Wrong Bar Right Time

I walked into The Rusty Spur at seven forty on a Friday night and I knew before the door closed behind me that something was off. The Rusty Spur had sticky wooden floors, a jukebox playing Harvey Strait, and about half a dozen regulars nursing beers at the counter, who all turned to look at me when I came in, which is what happens when a woman walks into a bar alone in a town of nine hundred people.

I'm Bobbie Dunbar, I'm twenty-four, and I had spent the last two years on my family's cattle ranch in eastern Colorado with nothing for company but cows and a divorce decree. So forgive me if my bar-reading skills were rusty.

I scanned the room for a face that matched the profile I'd been looking at for a week. The app said Mason, twenty-seven, software developer from Denver, dark hair, decent smile in the photos. The only man in the room who wasn't seventy years old was sitting at the bar with a beer in front of him, and when my eyes landed on him he turned, and he gave me a half-smile, the kind where you can't tell if it's recognition or apology.

"You're not who I expected," I said, standing there in the doorway with my coat still on.

"Well, that's a relief," he said, "because I was about to say the same thing to you." He patted the empty stool next to him. "Are you Bobbie, by any chance?"

"How do you know my name?"

"Because you walked in looking like a woman searching for somebody, and I've been doing the same thing for twenty minutes." He shrugged. "I'm Mason. And I'm guessing this isn't the Spur Lounge."

I looked around at the wood paneling and the mounted elk head over the cash register and I laughed, and it felt strange in my throat, like a muscle I hadn't used in a while. "No. No, it is not. The Spur Lounge is three blocks east, I drove right past it, and my GPS sent me here, and I just, walked in without checking the sign."

"I did the same thing twenty minutes ago," he said. "Well, not the GPS part. I read your text wrong. You said meet at the Spur, and here I am, and I've been sitting here deciding you'd stood me up."

"Or that I'd driven past and gone home."

"Or that. My phone's had one bar since I got off the highway, so I couldn't even ask." He slid his beer aside and waved at the bartender. "You want a drink? You're here, I'm here, the elk head is here."

"I want whiskey," I said, and hung my coat on the hook by the door, and told myself I was only staying because I'd already driven forty minutes and the gas wasn't free.

The bartender poured me two fingers of something cheap and I took the stool next to Mason, and we did the awkward small talk, the where are you from and what do you do, and it went the way those conversations go until it didn't.

"So a ranch," he said, when I told him. "Like actual cattle. Horses. Hats."

"Hats when it's cold. Horses when it's faster than the truck. It's my family's place, been there since my granddad bought it in sixty-two, and I run it with my dad and my brother." I turned my glass on the sticky bar top. "My ex hated all of it. The dirt, the hours, the smell. That should have been a clue, I guess."

"Your ex."

"Married at twenty one, divorced at twenty three. Two years of my life I mostly spent apologizing for where I lived." I said it flat, because I'd said it enough times in my head that it came out flat now, like a fact about the weather. "How about you, code monkey?"

"Code monkey, wow." He laughed. "Yeah, I write software for a logistics company in Denver. Moved there when I was twenty-two for the job. It pays well and I've had three relationships since, none of which survived past four months, so I'm clearly killing it out there."

The jukebox changed songs and nobody fed it quarters, it just rolled on, and one of the old regulars at the counter muttered something to the bartender and they both laughed at whatever it was.

"Can I ask you something?" Mason said, and his voice had dropped a little, like we'd moved into a different room even though we hadn't. "And you can tell me it's none of my business."

"Probably, but go ahead."

"Your profile said newly single. You picked a bar forty minutes from your own town to meet a stranger on a Friday night. That's not a thing people do because they're lonely for conversation."

I should have deflected it. Old Bobbie, married Bobbie, would have deflected it. Instead I looked at the whiskey in my glass and told him the truth, which surprised me more than it probably surprised him.

"I've been wondering for months whether I can still want somebody," I said. "After the marriage fell apart I couldn't tell if the problem was him or me, or all of it, or if I just broke that part of myself somewhere along the way. You spend two years being told you're cold, you start to believe it. So I figured I'd drive to town, sit across from a stranger, and see if anything happened. If my pulse did anything. Stupid test, but it was the only one I could think of."

"Did it work?"

"Ask my pulse."

He laughed at that, and then his eyes went down, and I watched them go, watched them settle on my hands wrapped around the glass. My hands are wrecked, honestly, rope-callused and sun-spotted in a way twenty-four-year-old hands shouldn't be, and I keep them anyway, and the way he looked at them made my face go hot.

"Your hands," he said, and stopped, and started again. "Sorry. I was staring."

"You were."

"I was. It's just, they don't match the profile picture at all, and I mean that as a compliment." He turned on his stool a little so he faced me, and the light above the back booth flickered, the whole bar dim and amber and smelling like beer and old wood. "My pulse is also doing something."

"We've been here twenty minutes."

"Twenty two," he said. "I've been counting, which I admit is not smooth."

"It's not," I agreed, and we both grinned at each other like idiots, and there it was, the thing I'd driven all this way to check for. A pull. Low and quiet and real, sitting in my stomach like a lit coal, and I nearly wanted to laugh out loud at how simple it turned out to be. Not broken. Just waiting.

"So here's where we are," he said slowly. "We were supposed to meet at the Spur Lounge, and we both ended up at the wrong bar, and we're getting along better than I think we would have at the right one."

"That's about the size of it."

"I don't want to be presumptuous. I've been told I rush things. But I also don't want to spend this whole night pretending we're here for the whiskey."

I took a sip and let it burn, and thought about it, really thought about it, because two years of being told what I felt didn't mean I owed anyone a fast yes now, including myself.

"Then don't pretend," I said. "But also don't rush. Ask me questions. Buy me one more whiskey. Let me decide if I like you, because so far you're a man who reads his texts wrong, and I have standards, apparently."

"That's fair. That's very fair." He signaled the bartender. "Question one. What's the ranch actually like, in the morning, before anybody else is up?"

I hadn't been asked that in years, not by anyone who didn't already know, and I looked at him and started to answer, and the coal in my stomach shifted and glowed.

* * *

He listened to the whole answer, that was the first thing I noticed about him, he actually listened, didn't check his phone or look past my shoulder at the door to see if somebody better was walking in. I told him about the fog sitting in the low pasture until eight and the way the cattle follow you along the fence line like they're filing a complaint about breakfast, and I told him about my granddad buying the place in sixty-two with money he'd saved doing work I still don't fully understand, and how Dad talks about him like a saint even though everybody else in the family remembers a hard man. Mason asked follow up questions. Real ones. About the well water and the winter calving and whether I'd ever been thrown off a horse, which I had, twice, and I told him both stories and he laughed in the right places, which sounds like nothing until you remember how long it's been since anybody laughed in the right places at anything I said.

Somewhere in the middle of the second story his hand came to rest on my knee under the table. Just rested there, light as anything, like it had landed by accident and neither of us was obliged to mention it. I kept talking about the horse, a gelding named Buck who held a grudge against me specifically for reasons nobody ever determined, and I did not move my leg away, and he did not move his hand, and we both went on pretending it was casual while my knee burned under his palm like a branding iron. The regulars had started to drift out. The old fellow who'd laughed with the bartender paid his tab and shuffled out into the dark, and then another one followed, and by the time I finished the story about Buck and the stock tank there were three of them left and the bar had gotten quiet in that way bars do when the night quits being about drinking and starts being about whatever comes after.

"Question two," Mason said, and his thumb moved, just barely, a small stroke across the side of my knee that he probably thought I wouldn't notice. "Do you actually like whiskey, or are you drinking it to seem like a ranch person?"