Page 47 of Take the Fall
The place was the same as always. Long bar, walls gone brown with age, hockey running silent in the corner. Two regulars at the far end arguing about a referee with their hands. The fryer smell that had been in the walls since before either of us was born.
Pat came down and set the first pint in front of me. Then he looked at Jordan. Took a second placing him, and got there. The kid who’d hauled me out of here that night. He didn’t say it. He put a coaster down in front of Jordan instead, which from Pat was a brass band.
“What’s he drinking,” Pat said. To me.
“He can order.”
“Stout,” Jordan said. “Please.”
Pat went to pour it.
“He didn’t card me,” Jordan said.
“You want him to card you?”
“No. I just thought he might with that look in his eye.”
Pat came back with the second pint and the slow top still settling in the glass. I waited till he set it down.
“Start a tab,” I told him. “Mine.”
Jordan’s head came round. “I’ll get my own.”
“You’re not getting your own.”
“Ryan.”
“You paid the tab last time.” I picked up my pint. “And the cab. And gave me a couch a grown man could’ve filed a complaint about. You don’t get to buy twice. Drink the beer.”
He drank the beer. He didn’t love it. But he let it stand, which was the deal, and he knew it was the deal.
“The couch wasn’t that bad,” he said.
“The couch had a spring with my name on it.”
“You slept nine hours on that spring.”
“I passed out for nine hours on that spring. Different verb.”
He grinned into the glass.
For a while we didn’t say much. Didn’t need to. The day was done and we’d both felt it go. There’s an hour after a shift where the job lets go of you finger by finger, and you don’t talk through it, you just sit somewhere with the lights low and let it happen.
The regulars at the end laughed at something. One of them slapped the bar.
“My dad used to come somewhere like this,” Jordan said. “After. One hour, on the way home. Mom kept his dinner warm and stopped calling when it went to voicemail.”
Something moved across his face and he let it.
The hockey cut to a commercial. Pat brought a plate of wings nobody had ordered, set it between us, and walked off before either of us could say a word about it.
Jordan picked one up and committed to it. Sauce to the knuckle. No napkin discipline at all.
“These are good,” he said, like it surprised him.
“Don’t tell Pat. He’ll get ideas.”
He laughed. The real one. Short, surprised out of him. I liked his laugh. There was no angle in it.
