The Last Night in Merida

Let me tell you something about me first. I'm Delores Grainger, I'm 44 years old, and I count pills for a living. I work at a pharmacy back in Ohio. My life is a lot of insurance rejections and people asking if their copay is really that high. It is. It always is.

I've been divorced six years. I dated a little after that. Then I just stopped. It's easier, honestly. You come home, you have your glass of wine, you watch your shows. Nobody leaves socks on your floor. Nobody breaks your heart.

So when my sister Lynda announced she was dragging me to Mexico for a long weekend, I said no. Then she showed up at my pharmacy with the tickets already bought. That's Lynda for you. She's 45 and she doesn't take no from anybody, including insurance companies, which is why she's in sales and I'm not.

Anyway. That's how I ended up in Merida, sweating through a sundress in October.

We were sitting on the roof of our little hotel the second night. There's a pool up there the size of a bathtub and a bartender who speaks about as much English as I speak Spanish, meaning twelve words. The heat doesn't quit here. Even at nine at night it just sits on you like a cat.

Lynda had her third margarita. I had my first. She looked at me over the rim of her glass in that way she has.

"You haven't had fun once this whole trip," she said.

"I've had fun."

"You've compared the hotel's coffee maker to the one at your store. Twice."

"It's a better coffee maker. I'm just saying."

"Delores." She set the glass down. She does this thing where she turns her whole body toward me, like she's about to deliver a diagnosis. "What would it take for you to have one night of fun? Real fun."

"I don't know what that means."

"I think you do." She picked a lime wedge out of her drink and sucked on it. "I think you want to go downstairs to that bar and find some stranger and have the hottest night of your life and never see him again."

I almost dropped my glass. "Lynda."

"What? Am I wrong?"

"You're insane."

"Am I?" She grinned at me. My sister has good teeth. She paid a lot for them. "Tell me you haven't thought about it. One night. No phone number. No follow up. No coffee maker opinions."

I looked out over the rooftops. The city glows orange down here at night, all these old stone buildings lit up like something in a movie. There was music coming from somewhere. Not the hotel. Somewhere closer.

"Okay," I said.

"Okay what?"

"Okay, maybe I've thought about it. Once or twice." I took a long drink. The tequila in this country is different. It doesn't taste like punishment. "But I've never done anything like that. Ever. You know that. I met Walt at a church picnic. A church picnic, Lynda."

"So? You're not going to a church picnic. You're going to a bar in Mexico where nobody knows your name."

I stared at her. She stared back. She always wins these staring contests. It's infuriating.

"If I do this," I said, "you don't ask me a single question tomorrow. Not one."

"Deal." She was already waving at the bartender for another round. "Oh my god. Okay. You need a drink first. Actually you need two."

"I have a drink."

"You need a braver drink."

That's more or less how, forty minutes later, I found myself walking down a narrow street alone, following the sound of a bad cover band. Lynda had offered to come. I told her absolutely not. She'd blow it. She talks to everybody. She'd be like a chaperone who also has a megaphone.

The bar was called El Sótano. It's not really a bar so much as a basement. You go down a set of stone steps off the street and the ceiling is low and the fans on the ceiling are turning slow, like even they are too tired from the heat to do a real job. There were maybe fifteen people in there. Three of them looked like tourists. The rest looked local or close to it.

And there was one guy at the end of the bar by himself.

I'm going to be honest with you, dear reader. I have not looked at a man with intent in a very long time. But this one, I looked at with intent. He was big. Not gym big. Work big. Forearms like rope. Silver in his stubble. He wore a wrinkled linen shirt with the sleeves rolled up and he was doing something with his hands, turning a matchbook over and over. His hands looked like they'd done every kind of job there is.

He caught me looking. He did not look away. That's the part that got me. Back home, men my age look away.

I walked over. My heart was doing something unprofessional.

"Is this seat taken?" I asked.

He looked at the empty stool between us, which was clearly not taken, and then back at me, and smiled. He had a nice face under the scruff. Weathered. "Not by anybody who matters," he said. American accent. Slight southern thing under it.

"I'm glad. I didn't fly two thousand miles to stand up."

That got a real laugh out of him. He waved at the bartender and said a bunch of Spanish I didn't follow, and a minute later the guy set down two glasses of something clear and two little dishes of salt and some lime wedges.

"What is this?" I asked.

"Tequila. The good stuff. It's called a name you can't pronounce, so don't try."

"I was going to try."

"Don't. You'll hurt yourself." He tapped his glass against mine. "Salud."

It went down smooth and warm and then it kicked me in the back of the throat on the way down, in a good way. "Oh," I said. "Oh, that's dangerous!"

"That's why I drink it slow." He turned on his stool to face me. Up close his eyes were brown, almost black, with lines around them like a map. "So what's your story? You don't look like the spring break crowd."

I don't know what came over me. It was the tequila, or the heat, or six years of church picnics. I heard myself say, in a voice I have never used before, "I'm a fashion buyer. From Paris."

He raised an eyebrow. "Paris?"

"Paris, Texas."

He laughed so hard he had to put his glass down. "Okay. Okay, fair. You got me twice in one minute." He stuck out that big rough hand. "Robert Bachman. Everybody down here calls me Bo."

I shook it. His palm was like a brick with skin on it. "Nice to meet you, Bo Bachman."

"You too. And you're a fashion buyer from Paris, Texas. Sure. And I'm a retired bullfighter from Madrid."

"Of course you are."

"Six years in the ring. Retired after the bad year." He rubbed his left side like something ached there. "The bulls won more often than I'd have liked."

I squinted at him. "You're lying."

"Probably," he admitted. "You?"

"Definitely."

"Well then." He picked up the tequila and poured us each another shot. He did it like he'd done it ten thousand times, which I believe about him more than the bull thing. "To whatever we say we are."

We drank. The band started up a song I half knew. Somewhere behind us a tourist knocked over a glass and everyone yelled like it was a festival. I felt the tequila sit down next to my heart and get comfortable.

"So, fashion buyer," Bo said, turning his matchbook over again. "Paris. What's the fashion scene like this season?"

"Very flammable. Everything's flammable this season."

He nodded gravely. "That tracks. Big flammable year in fashion."

"Ask me something real," I said. The tequila had fully taken the wheel by now. "Something that isn't the story."

He thought about that. He had a way of going quiet and looking at you that made the whole bar feel like it had fewer people in it. "Okay. Real question. What are you doing here tonight? Alone? At a basement bar in Mexico? Because ladies like you don't end up in places like this by accident."

"Ladies like me."

"Women who look at a bar like it's a shelf they're checking," he said, nodding at my hand, "with hands that do careful work."

I looked at my own hands. I don't know how he knew that. There's something about a pharmacist's hands. Maybe the way they hold things. Careful. Precise. Like everything might be the wrong dose.

"Okay," I said. "Real answer. I'm here because my sister told me to go find a stranger and have the hottest night of my life and never see him again. Her exact words. She's upstairs by the pool right now, probably texting the whole family group chat."

Bo smiled slow. "That's a good sister."

"She's a menace. But yes. Good sister!"

"And did you find one?"

I looked right at him. "I'm working on it."

He set the matchbook down. He stopped turning it over. "Well," he said, and finished his tequila in one go. "I might know a guy. Rough hands. Bad history. Doesn't do follow up."

"Sounds perfect," I said. "I hate follow up."

He put money on the bar. More than the drinks cost. He stood up and he was taller than I thought, and he held out his hand like we were about to slow dance in a church basement.

"Come on, then," he said. "I know a place that isn't here."

I took his hand. His fingers closed around mine and I stood up off the stool faster than I meant to. The floor did a little thing. Not bad. Just a reminder I'd had three shots of unpronounceable tequila on a plate of guacamole. My bag slid off the stool and spilled half its guts on the floor, and Bo scooped it all up and handed it back without a word.

"Lead the way," I said.

He led. Up the stairs, past the front door guy, who nodded at Bo like Bo was a regular, which apparently he was. Out into the street.

The heat hit me like a wet towel. Even at eleven at night Merida was an oven with the door closed. But it was a different heat than the bar. Louder somehow. Cicadas. A dog somewhere. Music coming out of a house across the street, somebody's TV, a moped ripping past.

"So where are we going?" I asked.

"Walk first. My rule."

"You have rules?"

"I have one rule. No shortcuts to the finish line. Walk first, talk second, whatever's third, third."

"That's a weird rule."

"That's the only rule a guy like me can afford."

We turned off the main street and into one of the arcades, those long stone tunnels with shops on both sides, all shuttered for the night. The lamps in there were orange and far apart. Our footsteps bounced off the arches. It was like walking through the inside of a guitar.

Okay. Time to be honest with you, since I'm being honest with me. The plan was working. That was the problem. I'd come out here with one job, which was to be somebody else for one night, and here I was being Delores Grainger, pharmacist, divorced, from a town with two traffic lights, walking through a tunnel in Mexico with a stranger's hand still holding mine. The plan was to lie. I was bad at it. My sister says I have an honest face, which she means as an insult.

"So, Bo Bachman," I said. "Bullfighter. Madrid. That's still a lie, right?"

"Probably."

"Then what's real? Give me one real thing."

He thought about it while we walked. The orange light slid across his face every time we passed a lamp. Scar on his jaw. Gray coming in over his ears.

"Real thing," he said. "I've been here three years. I own a bar in Merida, called El Sótano. Little place. The one we just left. I came down here when my old life ended."

"Ended how?"

"Later. Everybody's got something. What's yours?"

"I didn't say I had one."

"You've got one. I can smell it. Like cops smell lies."

"Fine. Divorce. Six years. He does something with insurance. He kept the house because the house was his idea and I kept the cat because the cat was mine. Fair trade. I won."

He laughed. It bounced down the arcade ahead of us. "You won."

"Cats are low maintenance. Houses are a trap."

We came out the other end into a little square. There was a church, closed up dark, and a fountain that wasn't running, and a bunch of plastic chairs stacked under a tarp. Bo stopped and lit a cigarette. I didn't know he smoked until that second. He offered me one and I took it, which I hadn't done since my fortieth birthday, which was its own story.

"Real thing back," I said, blowing smoke up at the belfry. "I know about twelve words of Spanish. Lynda took classes. I took a pharmacy convention in Branson."

"Twelve words. Let's hear them."

"Hola. Gracias. Cerveza. Baño. Where's baño is two words, so that's cheating. Um. Donde esta. That's it. That's the whole bank."

"Donde esta your cat?"

"Donde esta el baño, Bo. Donde esta the tequila. Donde esta my dignity."

He laughed again and shook his head. Then he did something. He took my wrist. Not my hand this time. My wrist, right where the pulse is, and his thumb settled on the inside of it, over the veins.

I felt it in my stomach first. Then lower. Like somebody'd dropped a hot coin down my front.