The Renovation Bet

Six months of swearing off men and there I was, walking down Maple Street with a cooler full of beer sweating through my grip, heading toward the half-gutted row house where Isaac and his crew were tearing an old place down to its studs. That's the sort of errand I'd been running every Thursday for about a month now, ever since Juliana talked me into bringing drinks out to the workers, and I want to note right up front that I'm thirty-four years old and too old to be talked into anything, but there you go.

The breakup with Dean had been ugly in the boring way, the way most of them are, two bartenders at the same bar for three years until there was nowhere in the building we could stand without tripping over what we hadn't said. I ended it in April, on a Tuesday, between the lunch rush and happy hour, and afterward I made myself a little vow, the kind you make at thirty-four, that I was done proving things to anybody, done with the whole performance of being wanted. I was going to pour good drinks, pay off my car, and keep my heart in my apron pocket where it couldn't get stepped on.

So of course the universe sent me Isaac.

I'd known him since a night certification course five years ago, some OSHA safety thing the bar made me take, me twenty-nine and him thirty, both of us tired and sharing one bad coffee from the vending machine afterward, and then nothing, just the occasional hello around the neighborhood. Then his sister Juliana started coming into my bar two years ago, and now her brother was renovating a house two blocks from where I worked, and every Thursday I was hauling him a cooler like it was 1954. Fine. It was fine. He was calm and steady and built like a man who carried lumber for a living, and I was allowed to notice that as long as I didn't do anything about it.

Robert was on the porch when I got there, my loudest regular, drinking from a thermos he absolutely was not filling with thermos-appropriate liquids.

"Beer lady," he announced, taking the cooler off my hands like it weighed nothing. "The troops rejoice."

"Where's Isaac?"

"Inside, arguing with the electrician about where a wall wants to be. You know how he gets, all quiet and stubborn until the other guy just gives up." Robert squinted at me over his thermos. "You look nice today, Susie."

"I look like a woman carrying a cooler, Robert."

"A nice-looking woman carrying a cooler," he said, and Juliana came around the side of the house then, thirty-three and dressed like she was on her way to close a sale, which she probably was, and she got that look on her face. If you've spent any time around Juliana you know the look. It precedes trouble.

"Perfect timing," she said. "Susie, tell Robert he's an idiot."

"Gladly. Robert, you're an idiot."

"See, she agrees with me," Robert said, delighted, and Juliana rolled her eyes and sat down on the porch rail, so I climbed the steps and sat too, because the sun was out and the job site was a mess and nobody was going to stop me.

The bet came up about ten minutes later, and I'll tell you honestly that I didn't see it coming, which I should have, because Juliana had been needling me about my vow for weeks. She was saying something about a guy she wanted to set me up with, some appraiser, and I said the thing I always say, that I was taking a break from men, focusing on myself, and Robert laughed into his thermos.

"A break," he said. "How long's the break been?"

"Six months."

"Six months," Robert repeated, to Juliana, like a man presenting evidence to a jury. "And in six months, how many drinks has anybody bought this woman?"

"That's not the point, I'm not trying to get drinks bought."

"It's exactly the point," Juliana said, leaning forward with her elbows on her knees. "You've turned it off, Susie. All of it. You go to work, you go home, you come here, you lug beer. You used to be fun."

"I'm still fun."

"Name one fun thing you've done since April."

I opened my mouth and nothing came out, which was answer enough, and Juliana smiled the smile of a woman who has already won.

"Here's the bet," she said. "A thousand dollars, each of us, says you can't walk into your own bar on a random night and get a complete stranger to buy you a drink without flirting. No leaning in, no touching his arm, none of your bartender tricks, no free pour nudging him along. He just decides to buy Susie a drink because Susie is charming."

"That's a ridiculous bet," I said.

"It's a thousand dollars," Robert said.

"It's a thousand dollars," Juliana agreed, "and it expires Sunday. Any night this week, your pick, one stranger, one drink, and Robert and I get to watch from a booth like normal people."

I should have laughed it off. That's what the woman with her heart in her apron pocket does, laughs it off, goes back to the beer and the car payments and the long quiet evenings. But my pride has always been the loudest thing about me, Dean used to say it was the only part of me that never needed a tune-up, and Juliana knew exactly which button she was pushing.

"Fine," I said. "Thursday. And when I win, you're both buying my drinks for a month."

"Oh, we're not worried," Juliana said, and she and Robert shook on it over my head like I wasn't there, which is how those two handle everything.

Isaac came out while they were still shaking, wiping his hands on a rag, and he looked at the three of us with the expression of a man who has learned not to ask. He's thirty-five and he does that, doesn't ask, just takes the temperature of a room and files it away.

"Beer's in the cooler," I told him, standing, because sitting felt wrong all of a sudden.

"You want one?" he asked, and I said no, I had a shift, and it was true, I did, though it started in ninety minutes and the bar was two blocks away, and I walked those two blocks faster than I needed to.

Thursday night, my bar was doing its usual thing, dark wood and neon signs and the after-work crowd two deep at the rail. I'd picked Thursday because it was busy enough that nobody would notice one more transaction and slow enough that Juliana and Robert could take their booth and play spy. Robert had a burger. Juliana had wine she barely touched. They were terrible at being subtle, both of them, and I did my best to forget they existed.

The rules were the rules. I worked my section like I always work it, fast and friendly and utterly closed for business, which is a thing you learn after ten years behind a bar, the smile that gives nothing away. And I want to be straight with you about what happened, which is that I did it, or I think I did it, and I'm still not sure what it means.

There was a guy at the corner of the rail, suit, mid-thirties maybe, in from out of town, nursing a club soda like he was driving or hiding or both. I didn't work him. The whole point was, I didn't work him. I just did my job, and at some point I was telling the couple next to him about the time a raccoon got into the bar's basement and Dee, my barback, tried to fight it, this long rambling story I've told a hundred times, and I was laughing, actually laughing, not the work laugh, and when I turned back around there was a seven and ginger sitting in front of me that I hadn't poured.

"From the gentleman," said the guy, meaning himself, gesturing at his own club soda with the expression of a man who'd already committed and couldn't take it back. "You looked like you needed a better story than mine."

"Well, thank you," I said, and I meant it, and I rang it up on his tab like it was nothing, like my whole week hadn't just been settled by a seven and ginger.

Juliana was doing a slow clap in the booth. Robert had both fists in the air. I shot them a look that could strip paint and took the drink, and the stranger and I talked for maybe ten minutes about raccoons and cities and nothing, and then he paid and left and that concluded it.

Except it wasn't, because of Isaac.

He'd come in around nine, which he'd never done before, ever, in all these months of Thursdays. I didn't see him arrive. I turned from the rail and there he was at the far end, a stool and a water, because Isaac drinks water in bars like some kind of health influencer, and he was watching me the way he watches everything, quiet, patient, like the answer's going to come to you if you stand still long enough. I don't know how long he'd been there. I don't know how much of the raccoon story he caught, or the seven and ginger, or Juliana's slow clap.

What I know is that when I came down the rail to him and asked what he was having, he said water, like always, and then he looked at me and said, "You're good at that."

"At what? Pouring drinks?"

"At being looked at without letting anybody actually see you."

I stood there with a bar towel in my hand and nothing to wipe, thirty-four years old, a thousand dollars richer in spirit if not yet in fact, and for the first time all week I didn't have a fast answer.

"Another water," he said, "and take your time with it."

I took my time with it, meaning I filled his glass at the well slow as syrup, and when I got back to my station there was a second seven and ginger sitting there, sweating, that I hadn't poured either. Dee jerked her chin down the rail. "End of the bar," she said. "Paid cash. Told me not to make a thing of it."

So here was the problem. The bet, as Juliana had laid it out earlier that week, was that I couldn't charm a stranger into buying me a drink without working him, and the stranger had bought the drink, and the bet was mine, except Isaac had just done the same thing twenty minutes later without me lifting a finger, and Isaac had not put money in the hat. Robert had. Juliana