The Last Ferry

The rain had been coming down sideways all evening, the kind of rain that made Port Blaine feel like the last town on earth, and Eliza was halfway through wiping down the bar when the bell above the door gave its tired little jingle.

She looked up. A man stood in the doorway shaking out his jacket like a wet dog, and water was dripping off him in three separate places. One of those places was her just-mopped floor.

"You missed the spot by the door," she said.

"Sorry! Sorry, I'll." He grabbed a handful of napkins from the dispenser and crouched down to dab at the floor, which somehow made it worse. "Great. Now it's a bigger spot. That's my special talent, apparently. Making problems bigger."

Eliza leaned on the bar and watched him work. She should have told him to stop. She didn't, mostly because it was the first entertainment she'd had all shift. "It's fine. It's a bar floor. It's had worse on it, believe me."

He stood up, wadded the napkins into his jacket pocket, and gave her a proper look. Thirty-ish, she guessed. Good jaw, bad hair day, the particular expression of a man who has just realized something has gone very wrong. "Okay, so. Question. And please don't laugh, because I'm already standing in a puddle of my own dignity."

"The ferry," she said.

His face fell. "You know?"

"Everyone knows. The last ferry left at sundown. It's," she checked the clock above the taps, "quarter past eight. Sundown was at six-something. You're about two hours and a whole tide late."

"Oh no." He said it very calmly, the way people do when the calm is doing a lot of heavy lifting. "No, no. I asked a guy. A local guy, on the pier. He said the last ferry was at nine!"

"Which pier?"

"The main one! The one with the, the seagull thing. The big ugly seagull statue."

Eliza laughed before she could stop herself. It came out rusty, like a gate that hadn't been opened in a while, which to be fair it hadn't. "That's the fishing pier. The ferry dock is the other one, the concrete one, south end. And the guy told you nine because there's a guy at the fishing pier who tells tourists that. He thinks it's funny. It's been funny to him for about forty years."

"Two hours," the man said again. He put both hands flat on the bar like the bar was a friend. "Okay. Okay. Is there a hotel? There's a hotel, right? Towns have hotels."

"There's the Driftwood, and it's probably full because the Driftwood has eleven rooms and it's October."

"Full. Right. Of course it's full." He looked around the taproom then, really looked, maybe for the first time. There wasn't much to look at. Six stools, four tables, a chalkboard with the tap list on it, and Murray's collection of antique bottle openers nailed above the bar. The whole place smelled like beer and wood polish and the faint salt rot that got into everything in Port Blaine from September to May.

Then he brightened, and Eliza had exactly enough time to think, uh oh, before he said, "Well. If I'm stranded, I may as well drink. What's good?"

She slid a coaster in front of him, mostly out of habit. "Depends on what you like."

"Surprise me. No wait, don't surprise me, that's how I ended up drinking a cucumber sour in Bend once and I've never recovered." He held up a finger. "Actually, you know what? Give me the darkest thing you have. The darkest, heaviest thing on that board. It's that kind of night."

"That would be the Graveyard Stout. Murray makes it with oat flakes and it's basically a meal."

"Perfect. A meal. I haven't eaten since that gas station in Tillamook, and I want to tell you, that gas station did not improve my evening."

She pulled the pint, and while the tap ran she took a proper look at him, and that was when it clicked. "Hang on. I know you."

He blinked. "You do?"

"You came in two days ago. Tuesday. You ordered the IPA, and then you asked me what I thought of it, and I said it was fine, and you said, and I'm quoting here, 'fine? It's incredible, this might be the best IPA I've ever had,' and I remember thinking that either you were the politest man alive or you were flirting very badly."

He went a shade of pink that she found, against all her better judgment, kind of charming. "That was you! I thought so! God, okay, in my defense, it was a very good IPA. And also I was flirting. Badly, you say. Noted. Duly noted."

"I didn't say badly."

"You said very badly. It's fine. My sister says worse." He took the pint from her and drank a real swallow of it, and then his eyebrows went up in a way that she suspected he thought was subtle and was not. "Oh wow. Okay. You undersold this one too. This is the best stout I've had since, hmm, maybe ever? Do you make this?"

"Murray makes it. I just pour it. And I don't undersell, I calibrate. If I told every tourist their beer was the best I'd ever had, the phrase would wear out by July."

"So what's your honest review of the Graveyard Stout? Professional brewer to stranded tourist."

Eliza dried her hands on the bar towel and considered. "It's good. The oat gives it a silky body, the roast is there but it doesn't shout, and the finish is cleaner than Murray has any right to expect from that ancient keg system he refuses to replace. Happy?"

"Thrilled. And you're a brewer? An actual brewer?"

"Actual. Six months here. Before that I was in Astoria, before that school, before that, well. Other things." She heard herself closing that door the way she always did, quick and quiet, and hated it a little, and did it anyway.

From the back came the bang of a cooler lid and then Murray's voice, carrying the way it always did, like a foghorn with a cold. "Eliza. I'm heading off, love's waiting and so is her casserole. You're good to lock up?"

She raised her voice. "You're good, Murray. Tell Agatha hi."

"Tell her yourself some night, you never come to anything." There was a jingle of keys, a muffled swear, and then the back door slammed and a car coughed to life in the gravel lot and ground away toward town.

And that was how Eliza found herself alone in the taproom with a stranded stranger, one hour until close, rain hammering the windows like it had a personal grudge, and nothing on the stereo because Murray had taken the speaker home again "to test it," which he did every year around this time and never once brought back before spring.

"So," the stranger said, into the sudden quiet. "It's just you and me and the best stout in Oregon."

"It's just me and you and an hour until I lock that door and go home."

"That sounds like a threat."

"It is a threat."

He grinned at her, and she had to admit, privately, where nobody could hear, that the grin was working on her. It had been two years since anyone's grin had worked on her at all, and she'd gotten comfortable with that, the way you get comfortable with a drafty window. You stop noticing the cold. You wear a sweater indoors.

"What's your name, ferry-misser?" she asked, mostly to fill the quiet before it could fill itself.

"Alec." He put out his hand across the bar, absurdly formal, and she shook it. His hand was cold from the walk and he apologized for that too, which, she was learning, was just something he did. "Alec. From Seattle. I come down here every October for a week, apparently to miss ferries and embarrass myself in front of brewery staff. And you're?"

"Eliza."

"Eliza. That's a good name. Very, uh. Very maritime."

"You're reaching."

"I'm reaching. I know I'm reaching, I've been reaching since I walked in, you saw the puddle." He drank again, and looked at the chalkboard, and looked at the rain on the windows, and then back at her with something a little more careful in his face. "So honest question. Is there truly nothing in this town? No motel? No kind elderly innkeeper? No ferry at midnight?"

"No ferry at midnight. The Driftwood might have a cancelation, but it's a ten-minute walk in this and you'd gamble your last dry sock on it. And that is the complete list. Port Blaine in October is the Driftwood and the diner and us, and the diner closes at eight."

Alec leaned back on his stool and looked around the empty taproom again, at the rain, at her, and Eliza watched him do the math she'd seen a hundred tourists do and never once watch land anywhere interesting.

"Well then," he said. "I guess I'm yours for an hour."

"You keep grinning like that and I'll start charging for it," Eliza said, and then wished she hadn't, because it was flirty, and flirty was a language she hadn't spoken since before the world went quiet. But Alec only laughed, which was worse somehow, or better, she hadn't decided.

"Charge away. It's worth it. My whole evening's entertainment so far has been your face when I said the word stout. I'd pay double."

"You paid for one beer."

"And I'd pay for the second, except apparently there's a whole ritual here I'm missing. You keep looking at that glass like it owes you money."

Eliza looked down. She was, in fact, wiping the bar in one long stripe for no reason, which was what her hands did when her head wasn't paying attention. She stopped. "Sorry. Habit. Murray says I'm going to wear a hole in the oak before I wear out my shoes."

"So what do people do in this town when it rains and the bar's empty? Surely you have something. Darts? A jukebox? Cards?"

"No jukebox. There's a dartboard but Murray hides the darts in October because some guy from two seasons back threw one at the television and it stuck there for a week and Agatha thought it was a decoration."

"He hid the darts from all of humanity over one guy?"

"He hid the darts from all of humanity over one guy, yes. And we don't have cards because he lost them. So no, there's nothing. There's beer, there's the rain, and there's me wiping this bar into the next geological age."

Alec turned on his stool, slow and deliberate, the way a man turns when he's about to suggest something and wants to be seen suggesting it. "Okay, so. Here's a thought, and you can tell me it's terrible. Truth or dare."

Eliza stopped wiping. "You're serious."

"Deadly serious."

"How old are you?"

"Thirty-one. Old enough to know better, young enough to do it anyway." He spread his hands like he was presenting a prize on a game show. "Look, it's either that or we sit in silence for an hour while you polish a bar that is already cleaner than my kitchen counter, and honestly? I came to this town to not sit in silence."

"You came to this town to clear your head. Your words."

"Yes, and my head is now beautifully clear and has nothing in it except the fact that I missed a ferry because a man next to a big ugly seagull statue told me the wrong time with total confidence. So. Truth or dare, Eliza the brewer."

She should have said no. She thought that clearly, right at that moment, a little bell ringing somewhere: this is the part where a sensible widow pours him his second beer, tells him the Driftwood is down the road, and goes home to her quiet house and her quiet routines. Two years of quiet. She looked at his stupid hopeful face and heard herself say, "Truth, obviously. Only a maniac picks dare first."

"But it's truth or dare. You have to keep playing. That's the whole structure of the game, the whole, uh, architecture of it."

"Oh, so I'm trapped."

"You're trapped. Welcome aboard."

"Fine. Truth."

Alec leaned his elbows on the bar, and Eliza noticed he had the kind of face that did thinking in public, everything showing. "Okay. Truth. Hmm. What's the best day you've had since you moved to Port Blaine?"

"That's a terrible truth question."

"It's a great truth question. It tells me everything about a person."

"It tells you I have no life."

"See? Efficient."

Eliza threw the bar towel at him. He caught it, which annoyed her, and grinned with it, which annoyed her more. "Fine," she said, because apparently she was playing. "The best day I've had here. There was a storm in September, a real one, power out on the whole street, and Murray couldn't get the taproom open, so he and Agatha and I sat in the back on milk crates by candlelight and drank the batch that had gone wrong, the one with too much rosemary in it. And Agatha told us about the time she and Murray got kicked out of a karaoke bar in Newport. And it was, hm. It was good. It was the first time it felt like this town might be a place instead of a waiting room."

Alec was quiet for a second, which she hadn't seen him do yet. "A waiting room," he said. "Yeah. I know that feeling."

"And now you know everything about me, so it's my turn. Truth or dare?"

"Dare. Obviously. I told you, only a maniac picks dare first, and I am that maniac."

Eliza looked around the taproom for ammunition. Rain, chalkboard, brass taps, the row of Murray's homemade coasters nobody ever used. Her eyes landed on Alec's glass, half full of stout, sitting there with dark confidence.

"Dare," she said. "Finish that beer and tell me what you actually taste. Not the brochure version. You've been complimenting my pour all night and I want the real review, from a man who's had, what, four hours of ferry-based trauma to develop a palate."

"That's the dare? That's easy."

"It's not easy, it's brutal. Nobody tastes honestly in front of the person who poured it."

"Watch me." He picked up the glass and drank, a real drink, half of what was left, and held it in his mouth for a long moment while she watched and pretended not to watch. Then he swallowed and set it down like a judge laying down a gavel. "Okay. Chocolate, obviously, but like dark chocolate, not milk. Coffee, but coffee that's been sitting a while, in a good way, like it's given up being bitter. And then, and this is the part that's going to sound made up, there's something green in it? Like a forest floor after rain."

"That's the oats," Eliza said, and hated how pleased she sounded.

"No. The oats are the smooth part. This green thing is separate. Am I right or am I right?"

"He's right," she told the ceiling. "Murray will be unbearable. He's been trying to get that forest-floor comment out of a customer for two years. I'm going to have to text him and he's going to put it on the chalkboard."

"Put my name on it. In capitals."

"Your name is going on a chalkboard in a town you're leaving tomorrow, congratulations."

"Better than nothing." He raised the glass to her. "Your turn. Truth or dare?"

"Dare. I'm feeling brave, I just watched you taste beer for sport."

"Okay." And here was the thing she'd remember later, the way he paused before it, not like he was picking something cruel, but like he was picking something real, sorting through the deck of cheap dares and skipping all of them. "Name three things you noticed about me the first time I came in. Tuesday. Two days ago. Because I can tell you three things I noticed about you, and I want to know if we were even."

"That's not a dare, that's a confession."

"It's a dare. Dares can be psychological, that's, uh, that's advanced dare theory."

"You made that up."

"I made that up, yes, but it's still a dare, and you can't back out, back-outing breaks the architecture of the game."

Eliza wiped her palms on her jeans, which was ridiculous, because nobody's palms needed wiping over a question like that, and yet. "Fine. Three things. First, you ordered the IPA before you looked at the chalkboard, which told me you're a man who decides fast and then dresses the decision up later as instinct."

"Accurate. Painfully accurate. Two?"

"Two, you apologize when you're not sorry. The guy who bumped you at the bar, you said sorry to him twice and he was the one holding the tray sideways."

"He seemed like he was having a hard day."

"He was drinking alone on a Tuesday and elbowing strangers, Alec. And three," and here she had to slow down, because she'd been keeping this third one in her pocket since Tuesday and taking it out