The Rebound That Backfired

Thomas walked into The Backstop at 8:40 on a Friday night, and I knew because I felt it before I saw it. Some part of my brain had been watching the door all evening like an idiot, waiting for exactly this.

I was on my second beer and my first basket of fries when he came in with her. Callie, or whatever her name was. The grad student. Twenty-six years old, long dark hair, the kind of put-together that costs money and sleep I don't have. Thomas had his hand on the small of her back, guiding her through the crowd like he owned the place. He didn't own the place. He was a 36 year old adjunct who drove a Corolla with a cracked dash.

We had dated three years. I was 31 when we got together and 34 when he told me, in the parking lot of a Panera, that he "needed to see what else was out there." What else was out there turned out to be one of his own students. Classy.

I stayed cool about it, but the truth is I sat there gripping my basket like it was going to leave too. Kath had gone to the bathroom. I could have bolted. Instead I did something dumber and better. I looked around the room and picked a target.

Not for anything. Not yet. Just for show. I needed to be a woman having a good time, and I needed witnesses.

The only other solo man in the joint was at the bar, a few stools down. Big guy, dark skin, reading glasses pushed up on his head, working through a plate of nachos and a notebook. An actual paper notebook, filled with pencil. Nobody writes in a notebook at a dive bar unless they've got nothing to prove, so I picked up my beer and moved.

"Is this taken?" I asked, nodding at the stool beside him.

He looked up, looked at me, looked at the stool. "Nah, go ahead. It was saving nobody."

I sat. Up close he was maybe 37, shoulders like a guy who'd played football at some point and then discovered food. There was a slide rule on a lanyard around his neck, which is a thing I did not know people could own.

"You know that's decorative, right?" I said, pointing at the lanyard.

"This?" He held it up. "Nah, this is my identity. Guy at the gift shop told me it makes me look approachable."

"Did it work?"

"You're sitting here, ain't you."

Fair. I took a fry from my basket and studied the room sideways. Thomas and Callie had grabbed a booth in the back. Good. Visible. Let them settle in.

"I'm Clay," he said.

"Jenny." We shook hands. His palm was warm and his grip was honest, no squeezing contest. "You from around here?"

"Memphis, originally. Been here two years doing my doctorate."

"Doing it in what? You don't strike me as a humanities guy."

He laughed, low and surprised. "Biostatistics. I do the math of cancer."

I stopped chewing. "The what?"

"Clinical trials, mostly. Somebody's gotta figure out whether a drug actually works or if everybody just got lucky. That's my job. I count the bodies so you don't have to."

Something about the way he said it, flat and matter of fact, got under my skin in a good way. I put my beer down.

"I'm a nurse," I said. "Oncology floor, over at Ashford General."

He turned on his stool to face me, the whole way, notebook forgotten. "Get out. You're kidding."

"Nope. Ten years. I've been a nurse for 10 years, since I was 24, and onc since 28. Why, what's so shocking about that?"

"Nothing's shocking. It's just, I spend all day reading charts from hospitals, and you spend all day in one. I've never actually met the other end of the paperwork." He shook his head. "Small world, huh. I run the numbers on the poison, you pour it."

"That's a hell of a way to put it."

"Well. You know what I mean."

I did know what he meant, and nobody had ever put it to me like that before, not even the doctors. Most of them talk at me. This guy was talking across, like we were on the same side of something. Which we were, in a way I hadn't thought about while I was busy feeling sorry for myself.

The jukebox kicked over to some song, the worst song, that one country tune where the guy whines about his truck for four minutes. We both made the same face at the same time.

"Oh, come on," he said. "Who's paying for this."

"Somebody with no taste and a lot of quarters."

"It's a hate crime against that jukebox. That thing skips on the good songs and plays this garbage clean every time."

"You've noticed the skipping too?"

"Every Friday. I come here Fridays, get nachos, grade half a stack, put three bucks in the jukebox, and the thing eats my money and plays truck songs. It's a system."

I laughed, a real one, the kind that comes out of the stomach. It surprised me. I hadn't laughed like that in months, and here I was doing it next to a stranger over a jukebox.

Here's the part I should admit. The plan, the original plan, was simple. Sit near him, look happy, let Thomas see me being happy with another man, go home. Even if nothing happened with Clay, even if we never exchanged a word beyond jukebox complaints, the visual would do the work. A woman laughing at a bar reads one way, no matter the context. I know because I'd spent three years watching Thomas read that way into everything.

So when Kath came back from the bathroom and clocked me sitting at the bar with a large man, she gave me a thumbs up from across the room like a coach calling a play, and I gave her one back, and Clay watched the whole exchange with his eyebrows up.

"Your friend seems intense," he said.

"She's a nurse too. We met in school when I was 22. She has never once respected a boundary in her life and I would die for her."

"Solid arrangement."

We talked for another hour about nothing. Bar food, mostly. He had thoughts on the nachos, which he said peaked two years ago when the old cook left, and I told him about the time Kath and I split a basket of mozzarella sticks during a blizzard because the kitchen was the only thing still open. Then the jukebox skipped during an actual good song, a Motown thing, right in the middle of the chorus, and he put his pencil down like it had personally wronged him.

"That's it," he said. "I'm filing something."

"With who?"

"The bar. The jukebox oversight committee."

"There's no committee!"

"There should be. Every institution needs oversight. That's literally my field. You don't just report the numbers you like, you report the skipping too."

And that right there, that dumb little speech about a broken jukebox, is the moment the flicker happened. I felt it go off in my chest, warm and unwelcome, like a pilot light coming on in a house you were planning to sell. This wasn't strategy anymore. I liked him. Actually liked him. He was kind in a way that had weight behind it, and he was funny without working at it, and when he looked at me he saw a person, not a performance or a prop or a way to make an ex jealous.

Which was a problem, because the whole reason I sat down was that he was a prop. I had picked him out like a lamp.

Thomas and Callie ordered food in their booth. Every so often I caught myself checking, doing the math on sight lines, and every time I did I felt a little cheaper. Meanwhile Clay was telling me about Memphis barbecue, holding his hands apart to demonstrate the size of a sandwich his uncle used to make, and I was missing the middle of his sentences because I was busy feeling guilty about using him.

"You okay over there?" he asked. "You went somewhere."

"Yeah. Sorry. Long week."

"Hospital week or life week?"

That question, from a stranger, after one beer. Hospital week or life week. Thomas never asked me anything like that in three years, not once, not even when I came home after a bad shift and sat in the car in the driveway for twenty minutes.

"Both, honestly," I said. "But this is better than either."

He smiled at that, a real one, and went back to his nachos like I'd said something normal and not accidentally honest. The jukebox skipped again. I laughed. He shook his head at the ceiling.

Down the bar, out of the corner of my eye, Thomas got up to use the bathroom. He'd have to pass right by us. I knew it, and I sat up straighter, and I hated myself for knowing it.

Clay didn't notice anything. He was mid-sentence about dry rub versus sauce, pencil in hand, ready to take notes on my answer like my opinion on ribs was a data point worth keeping.

Kath drove me home that night, which was not the plan either, since I'd driven myself there. But by the time Thomas came out of that bathroom and walked past us without looking, I was two beers deep and Kath had already taken my keys off the bar as if it were nothing. She does that. She's been stealing my keys since nursing school and I've never once won that fight.

Thomas walked past. I watched him in the mirror behind the bar. He glanced, all right. Just a flick of the eyes, then he fixed them on the hallway like a man with somewhere important to be. A Corolla with a cracked dash and somewhere important to be. Callie stayed in the booth, on her phone, and I felt one ugly second of satisfaction and then a whole hour of shame about it.

Kath made me text her when I got inside, which took her five minutes of standing in my doorway to arrange.

you home safe

yes mom

good. So?? the big guy??

I stood in my kitchen in my coat and typed it before I could talk myself out of it.

I think I found a distraction.

Three dots. Then a long paragraph, because Kath texts like she talks, that is to say in bursts.

GOOD. You deserve a distraction. ALSO. And I say this with love. Do not use a real person as a weapon. That man has a slide rule on a lanyard. He is not a chess piece, jen. He is a whole man with a lanyard.

I sat down at my table and laughed alone in my kitchen, which is a thing I hadn't done in a while either.

he has a name. Clay.

CLAY. Ok that's a good name. Is he nice or is he nice to you. There's a difference.

I thought about that one for a while. About him asking hospital week or life week. About him putting his pencil down to hear my answer.

he's nice. Like actually.

then be careful with him. And with you. You're not revenge, jen, you're the whole point. Love you. Drink water.

Love you too. I put the phone face down and sat there in my coat for another ten minutes, thinking about a man with a lanyard, and whether I could tell the difference anymore between wanting to be seen and wanting to be seen by him specifically. Kath had put her finger on something and we both knew it. I'd walked into that bar with a plan that involved a human being, and the human being had turned out to be better than the plan, and now the plan felt embarrassing, like something I'd written at 22.

I didn't hear from him for three days. I want to tell you I wasn't counting, but I was counting. Wednesday, around one in the morning, halfway through a twelve-hour night shift, my phone buzzed in my pocket during a charting break and it was a number I hadn't saved.

This is Clay from the bar. The jukebox situation has been escalated to no one. Also, there's a coffee place on Milner that doesn't skip songs, because they don't have songs. Want to test that theory Friday?

I read it four times. Then I typed back before my brain could get a vote.

Yes. Friday works. 10am? I work nights this week.

I'll be the one with the slide rule.

I spent the rest of that shift smiling at patients in a way they probably found alarming. Then I spent the whole drive home doing something worse. The coffee place on Milner has big windows. Front-facing. Street level. Thomas's department is four blocks north. He walks that stretch sometimes, I knew that, he used to meet me there before my shifts when we were new, back when I was 31 and stupid about him in the hopeful way instead of the bitter way. I sat in my driveway and did the geometry. Where would the tables sit. Where would I sit. Which way would the light come in. Would he see me laughing with another man through a plate glass window like a commercial for moving on.

I caught myself and put my head on the steering wheel. This was the disease talking. Three years of watching everything through the lens of what Thomas would think, and now he was gone