The Last Hop Harvest

I was twenty-nine that September, and Derrick was thirty-one, and we had been dating for two years by the time the Hoptimist's Diner closed its doors for good. We met at a hop industry mixer in Portland, of all places, which sounds duller than it was because there was an open bar and neither of us knew anybody. He managed operations at a farm outside Yakima. I did product recalls for a brewing supply company, which meant I got paid to ruin people's weeks. He said I had nice eyes for someone in regulatory. I said he had nice forearms for someone in agronomy. That was more or less the whole courtship.

The diner sat on the edge of town with its back to the fields, and it had been there forty years, which in Yakima counts as historic. Last night of business. The owner had put a hand-lettered sign in the window that said THANK YOU, VALLEY, and underneath, in smaller letters, NO CRYING AT THE COUNTER, which nobody was following.

The air inside was thick with onions from the flat top and forty years of grease that no amount of scrubbing would ever get out of the walls. I love that smell. I will defend that smell. It smelled like every Friday night I'd had since I moved to the valley.

We slid into a vinyl booth by the window, red and cracked in the same places it had been cracked since probably the Reagan years, and Derrick picked up the little table tent with the beer list like he was reading scripture.

"They're pouring the seasonal," he said. "Last keg of it, according to Marlene."

"The harvest ale."

"The harvest ale. Which, and I mention this purely as a point of professional pride, I have drunk more of than any man alive."

"Volume isn't knowledge, Derrick."

"Volume is exactly knowledge. That's how wine people do it."

Marlene came over with two glasses without asking, because she'd been bringing us two glasses without asking since our third date, and set them down and said, "Last night, you two. I don't know what you're going to do without me."

"We're going to be fine, Marlene," Derrick said.

"You are not. You're going to order french fries at some chain restaurant and some server in a paper visor is going to bring them to you and they will not be right and you will think of me."

"We will think of you constantly," I said, and she patted my shoulder and left, and I watched her go and felt something in my chest go tight, which I did not need at eight forty on a weeknight.

Derrick leaned back and folded his arms, and I knew that posture. That was his bet posture. He makes me bets the way other men buy flowers.

"So," he said.

"No!"

"You don't even know what I was going to say."

"You were going to say you bet I can't name the hop in the harvest ale, and if I can't, I owe you a dinner of your choosing, and if I can, you owe me your famous back massage, which you claim is famous and which two people have ever actually received."

He looked genuinely thrown. "Did Marlene tell you?"

"Nobody told you either, apparently. You do it every time we come here. It's a bit."

"It is not a bit. It is a test of your palate."

"Your massage is not famous, is the part I keep coming back to."

"Take the bet, Leanne."

I picked up my glass. Here's where I should admit something: I already knew the answer. I had known it for a year, because my company handled the supply contracts for the little brewery that made the diner's ale, and I had read the spec sheet, and then felt weird about knowing and decided to save it for exactly this kind of moment. What can I say. I hoard things.

But there was no fun in just saying it. So I lifted the glass and took a slow sip, and then I took another slow sip, and I ran my tongue around the rim of the glass while I looked at the ceiling like the answer was written up there among the grease stains and the plastic ivy.

"You're doing the tongue thing," Derrick said.

"What tongue thing."

"The rim thing. The thing you do when you're stalling."

"I'm tasting. Tasting involves the whole mouth. Ask anybody."

"You look like a sommelier in a cartoon."

"Floral," I said, buying time. "Citrus. Definitely citrus. Grapefruit, maybe."

"Maybe."

"And a kind of, hm, what's the word."

"There's no word. You're stalling!"

"Spice on the finish." I set the glass down and looked at him over the top of it. "Okay. I'll say it. Cascade."

For a second he didn't say anything, and I thought, oh no, it's Centennial, I've made a terrible error, I'm going to owe this man a dinner of his choosing and he's going to pick competitive mini golf. Then he broke into this enormous grin and reached down beside him and came up with something I had not noticed him bring in, which was a carved wooden cane, honey-colored, with a hop bine running up the shaft in relief.

"Where did that come from?"

"It's a forfeit," he said, sliding it across the table. "Winner takes the loser's walking stick. That's the ancient law."

"That is not the ancient law."

"It is tonight. Marlene's nephew carved it. I commissioned it in June for the closing, in case of exactly this outcome."

"You bet on a cane you already paid for."

"I bet on a cane I already paid for, and you still had to name the hop, and you did, first try, no hints, which frankly annoys me, because I was going to enjoy the massage forfeit."

"You were going to enjoy giving me a massage?"

"Immensely."

"Then you lost twice."

The place was emptying out around us. Regulars paid up and drifted toward the door in twos and threes, and Marlene worked the register and told every single one of them the same thing, which was go home, get out, I'm closing. Somebody put quarters in the jukebox and played the same four songs the diner had