The Last Regular

Bennett Mayfield was twenty-four years old, and she had exactly one plan for the evening, which was to drink two whiskeys at The Anchor and then go home and stare at the ceiling of her apartment above the dry cleaner until it was late enough to be sleep. Was that a healthy plan? No. Was it a plan? Sort of. She'd take it.

The Anchor hadn't changed in three years, which was both a relief and kind of depressing. Same sticky floor by the door. Same jukebox that skipped on the fourth track of every CD. Same smell of fryer grease and old smoke that the town had banned indoors a decade ago but the walls had clearly never gotten the memo. The regulars were the same regulars. Some of them were even in the same seats, like they'd been frozen in amber and thawed out nightly at five o'clock.

And there, in the back booth, was Sherman Henson, fifty-two years old and nursing a whiskey like it owed him an apology.

He'd always been there. That was Sherman. He'd been her mother's closest friend, and then somehow he'd become hers too, which didn't make a lot of sense on paper. A retired machinist and a girl who curated museum exhibits for a living shouldn't have had anything to talk about, but they'd never once run out of conversation, not in fifteen years of knowing each other.

He looked up when the door opened, and his whole face changed. Was that surprise? She honestly couldn't read it.

"Well, holy hell," he said, setting down his glass. "Bennett Mayfield, in the flesh! I thought you'd skipped town for good."

"I thought about it," she said, sliding into the booth across from him. "But the apartment lease was already signed, and apparently I enjoy punishing myself."

"That tracks. You always were stubborn as a mule about the dumbest things."

"And you always noticed, which is the annoying part."

He laughed at that, a real laugh, and something in her chest loosened a little. She hadn't expected that. She hadn't expected to feel much of anything in this town, honestly, and here was a laugh just showing up uninvited.

The waitress came over and Bennett ordered her whiskey, and then they just sat there for a second, and the silence should have been awkward but wasn't, because Sherman had never made her be anything she wasn't ready to be.

"Your mama's funeral was Tuesday," he said finally, not asking, just stating it the way he stated everything, flat and careful.

"Yeah. Tuesday."

"Were you gonna tell me? Or was I just supposed to find out from the newspaper like everybody else in this town?"

"I wasn't gonna tell you anything, Sherman. I wasn't gonna tell anybody anything. I got off that plane and my whole brain just went, okay, autopilot, see you in a week."

He turned his glass around slowly on the table. "You should've called me."

"Should I have? What would you have said?"

"Probably nothing useful. But I'd have been there."

She looked at him. He had more gray in his beard than she remembered. More lines around his eyes, too, though his hands were the same, big and scarred from forty years of lathes and mill machines. Those hands had fixed her bike chain when she was nine. Those hands had built her mother a bookshelf that was still standing in a house neither of them lived in anymore.

"The funeral was fine," she said. "Small. The pastor got her name wrong twice, which she would have found hilarious. There were sandwich trays. Somebody's aunt cried in the parking lot. Very standard."

"Standard," he repeated, like the word tasted bad.

"Completely standard!"

"And how are you?"

"I'm great! I'm wonderful! I'm back in my hometown living above a dry cleaner at twenty-four because apparently I peaked at running away and now I'm doing a victory lap."

"You know that's not what I asked."

"I know that's not what you asked."

The waitress brought her drink and Bennett took a long pull of it, and Sherman just waited, the way he always waited, patient as a stone wall. It was infuriating. It was also the only kind of company she could tolerate right now.

"I feel nothing," she said. It came out before she'd decided to say it. "That's the answer, okay? I feel absolutely nothing. I stood at my own mother's grave on Tuesday and I felt like I was watching it on TV. Like it was somebody else's sad scene in a show I wasn't even invested in. No crying. Not even the ugly sobbing everyone kept warning me about. Just static. Like my head is full of snow."

"Bennett."

"No, wait, it gets better! I haven't eaten a real meal in four days because I'm not hungry. I'm not sad, I'm not hungry, I'm not scared, I'm nothing! I keep waiting for the grief to show up like everybody promised and it's just not coming. Do you know how weird that is? To watch everyone around you do the crying and the hugging and the casseroles, and you're just standing there like, gee, is it broken?"

"Is what broken?"

"Me! The grief part of me! I think it's just broken!"

She hadn't meant to get loud. A guy at the bar turned around and then turned back, and Bennett put her face in her hands for a second, laughing at herself, or something adjacent to laughing.

"Sorry," she said into her palms. "That's a lot for a Tuesday."

"It's Thursday, kiddo."

"See? I don't even know what day it is. I'm a mess."

Sherman reached across the table and put his hand over hers. And that was normal. That was fifteen years of normal, right there. He'd held her hand at her high school graduation, at a hundred other moments when the world got too loud. His hands were always warm and always steady.

But this time his hand stayed. Longer than normal. Way longer than normal, actually, long enough that she looked up at him to check if something was wrong, and his face was doing something she couldn't name, and he didn't move his hand, and she didn't move hers either, and the jukebox skipped on the fourth track like it always did.

"You're not broken," he said quietly.

"How would you know?"

"Because I've watched you since you were nine years old, and you're the least broken person I know. You're just numb. There's a difference, even if it doesn't feel like it right now."

"Everyone keeps saying that. Numbness is normal. It's a stage. It'll pass. Blah blah blah."

"Maybe. But listen to me." His thumb moved once across the back of her hand, almost without him seeming to notice, and then he did notice, and he almost pulled away, and then he didn't. "Numbness doesn't get cured by waiting it out. You don't sit in an apartment full of boxes and ceiling-stare your way back to being a person."

"Oh, and you're a therapist now? What's your doctorate in, whiskey?"

"Feeling things. I'm a black belt in feeling things, Bennett. Forty years of it. Some of it I didn't even want."

She tilted her head at him. "What's that supposed to mean?"

"Nothing. What I mean is you need something real. Something your body can't argue with. Cold water on your face. A long walk in the cold. Crying, if it ever shows up. Something that proves to you there's still a person in there."

"That's your big advice? Feel something real? Wow, Sherman, they should put you on the radio!"

"I know it sounds dumb."

"It sounds like a fortune cookie!"

"Maybe," he said, and he still hadn't let go of her hand, and now she was aware of it in a way she couldn't stop being aware of it, his calloused palm and the heat of it and the fact that she hadn't felt heat of any kind in weeks. "Maybe it does. But it's the truth. And you came here tonight instead of sitting home alone, didn't you? So maybe some part of you already knows what it needs."

"And what's that, doctor? Whiskey and old men?"

"Company," he said, simple as arithmetic. "Just company."

The jukebox clicked over to the next CD. Somebody fed quarters into the pool table. Outside, the streetlights came on all at once the way they did in towns like this, no ceremony, just darkness with a few holes punched in it.

Bennett looked at their hands on the table, hers small and his big and scarred, stacked together like something from a museum exhibit she'd have catalogued and labeled and never quite explained.

"You're looking at me weird," she said.

"I'm looking at you the same way I always look at you."

"Yeah, well. It feels different tonight."

Did it? She wasn't sure. Everything felt different and nothing felt different and the static was still there, humming under the whole bar. But his hand was warm. That, at least, was real.

"Can I buy you a second one?" Sherman asked.

"You'd better," she said. "I'm gonna need it."

Sherman closed out the bar at eleven, which meant the bartender flicked the lights and Sherman held out his own coat with the disapproving look he'd been giving her since she was twelve. The one that said, you're walking home in that flimsy jacket, in October, in this town?

"I have a coat at home," she said, taking his anyway.

"That's like saying I have a salad at home. Doesn't help me now, does it?"

"Oh, ha ha. Very funny, old man."

"Old man. Real original. You've been calling me that since you were nine."

"And you've been nagging me about coats since I was nine. So we're even."

They walked. It was six blocks to her apartment above the dry cleaner, and the cold did what cold does, which was make her feel something, at least. Her ears ached and her nose was running and Sherman walked on the traffic side of the sidewalk without being asked, the way he always did, and Bennett thought, huh. How long has he been doing that?

"Careful, the sidewalk's slick here," he said, catching her elbow as she slipped on the ice in front of the hardware store.

"I'm fine!"

"You're wearing sneakers with no tread. You're about as far from fine as a person can get, footwear-wise."

"Footwear-wise! Listen to you!"

"Shut up and watch the ice."

They didn't talk much after that. Sherman never filled silence up with junk just to have something in there. They walked past the church and the shuttered diner and the vacant lot where the skating rink used to be, and Bennett thought about being nine years old on that rink, and how Sherman had laced her skates for her because her mom's hands were always cold.

Why was she thinking about that? She didn't know.

At her door, she fumbled the key out of her pocket and dropped it. Sherman picked it up, held it out to her, and said something about how the lock was rusted and she should get some WD-40, and Bennett looked up at him, at his face half in shadow under the burnt-out porch light, and she kissed him.

On the mouth. With her hands on his jacket.

It was not planned. There was nothing about it that was planned. It was like her body had been standing in line for weeks and the window was finally open and she just went through it. And the wild thing was he didn't pull back. He froze for maybe two seconds, and then his mouth moved against hers, and one of his big hands came up and held the back of her head like she was made of something that could break, and they stood there on the landing kissing like they'd both been starving while the dry cleaner's sign buzzed behind them.

When she finally pulled back, her heart was going like a hammer and she could not read his face at all.

"Okay," she said. "That was...wow, okay. I don't know why I did that."

"Want me to pretend I mind?"

"Because you should! Sherman, you're, like, my whole childhood! You're supposed to tell me to go to bed and drink some water!"

"Want me to say it now?"

"No!" And she heard herself laugh, a real laugh, the first one in weeks, and it scared her a little. "God, no."

"Then stop asking me for lines, Bennett. I don't have any that fit this."

His voice was rough. Not like him at all. She got the door open with hands that didn't want to work right and he came in behind her, and the apartment was a disaster, boxes everywhere, catalogs in piles, three mugs on the counter she kept meaning to wash, and she started to say sorry about the mess and he said, "Bennett. Stop. I'm not here for the apartment."

"Then what are you here for?"

He didn't answer that. He looked at her in a way that made the back of her neck get hot, and then he crossed the room and took her face in both hands and kissed her again, slower this time, like he had all night, and she made a sound into his mouth that embarrassed her and she didn't care.

"Tell me to stop," he said against her lips. "Right now. Say it and I'm gone."

"Don't you dare stop."

His hands went to the hem of her shirt and lifted it up over her head, slow, like he was unwrapping something, and Bennett had a weird floating second where she thought, my mother would lose her mind, and then his mouth was on her throat and the thought dissolved. He was being so careful with her. That was the part that got her. He touched her like she was the fragile thing in the room, mapping her with his fingers, the dip of her waist, the curve of her hip, like he was memorizing her.

"Sherman," she breathed.

"Still here."

"Your shirt. Take your shirt off, that's not fair."

He laughed, this low quiet laugh she'd heard a thousand times and never once like that, and he pulled his shirt off over his head, and there he was. Fifty-two years old, gray in his chest hair, still thick through the shoulders, and he was looking at her like she was the last thing on earth.

"You're staring," he said.

"You're built for a guy who complains about his knees!"

"The knees complain. The rest of me is doing great, actually."

"Prove it."

"Oh, I intend to."

He walked her back toward the mattress on the floor, because the bed frame was still in a box somewhere, and she was laughing at that, at the absurdity of her whole life right now, and then his hands were on her jeans and the laughing stopped and turned into something else. He got her undressed in increments