Two Shots of Rye

I'd had a bad day, the kind of bad day where you lose a job you should've had locked down, and when I pushed open the door of the Copper Tap at seven on a Thursday I was still replaying the phone call in my head. Some shop called Precision Auto, been open eleven months, undercut me by forty bucks on a bumper replacement for Mrs. Ramos, who'd been coming to Mendoza Auto since before I took the place over from my uncle. Forty bucks. I'd sat in my office for ten minutes composing a perfectly professional email to her, and then deleted it, and then drove to the bar instead of going home, which tells you everything about my state of mind.

The first thing I saw when my eyes adjusted to the warm dark of the place was a woman at the bar in a gray suit, sitting alone with something amber on the rocks, laughing at the muted TV where the local news was doing a segment on a raccoon that had gotten into the county building. She laughed the way people laugh when they think nobody's watching, shoulders shaking a little, and I stood there by the door with grease still under my fingernails and forgot for a second that I was in a mood.

She was maybe thirty-three, dark hair cut sharp, watch on her left wrist, and she looked about as out of place on this side of town as a chandelier in a garage. Doreen caught my eye from the taps and raised her eyebrows in a way that said, yeah, she's been here three weeks, she tips well, and she's single, now quit gawking.

I took the stool two down from her, because I'm not smooth, I just wanted to be near the jukebox and I didn't want to look like I was orbiting her. Doreen pulled me a rye without asking, because that's the arrangement we've had for three years.

"Rough one?" she asked, setting it down.

"Lost a bumper job to a shop that didn't even exist two years ago."

"That's a shame, honey. You want the good glass or the regular one?"

"The good one, it's that kind of day."

The woman in the suit laughed again at the raccoon segment, which had escalated to a picture of the raccoon sitting inside a filing cabinet, and I found myself smiling despite everything. She glanced over and caught me smiling at her laughing, which is the kind of thing that would've made me look away fast any other night, but the rye was already working.

"He got into the records room," she said to me, nodding at the TV. "Third time this month. They can't figure out how he opens the door."

"Raccoons are basically little mechanics," I said. "Opposable thumbs, patient, no respect for authority."

She turned on her stool to face me fully, and up close she was even better, this cool dry look like she was filing me under something. "Do you work with your hands?" she asked, and I realized she'd clocked the grease.

"Mechanic. Two-bay garage about six blocks from here."

"That explains it. I've been wondering all week what kind of person drinks rye at seven PM on a Thursday in a bar with a jukebox that only plays Garth Brooks and Otis Redding."

"Those are the two pillars of music, actually," I said. "Everything else is decoration."

That got a real laugh out of her, not the TV laugh, and I felt it land somewhere in my chest that I wasn't expecting. She put out her hand. "Constance Whitmore. I'm in town for three months doing efficiency consulting for the regional logistics outfit on Fifth, which is exactly as thrilling as it sounds, and my hotel has one bar and it plays smooth jazz, so here I am."

"Mia Mendoza. I'm here because it's here."

We shook hands and hers was firm and dry and I held on maybe a half second too long, whatever, sue me.

Now, the Copper Tap has a tradition, or at least Doreen lets us believe it does, which is that whoever wins the nightly trivia challenge off the coaster cards she keeps behind the bar controls the jukebox until close. The cards are ancient, laminated, wrong in places, and I have won them four Thursdays in a row, which Doreen says is because nobody smart comes in on Thursdays. I'd already spotted Constance's empty coaster and I saw my opening.

"You play trivia?" I asked her, sliding my coaster over. "House rules. Winner runs the jukebox all night. Loser drinks their losses."

Constance looked at the card, then at me, and I watched something light up in her face, this competitive little flicker that I recognized because I see it in my own mirror. "Stakes, already. All right, Mendoza, deal them out."

Doreen read the questions, because she doesn't trust either of us not to cheat, and it went back and forth for twenty minutes over two more ryes. I took capitals, I took state birds, I took a whole run of sports questions that had Constance shaking her head, and I was up four with five questions left and I could already taste the jukebox, had my whole evening planned out, six Otis Redding tracks in a row like a civilized human being.

Then Doreen hit her with the sports, because Doreen is a menace. "1975 starting lineup, defunct team, name all five."

And Constance, this woman in a gray suit who'd probably never held a wrench, reeled off five names, spelled one of them, and looked at me over her glass like a cat that had just knocked something off a shelf on purpose.

"That's correct," Doreen said, sounding personally disappointed in me.

"That is not possible," I said. "Nobody knows the 1975 starting lineup of a team that hasn't existed since before I was born."

"My father was a season ticket holder," Constance said, shrugging. "I grew up memorizing rosters at the dinner table instead of learning to cook. I have many useless talents and that's one of the top five."

"You could've mentioned that before we bet."

"Where would the fun be in that?" She finished her drink and gestured at Doreen for another, then looked at me with what I can only describe as gracious victor energy, which is the most infuriating kind. "The jukebox is mine, then. I promise to be merciful. Mostly soul, I think, since I suspect you'd riot over anything else."

"You're going to play the same song twice, aren't you."

"Almost certainly."

She did, in fact, play the same Otis track twice, back to back, watching me the whole second play to see if I'd flinch, and I refused to give her the satisfaction, and we both knew I was giving her the satisfaction anyway. Somewhere in there Doreen brought over a plate of the free popcorn and said something about how she hadn't seen the jukebox get contested in months, and Constance asked her about the dartboard by the back hallway, and that's how I ended up losing at darts too.

Because she said, casual as anything, "Is there anything in this establishment you can beat me at, Mia, or was trivia your whole hand?" and I am only human.

Darts, chalk scorekeeper hanging on a nail by the board, and we played 301, and she was good, annoyingly good, this smooth practiced throw like she'd learned in an airport bar somewhere, which she later admitted she had. I won the first leg, she took the next two, and we were into a fourth when she went to the chalk to mark my score and I went to the chalk at the same time, and our hands ended up on the chalk holder together, her fingers over mine, cool and steady, and neither of us moved for a second longer than the situation required.

"Sorry," she said, not sounding sorry at all, and didn't pull away either, so I did, backing up with the chalk and pretending to be very focused on writing the number fourteen.

That's when I really noticed her watch, a women's mechanical thing, steel case, older, the kind of piece that isn't expensive but has been maintained like somebody's life depended on it, band replaced once, dial immaculate. I know watches the way I know parts, and that was a well-loved part, the kind of thing you'd flag in a catalog and think, somebody took care of this, somebody cared.

"Nice watch," I said. "Mechanical?"

"Thirty years old and it's never missed a minute. My mother's. She believed if you maintain a thing properly it'll outlast you." She turned her wrist so I could see the dial better. "I get it serviced every year whether it needs it or not."

"That's the only correct way to do it," I said, and meant it so plainly that she smiled, this slow real smile, and I felt the floor shift under my evening in a way I hadn't planned for. "So you're the type who keeps things running."

"When they're worth it," she said, and took the chalk back from me, fingers brushing mine again, definitely on purpose this time, and threw her darts without looking away from me, which is showing off, and tripled a twenty doing it.

"Oh, come on," I said.

Doreen called from the bar that she was cutting off trivia for the night, and outside the window it had gone full dark, and I realized I'd been at the Copper Tap for three hours and my bad day was a rumor. Constance chalked the board for a new leg and looked over her shoulder at me.

"One more?" she asked. "Unless the mechanic has an early morning."

"I open at seven," I said, picking up my darts. "But the garage can open at seven fifteen."

Doreen let us stay past closing, which she does for nobody, and I know this because she's told me so about forty times over the three years I've been drinking her rye. She flipped the lock on the front door and turned the sign around and came back shaking her head at both of us like we were weather she'd have to wait out.

"One more, and then I'm not pouring anything else," she said, pulling two glasses without waiting for an answer. "And before you ask, yes, I'm doing it because Constance here actually made trivia interesting for the first time in a month, so this is a reward, not a habit."

"I'll take it as a reward," Constance said, settling back onto her stool like she'd been sitting there her whole life. "Thank you, Doreen."

"It's on the house, so don't thank me, just drink it."

I watched Doreen pour and realized something kind of embarrassing, which is that I couldn't actually remember the last time I'd seen Constance before tonight. I've been coming in on Thursdays for months and I'd have sworn I knew every face in the rotation, and yet here was this woman in a gray suit who'd apparently been sitting three stools down for three weeks, and I'd never once said a word to her.

"Three weeks," she said, when I asked her out loud, and she turned her glass on the bar in a slow circle. "Three weeks in this town and tonight is the first real conversation I've had that didn't involve a slide deck. I'm not exaggerating. There's the hotel, which has one bar that plays smooth jazz at a volume designed to prevent speech, and there's the client site, where everyone is very polite and very busy, and there's the restaurant next to the hotel, where the waitress knows my order and that's the extent of our relationship."

"That's grim," I said.

"It's efficient," she said, and smiled like the word tasted bad. "That's rather my whole problem, professionally speaking. I make things efficient for a living and it turns out I'm very good at doing it to myself."

Well, what do you say to that. I signaled Doreen for a second rye for her, which Doreen poured with an expression that said she'd been waiting three weeks for somebody to do exactly that, and I pushed the glass across the bar until it bumped Constance's hand.

"Well, you're having one now," I said. "A real conversation, I mean. Sorry it took a trivia loss to get there."

"You're not sorry at all."

"I'm not sorry at all," I agreed, and she laughed, this low surprised sound, and Doreen caught my eye over her shoulder and mouthed something I'm choosing to interpret as atta girl.

We stayed until Doreen started stacking chairs with pointed clunks, and then it was out onto the sidewalk, where the night had that early-fall cool to it, and Constance stood there a second getting her bearings like the street was a puzzle she hadn't solved yet. I pointed her the right way, which was toward Fifth, past the garage, six blocks of quiet storefronts and one very determined raccoon territory, apparently, per the local news.

"I'll walk you," I said. "It's on my way."

"Is it?"

"It's six blocks, Constance. Everything's on my way."

She didn't argue, which I'd already learned she doesn't do when she actually wants the thing being offered, and we walked. She told me about the logistics outfit on