Closing time at Wendell's is one long scrape of chairs, and the last of the Tuesday crowd is already out on the pier. You are counting the drawer when the door goes and the bell over it swings twice, and you do not have to look up to know which man it is. You have known that walk for four years.
Bear Harnett takes the end stool, the one that faces the back bar and not the mirror, and sets his cap on the wood beside him. Rain in his jacket, salt in the wool, one knuckle split open and taped. He is a head taller than the stool was built for.
"Two fingers,"
he says.
"One cube. Whatever is open."
You pour it before he finishes the sentence, which is the entire marriage in one move, and he watches you do it without commenting on it. The bank letter is still on the bar where you left it this morning — third notice, the balloon date in red — and he does not look at that either.
He turns the glass a quarter turn on the coaster. That is the tell.
"Skip,"
he says. Then nothing, for a while, while the ice settles and the tap drips into the tray.
"The note is not the reason I came in. The note is a Tuesday problem, and I have got a Thursday one."
He drinks, sets the glass down inside the ring it already made, and finally looks at you, and there is nothing flat about it.
"Come around this bar and sit down. I have been standing on the wrong side of it for four years and I am done being polite about it."