The Premium on Irma

The Tap and Rail closed at midnight on Fridays and Charlie let me sit while he counted the drawer. That was the arrangement. He poured me one last beer, kept the jukebox off, and I sat at the far end of the oak bar with my back to the wall and did my thinking. Most nights my thinking was the ordinary kind. Claim files, mileage, whether my apartment needed a real vacuum or if I could keep getting away with the little hand-held one. But that night in October my thinking was all about a woman named Irma Vance, and a green Ford pickup, and a totaled Saturn sitting in a tow yard with its windshield spread across the pavement like spilled sugar.

I was thirty-four years old and I had never been much of a believer in luck, good or bad. Bad luck, sure. I believed in bad luck the way you believe in weather. Good luck seemed to require other people, and I had learned somewhere in my twenties not to expect much from other people. A few casual dates, nothing that stuck, nothing I had mourned. I paid my bills, I adjusted claims for Midwest Mutual, I drank two or three beers at The Tap and Rail on Friday nights because it was six blocks from my apartment and the walk did me good. That was the entire shape of my life and I had mostly stopped noticing the shape.

Then came the night in late August when Duane Kessel, a pipe fitter I had never met, drank four tequila sunrises at his cousin's backyard party and pointed his Buick down River Street at forty miles an hour. I was walking home. Duane jumped the curb on the block past the bar and hit the Saturn while it was parked, which means he hit nothing of mine but steel and glass and fourteen years of faithful service. If I had been twenty feet further along, if I had stopped to tie a shoe, the story would be different and I would not be writing this one. As it was, I got a scraped elbow from diving over a mailbox and a statement to give the police at one in the morning, and I stood in the wreckage-light of a tow truck's flashers thinking about bus schedules.

Here is what I had not counted on. Irma Vance was on the patio of The Tap and Rail having her last cigarette, and she saw the whole thing happen. She was fifty-six that August, retired from the tool and die shop on the east side, and I knew her the way you know a regular, by nodding, by holding the door sometimes, by the fact that she always sat at the little two-top by the window and always ordered her rye with one ice cube. When I gave my statement to the officer she walked over, still holding her cigarette, and said the car was parked and the guy never braked, she saw it all, and then she looked at me standing there in the flashing light with no car and a bar tab and said, well, I live three blocks from you, and I drive past your street every morning on my way to the garden center.

So that was how, for six weeks, Irma Vance's green 2004 F-150 with the rust spots over the wheel wells sat in the lot of Midwest Mutual while I adjusted my own claim. She had refused gas money twice. She had refused it a third time with a look that suggested a fourth refusal would be unpleasant for both of us. Every weekday morning the truck carried me to work and every evening it carried me home, and somewhere in there, without my noticing the exact date it happened, the truck stopped being a loan and started being a thing I associated with Irma. The smell of her, cedar and coffee. The little saint sticker on the dash. The way the driver's seat was pushed all the way back for her long legs and I had to pull it forward every single time and push it back at night, a small daily conversation with a woman who was not there.

I will be plain about the part I did not figure out until later. Somewhere in those six weeks, gratitude turned into something with more heat in it. I am not sure when. Maybe the Tuesday she stopped by the lot at seven in the morning to check on the truck and she was in her garden clothes, the faded overalls, dirt on one forearm, hair pushed back with a bandana, and she said good morning, Hobart, your seat's where you left it. Maybe it was the Friday I bought her a rye for the first time and she talked for forty minutes about the die shop and the union and her brother in Tucson, and I found I did not want the forty minutes to end. Maybe it was gradual, the way rust is gradual, and one day I looked up and the metal was thin all the way through.

* * *

Saturdays, Irma came in at nine in the morning for coffee, before the day drinkers and long before the regulars. Charlie opened early for her because she had been coming in for coffee on Saturdays since before he owned the place, back when his father ran it. I knew this because Charlie told me, one night in week three of the loan, in the way Charlie tells you things, which is flatly, while doing something else, and I had tucked it away like a man tucks away a schedule.

So that Saturday in October I was there at nine. I had closed the file on my own claim two days earlier. Midwest Mutual had paid out four thousand one hundred and sixty dollars, the Saturn being fourteen years old and worth what fourteen-year-old Saturns are worth, and I had added to it from my savings because four thousand would not buy back what Duane Kessel took from me, and because I had decided the loan ended the day I could end it. My plan was simple. Hand her a check, hand her the keys back, buy her a rye, and go home being a man who had settled his accounts. I want to note that I really did believe that was the plan. I was thirty-four and I still believed plans were things that happened.

She came in at nine ten, ten minutes late, which Charlie said was her usual. She was in a canvas coat over a green sweater, gray hair cut short and silver at the temples, and she looked like what she was, a retired machinist with good arms and a straight back who got up at dawn to tend a garden on Magnolia Street. She saw me at the bar and stopped for a second, coffee cup halfway to her lips before she even ordered.

"Well," she said. "You're here early, Hobart."

"I wanted to catch you," I said. "I've got something for you."

Charlie set her coffee down and went back to the register and left us to it, which was Charlie's other skill, knowing when to be furniture.

I had the envelope in my jacket, the check and the spare key, and I had rehearsed a short speech on the walk over, something about how I appreciated it more than I could say, something clean and closed. What came out instead was closer to the truth, which is that I thanked her, and thanked her again, and heard my own voice go a little unsteady on the second round of it, and then I pushed the envelope across the oak bar and looked at my beer like it had interesting news printed on the side.

She did not open it right away. She put her coffee down, took the envelope, and read the check amount, and then she looked at me for a while with those level gray eyes, and I understood that I had made some kind of error, though I could not yet name it.

"You counted," she said.

"Ma'am?"

"You counted the favor. That's what this is. Six weeks of my truck and now you've run the numbers and squared us up." She set the envelope down on the bar between us, deliberate, the way she did everything. "I told you the second time, Luke. I don't count. Counting is for people who are keeping score, and I stopped keeping score around the time I turned forty, and I'm fifty-six now and it's the best thing I ever learned."

"It's four thousand plus what the car was worth," I said. "It's what I owed."

"It's what you think you owed." She picked her coffee back up. "You owed me a thank you and you've given me three. You owed me a ride home the one Friday I'd had my rye and didn't want to walk, and you gave that too, so maybe we're both bad at arithmetic." She took a sip. "Now, are you going to drink that beer or am I going to have to buy you a decent drink, because it's nine thirty on a Saturday and you look as though you've been thinking too hard since August."

I did not know yet that she was lonely in a specific way, the way of a person who had been single a long time and had stopped minding except at certain hours. I did not know about the affair at the shop when she was forty-two, brief and quiet and finished on good terms, or that she had decided at some point after it that she liked sex fine and complication not at all. All of that came later, over ryes, in pieces. That Saturday I only knew that the envelope sat on the bar between us and she had no intention of taking it, and that when she said my first name, which she had never done before, something in my chest moved in a way that had nothing to do with gratitude and everything to do with the fact that her hand was resting on the oak four inches from mine and I had not moved mine away.

"So," she said, and turned on her stool to face me square. "Tell me what a man does with his Saturdays when he doesn't have a car to worry about anymore."

We talked until eleven. Not about anything important. Her garden, mostly, and the tomatoes she was trying to nurse through the first frost, and the price of mulch at the garden center on Route 9, which she considered a crime. I told her about the claims desk at Midwest Mutual, the way the adjusters all develop a shorthand for damage that starts to sound like a language nobody outside would recognize. She laughed twice, actual laughs, and I counted those instead of dollars. It felt like a better system.

The envelope stayed on the bar. When she got up to leave she looked at it, and then she picked it up and put it in my jacket pocket herself, patting the pocket flat like she was tucking in a hem. "Bring it back when you've got a better reason," she said. Then she walked out and I sat there another twenty minutes wondering what a better reason would look like, and Charlie counted his drawer and said nothing, because that was Charlie.

I walked home the six blocks. It was a warm Saturday for October, one of those afternoons that feels borrowed, and somewhere around the third block I stopped counting things. It took practice. She had made it sound easy, stopping at forty, but I figured she'd had sixteen years of head start on me and I was willing to put in the time.

***

Friday came around the way Fridays do. I clocked out at Midwest Mutual at five, walked home, changed shirts, and got to The Tap and Rail by seven, which was earlier than my usual but not so early that anyone would comment. I took my stool two down from the register and ordered my first beer of what I planned to be the standard two, maybe three. The jukebox was playing Haggard. Somebody had loaded it with all Haggard, which meant Dale had been in, because Dale believed a jukebox was not a democracy.

Irma came in at eight. That was not like her on a Friday. Apart from the Friday of the first rye, her Fridays were home Fridays, she'd said, rye and the news and bed by ten, because a person who rose at dawn to garden needed to rise at dawn to garden. But at eight o'clock she came through the door in a maroon jacket I hadn't seen before and she looked around the room and then she looked at me, and she crossed the floor and stood next to my stool.

"This seat taken?" she asked, meaning the one right beside me, which was never taken, because nobody took it, because it was next to mine.

"All yours," I said.

She sat and ordered her rye with one ice cube and Charlie brought it without writing anything down, and for a while we just drank and listened to Haggard. Her arm was close to mine on the bar. Not touching. Close. I kept thinking about the distance the way I used to think about depreciation schedules, constantly and against my will.

"Luke." She turned on the stool, the way she had turned on Saturday. "There's a bluegrass thing at the grange hall next month. Fiddle contest. I was going to go alone, which is fine, I've done a lot of fine, but I'd rather not."

I said yes before she finished the sentence. She nodded like I'd confirmed something she already suspected, and we went back to drinking, and my chest did that thing again, the one from Saturday, only stronger, because now it had a date attached to it.

Around nine she said, "Sit with me at the two-top. My neck gets stiff turning on this stool." So we moved, the two of us, to her window table, the one that was hers by treaty and custom, and Charlie brought our drinks over without being asked, and I remember thinking the evening had the shape of something. We were talking about the grange hall, whether they'd have food, whether the food would be terrible, whether terrible food was part of the charm or an obstacle to it, and I was leaning in to hear her over the jukebox when Charlie came out of the back wiping his hands on a bar towel.

Charlie had owned the place eleven years. He was sixty-two and built with a broad, rectangular solidity, and he had a look he got when the walk-in had betrayed him. "Luke," he said. "You got a minute."

He did not wait for the answer. He said the new keg delivery had come in short-handed, Danny had called off, and the cooler needed restocking before the ten o'clock rush, and would I mind giving him a hand, twenty minutes, tops. And here is the thing about being the guy who is known at the