The Regulars

My friend Denise asked me to housesit for her for a week while she went to visit her sister in Phoenix, and honestly I said yes before she finished asking. Her place has a dishwasher, a real coffee maker, and a cat named Pickles who only wants to sit on your chest at five in the morning. That last part is less of a perk. But the neighborhood has a bar on the corner called the Hideaway, and by day three Jordan and I were regulars.

I'm Christina, I'm 34, and I'm a carpenter by trade, which means I get to drink beer on weeknights without much guilt. Jordan is 35 and tends bar himself, so he does this thing where he watches the bartender work like he's grading a test. He'd been doing it every night, and every night the guy passed.

The Hideaway is dim and kind of shabby in a way that feels deliberate. Worn leather booths along one wall, a jukebox that plays nothing but old soul, a dartboard with so many holes it looked like it had smallpox. It was a Tuesday and we were in our usual booth, the second one from the back, and I was telling Jordan about the cabinet install I'd botched that morning when I looked up and saw him.

Hector Fuller. Across the room, at the actual bar, holding a pool cue like he was born with it. Twelve years since I'd seen him last and my stomach still did the same stupid flip it did when I was 22 and we were sneaking around during a summer neither of us was supposed to be taking seriously.

"You okay?" Jordan asked. "You stopped mid-sentence."

"Yeah. Yeah, I just." I took a drink. "That guy at the bar, the tall one in the flannel. I know him. Knew him. College."

Jordan turned around, looked, turned back. "The pool guy?"

"That's Hector. We had a thing. A summer thing."

"How much of a thing?"

"A pretty real thing," I said, and he nodded the way he does when he's filing something away instead of getting upset about it. We'd talked about our histories early on, back when we'd only been dating a few months. He knows about Hector. He's never met him.

Then Hector turned around and saw me. I watched it happen, the pause, the squint, and then his whole face opened up and he set the cue against the wall and started over. I stood up out of the booth, which felt dorky, but what are you going to do.

"No way," he said. "No way, that's not Christina Alvarez!"

"It's me. Hey, Hector."

He hugged me, and it wasn't a polite hug, it was a real one, and he smelled like sawdust and beer, which figures, because I found out later he's a mechanic now and mechanics always smell like something. "Twelve years," he said into my shoulder. "Twelve years, I'm counting, because I did the math on my thirtieth birthday and got depressed."

"You're what, 38 now?"

"Thirty-eight in March. You're 34?"

"Thirty-four, yeah."

"God. Okay. Sit, sit." He pulled a woman over by the hand. She was small and quick-moving, dark hair cut short, wearing scrubs under her jacket, so I guessed nurse before he even introduced her. "This is Sue, my wife. Sue, this is Christina. From school."

"The Christina?" Sue said, and looked at me like I should know what that meant.

"I don't know what that means," I admitted.

"Oh, you absolutely do," she laughed, sliding into the booth next to Jordan, who scooted over to make room. "The summer stories. The lake stories. I married a man who tells the same four stories about one summer and I know all of them by heart."

"Sue," Hector said, in the voice of a man begging for mercy.

"No, no, tell me," Jordan said, grinning, and I kicked him under the table and missed because the booth is huge.

Hector and Sue sat down across from us and we were a table of four. He flagged down the bartender with two fingers and ordered a round of whatever we were having plus two of whatever they were having, which turned out to be Old Fashioneds, which tracks, because Hector was always an old soul. The jukebox was playing Sam Cooke. Somebody was losing badly at darts and taking it well.

"So you're a carpenter," Hector said. "Sue found you on there, what's it called, the business page thing."

"The little writeup, yeah," I said. "A local paper did a thing on women in the trades. My boss talked them into it."

"I showed Hector before I ever met you," Sue said. "I said, this woman builds cabinets, she looks like she could carry you out of a burning building. He said, I went to school with her, she once carried a canoe a half mile."

"It was downhill," I said.

"She's being modest. It was mostly flat."

Jordan laughed so hard he had to set his beer down. "She does that. Everything was downhill. Every story."

"It's called narrative discipline," I told him.

Sue works nights at St. Anthony's, ER, three shifts a week, and she talks about it the way people talk about a sport they love, fast and with a lot of names in it. Jordan asked her a hundred questions because he loves other people's jobs, and she asked him about bartending right back, and for about ten minutes I just watched the four of them at that booth and thought, this is either going to be the best week or a very strange one, and I wasn't sure which yet.

Hector leaned back and put his arm along the top of the booth, the way he used to sit in the camp mess hall. "So what brings you to this neighborhood? You didn't move in, I'd have heard. My mom knows everybody's business within four blocks of here."

"Denise, my friend from the shop, she's out of town. We're watching her place and the cat."

"Pickles?" Sue said. "Big gray one, kind of a jerk?"

"Yes. How do you know Pickles?"

"Everybody knows Pickles. Pickles bit the mailman twice."

"That tracks," I said. "He's got a real five a.m. energy."

We closed the place down, almost. Around eleven the bartender, whose name is Ray, we learned, started stacking chairs on the tables two at a time, which is a bar's way of clearing its throat. Hector paid the tab before I could get my card out, and when I argued he said, "You can get the next one, you've got a whole week," and that settled it.

"We're four blocks up, on Maple," Sue said. "If you're ever bored. We've got a fire pit and Hector makes a genuinely terrible margarita that I pretend is good."

"It's not terrible, it's strong."

"It's terrible and strong, honey. Those are different problems."

Jordan and I walked home under streetlights that buzzed, and he was quiet for half a block, which for Jordan is a long time.

"He seems good," he finally said.

"He is good. Was. Probably still is."

"And Sue seems good."

"She does."

He put his hands in his pockets. "You're doing that thing where you wait for me to say the thing instead of saying the thing."

I laughed, because he had me. "Fine. It was nice seeing him. It was really nice. Seeing him with her, the two of them, they're good together, it didn't feel like anything to be jealous of. It felt like something else and I don't have the word for it yet."

"Okay," he said, and squeezed my hand. "We've got four more days."

That was Tuesday. By Thursday we were back in the second booth from the back and Hector and Sue came in at eight like it was a standing appointment, and I found out later Sue had told him, Thursday, that booth, don't be late, and he hadn't been.

Ray called last call at eleven again, and this time when he started stacking chairs, Sue didn't take the hint and leave. She leaned across the table and said, "Come up to the house. I'm off tomorrow, Hector's off tomorrow, and you two have no excuse because you live, what, six minutes away right now?"

"Four," Hector said. "We timed it once when my car wouldn't start."

"Come on," she said. "Nightcaps. The cat can survive without you for one night."

Jordan looked at me and I looked at Jordan, and he did that little shrug that means sure, why not, and we went. We walked the four blocks, and I fell in beside Hector like we were back at the lake, and his old pickup turned out to be a Honda in the driveway now, with a car seat in the back for his sister's kid and a tape dispenser from the shop on the floor. Sue walked half the way backward talking to Jordan about the difference between a Manhattan and a Rob Roy, which Jordan was happy to litigate for four blocks.

Their house on Maple is a little brick ranch with a fire pit out back and a porch swing nobody sits on. Inside it smells like a dog even though, Sue says, they don't have a dog, they just host everyone else's. She put a candle on because Hector is always cold, and Hector disappeared into the kitchen and came back with a pitcher of margarita and four glasses.

"Do not sip it politely," Sue told me. "Honesty matters in this house."

I sipped it. It was terrible. It was also strong enough that I could feel it behind my ears. "It's terrible," I said, "and it's wonderful."

"See, she gets it," Hector said, and sat on the couch and pulled Sue down next to him.

We talked for another hour, easy, the way the second night of knowing people goes. Jordan asked about the fire pit and Hector got him outside to show him the chimney thing he built out of old brake drums, and I stayed in, and Sue topped off my glass and sat sideways on the couch facing me and asked about college.

"I knew Hector had a whole life before me," she said. "He doesn't talk about it much. But I found a photo of you two in a box, at a lake somewhere, you're both sunburned and grinning like idiots."

"We look like idiots because we were idiots," I said. "It was one summer. We worked at this day camp together and we thought we were so grown."

"How grown?"

"Well," I said, and drank instead of finishing, which she noticed.

She laughed and kicked her feet up. "I'm not prying. Okay, I'm a little prying. I like you. I decided Tuesday I liked you and I've been telling Hector about you all week like he doesn't already have the whole story memorized."

"He does not have it memorized," Hector said from the doorway, come back in with Jordan behind him. Jordan had his jacket off and was comfortable in the corner of the big chair, which is where he goes when he's settling in. "It was downhill, mostly."

"Shut up," I said, and everyone laughed, and Hector went to feed the fire pit thing or whatever men do at a fire pit, and the three of us ended up talking in the living room with the door open to the yard.

At some point Sue moved to the floor and sat on the rug by my feet, cross-legged, with her glass on the hearth. She had changed out of her scrubs jacket into an old sweatshirt and her short dark hair was doing its own thing. She was telling a story about a guy in the ER who swallowed a magnet and lied about it for two hours, and I was laughing, and she reached up and put her hand on my knee while she laughed, and didn't take it off.

"You have really great hands," she said. "Carpenter hands. I've been wanting to say that since Tuesday and it seemed like a weird thing to say."

"It's a weird thing to say," I agreed.

"I know. I'm a little drunk on Hector's terrible margarita." She squeezed my knee. "Can I tell you something honest?"

"Go ahead."

"I've always been curious about you. Not just tonight. From the photo, from the writeup, from Hector's dumb face when he talks about that summer. I've never done anything about it with anybody. But I keep looking at you across that booth and thinking about it."

The room got very specific all of a sudden. Jordan had gone still in the corner. Hector had come back in and was standing by the open door with the fire behind him and a log in his hand, not moving.

"Well," I said. My mouth was dry even though there was a full drink right there. "That's a fair thing to tell me."

"Is it okay that I told you?"

"Yeah. It's okay." I looked at Jordan and he nodded once, small, and looked at Hector, and Hector set the log down on the hearth like it was made of glass. "It's more than okay, I think. I'd be lying if I said I hadn't thought about you either. I didn't let myself think it until tonight."

"Oh my god," Sue said softly, and laughed, nervous, real.

"Can I kiss you?" I asked her. "I'm asking before I do anything, because I don't want to do anything you didn't ask for."

"Yes," she said. "Please."

I slid off the couch onto the floor next to her, which took some doing because margaritas and floor sitting, and I took her face in my hands and kissed her. Soft, at first, just her mouth, warm, her lip gloss long