks, Ro, like they'd been doing this dance for years, which apparently they had, and she looked at me on her way by with that same unreadable eyebrow thing and I decided to stop trying to read it.

Then my phone buzzed in my bag, and I knew before I looked. I pulled it out under the bar where I didn't have to make a production of it, and there it was, a text from Tomas, three words. How's the whiskey?

I sat there with my thumb over the keyboard for longer than three words should take. There was a whole argument in my head, quick and dumb, about what an answer meant, whether one word was a door opened or a door closed, whether he wanted the truth or wanted the performance of the truth, and then I thought about him at 7:15 that morning, sitting across the kitchen table with his hands flat on it like he was presenting quarterly numbers, telling me, in his careful IT consultant way, that he had been trying to wake me up for a year and he was out of ideas and this was the idea he had left. Go. Stay until last call. See what happens. He hadn't said what happens, exactly, and I hadn't asked, because asking felt like the thing we'd stopped doing somewhere in year two.

I typed back, Warm.

Sent it. Put the phone face down on the bar.

It wasn't a lie. The whiskey was warm by then, whiskey goes warm fast in a glass you hold while you talk, and it was also the entire truth of the evening compressed into one word, warm, the bar was warm, the conversation was warm, my face was warm in a way that had nothing to do with alcohol content. And underneath the little thud of guilt I felt when I hit send there was something else, something that felt suspiciously like permission, which was insane, because he was the one who gave me the assignment, he had literally written it for me in the sense that a man sitting at a kitchen table at 7:15 in the morning telling his wife to go sit in a bar is writing you a permission slip, and here I was feeling guilty about answering his text honestly. Warm. He'd probably read it six ways. He was good at reading six ways into things, it was half of why we'd gotten quiet, we were both so busy interpreting each other that nobody said anything plain anymore.

The phone buzzed again. I made myself wait a full minute before I looked, which felt like a character test I was administering to myself for no clear reason, and when I did it said, Good. That's the point. Keep going.

No emoji. Of course no emoji, Tomas didn't believe in emoji the way some men don't believe in thermometers, if you can't measure it directly it isn't real. I typed back, Stop texting me, go to sleep, and he sent a thumbs up, his one concession, and I turned the phone over for good and felt the flicker settle into something I could carry.

"You smiled at that thing like it owed you money," Dwayne said. "Now you're smiling at the bar. The bar can't help you, the bar's done all it can."

"My husband," I said, and then I didn't know how to finish the sentence, so I finished it with the least