Two Pharmacists in Faro

I'm Alba Cline, 52 years old, and I've been a pharmacist for almost thirty years. I say that up front because it matters to how this all started. Counting pills does not prepare you for lying to a Portuguese landlady about your love life. Nothing prepares you for that.

Olive and I had been planning this trip since January. She's 51, works at a hospital pharmacy, and we met in pharmacy school over twenty-five years ago. Best friends ever since. I'd been going through a string of first dates that went nowhere, and I told her I needed a change of scenery or I was going to lose my mind. She booked the flights before I finished the sentence.

So there we were, late May, standing in the courtyard of a bed-and-breakfast in Faro with our suitcases and two days of travel sweat on us. The place had those blue and white tiles everywhere, and a lemon tree in the middle of the courtyard, and it was already warm at eleven in the morning.

Diane Addams came out to meet us. She's 48, owns the place, and we'd met her at a pharmacy conference in Lisbon three years ago. When she emailed me back about the room, I about fell out of my chair. Small world.

"Alba! And you must be Olive," she said, shaking our hands. "I'm so glad you found it okay."

"Barely," Olive said. "The GPS gave up on us twice."

"That's Faro for you. Come in, come in. You must be dying for coffee."

She led us inside and poured coffee in little cups, and that's when she said it.

"I'll tell you a secret," she said, sitting down across from us. "I don't usually rent to strangers anymore. I got tired of it. But when your email came, and then I saw you two at the door..." She smiled at both of us. "A nice couple. I made an exception for a nice couple."

Olive sipped her coffee. I choked on mine.

Olive patted my back while I coughed. "You okay, honey?" she asked, and her voice held a quality I couldn't identify at the time.

"Fine," I wheezed. "Went down wrong."

Diane kept talking about breakfast times and the good restaurants, and I nodded along while my brain ran the whole thing back. She thought we were a couple. She'd rented us the room because she thought we were a couple. And I had said nothing. Not one word.

Diane showed us up to the room, which had two beds pushed together, and I told myself that was normal in Europe. It probably is. I've heard it is. Then she left us alone and I sat down on the bed and put my face in my hands.

"Alba." Olive sat down next to me. "You could still fix it. Go tell her."

"I know."

"You want me to go tell her?"

"No!"

"Then what's the problem?"

"The problem is I just let her believe we're together and now we're stuck with it for a week and I don't know why I did that."

Olive laughed. She has a good laugh, low, and she doesn't use it on just anybody. "You didn't want to ruin the vibe," she said. "That's your answer. You didn't want to ruin the vibe."

"That's insane."

"It's a little insane."

I looked at her. She was sitting there all calm, unpacking her one suitcase, like this was nothing. She'd played along too, I realized. When I choked, she'd said "you okay, honey" like she'd been saying it for years. She hadn't corrected Diane either.

"Why didn't you say anything?" I asked.

She folded a shirt, took her time about it. "Honestly? It was kind of nice," she said. "She was being so welcoming. It felt rude to argue with her."

"So we're both cowards."

"Seems like it."

That was around noon. By evening we were out in the courtyard with a bottle of wine Diane had left for us, sitting at a little iron table under the lemon tree, and the light was doing that thing it does in southern Portugal where everything turns gold. I'd had three glasses by the time Olive brought it up again.

"So," she said, turning her glass by the stem. "The couple thing."

"Don't."

"No, I'm not teasing. Okay, I'm teasing a little. But hear me out." She leaned forward. "What if we just keep it up? For the week. It's easier, she's already happy, and nobody has to go have an awkward conversation."

"Olive Mendez. You want to pretend to be my girlfriend for seven days."

"Partner. We're in our fifties, nobody says girlfriend."

"Fine. My partner. For a week. In front of the woman who owns this place and whoever else crosses our path."

"Why not? It's like a game," she said. "Remember the game we used to play at conferences? Guessing people's drug interactions off their name badges?"

"That was for professional development."

"This is for vacation development."

I laughed into my wine. She had a point, sort of, the way she always sort of has a point. And I'll admit something here that I didn't admit to her that night. The lie had felt warm. When Diane said "a nice couple," something in my chest went soft, and I didn't examine why. Fifty-two years old and I didn't examine why.

"Fine," I said. "But there are rules."

"Rules?"

"Rule one, we don't lie to actual friends. Diane barely counts. Rule two, if it gets weird, we stop."

"Agreed. Rule three, we have to be convincing," she said, and she had that look she gets, the one where her eyes go sly. "Hand holding at minimum. Maybe an arm around the shoulder in front of the locals."

"You're enjoying this way too much."

"A little, yes."

We clinked glasses on it, which felt official. Under the lemon tree, two grown women with pharmacy licenses, sealing a fake relationship over five-euro wine. If you'd told me that night how the week would actually go, I would have laughed at you. Or maybe I wouldn't have. There was a moment, when she reached over and tucked a strand of hair behind my ear just to practice, supposedly, when my heart did something I didn't have a word for.

"See?" she said. "Easy."

"Sure," I said. "Easy."

I went to bed that night in the pushed-together beds, mine and hers three feet apart, and listened to the courtyard fountain, and told myself it was just a game. Seven days. What could happen in seven days?

I can answer that question now. Quite a lot, as it turns out.

The next morning we went out to find coffee, because Diane's machine was broken and she'd apologized about it three times. There was a café two streets over, small, with a few tables out front and a chalkboard menu I could mostly read. We took a table outside and a young woman came over with two menus.

"You are the Americans from Diane's place," she said.

"How did you know that?" I asked.

"Diane tells everyone. She is happy to have guests." She smiled. "I am Mila. I am here all day, so you will learn my name whether you want to or not."

She was twenty-nine, we found out later, and she wanted to practice her English, which meant she asked us a lot of questions and corrected our terrible Portuguese in return. She brought the coffees and then stayed to talk. Olive ordered pastries by pointing, and Mila laughed and told her the actual names.

"You two are on holiday together?" Mila asked.

"We're partners," Olive said, and said it as if it were trivial.

"Ah, how long?"

"Ten years," Olive said, and I nearly choked on my coffee. I hadn't known we were putting numbers on it now. She kept her face completely still. "Ten years in September."

Mila congratulated us. She said Diane would be pleased. Then she went back inside and I put my cup down harder than I meant to.

"Ten years?"

"I improvised."

"You can't just invent years, Olive. Now we have a timeline. Now there's an anniversary."

"So there's an anniversary. We'll be gone by then." She sipped her coffee, all innocence. "Relax."

Then Mila came back out with more pastries we hadn't ordered, on the house, she said, for the anniversary couple, and she touched Olive's shoulder when she said it, light and friendly, and I felt something in my stomach that had no business being there. Jealousy, over a fake girlfriend, from a barista. While Mila was still standing there, Olive put her hand on my thigh under the table. Just rested it there. For credibility, obviously.

It was not credible. It was distracting. Her hand was warm through the fabric of my shorts and I lost the thread of whatever Mila was saying about the market schedule. I answered something wrong and Mila laughed and I laughed too, and Olive's fingers moved maybe half an inch, and I took a very careful breath.

When Mila went back in, Olive pulled her hand away and ate her pastry like she'd done nothing at all.

"So," she said.

"Don't talk to me."

"Noted."

We spent the afternoon in the old town. Faro's old town is small, cobbled streets and white walls and orange trees growing out of places orange trees shouldn't grow. There's a chapel with bones in it that everyone tells you about. We skipped the chapel and just walked.

The hand holding was Olive's idea, per the rules, and she took my hand outside the gate like we'd been doing it for a decade. Her hand is smaller than mine and dry, pharmacist hands, washed forty times a day, same as mine. That detail got to me for some reason. I know what her hands look like after a shift. I'd known for twenty-five years.

We walked and pointed at doors and argued about where to eat dinner. At some point neither of us was talking. I don't remember exactly where. Somewhere near the water, on one of those narrow streets where the buildings lean toward each other. Her hand was still in mine and neither of us adjusted our grip, and the touching part of it had gone on longer than a game requires, and I could feel my own pulse in my fingers, which is a stupid place to feel a pulse.

She looked over at me. I didn't look back, because I was afraid of what my face was doing.

"This street is pretty," she said.

"Yeah."

"That's all I've got."

"Fine by me."

We walked another block without saying anything. Both of us knew. You can't unknow a thing like that. The game had a floor and one of us had stepped through it, and from the silence I'd say it was both of us.

Dinner fixed it, mostly. We ate at a place Mila had recommended, grilled fish, bread, more wine than strictly necessary, and by the end we were laughing about a conference in Atlanta where a speaker's slides had all been for the wrong drug. Normal stuff. Friend stuff. I almost believed the afternoon hadn't happened.

Then we got back to the B&B and Diane was in the courtyard with the wine bottle from our first night, refilling our glasses before we could say no.

"There they are," she said. "I was thinking, you must tell me. Ten years, Mila says. When exactly? I love an anniversary."

"September," I said, because that part was apparently canon now. "The ninth." I made that up on the spot. I have no idea why the ninth.

Diane clapped her hands together. "The ninth. I'll write it down. And how did you meet? Everyone always wants to know how a couple met."

Olive looked at me. I looked at my wine.

"Pharmacy school," Olive said. "We were lab partners. She corrected my calculations and I decided to keep her."

That's not far from the truth, which is probably why it came out so smooth. Diane loved it. She made us toast to it, right there, and we clinked glasses over a fake meeting that was actually real, and I drank the whole toast without tasting it.

Later, upstairs, I was sitting on my bed taking off my sandals when Olive came out of the bathroom with her toothbrush in her hand and stopped in the doorway.

"Can I say something?" she asked.

"You're going to anyway."

"The thing in the old town. When we were quiet."

I kept unlacing the sandal. "What about it."

"I liked it."

"Olive."

"No, let me finish. I've had two glasses of wine and one fake toast and I'm going to say it." She set the toothbrush down on the little shelf by the sink. "I've wanted this to