Last Call at Randy's#

Episode One: Open at Eleven

1. The Wobble#

Randy's Tavern opened at eleven because Randy said anything earlier invited breakfast people, and breakfast people asked too many questions about cleanliness.

By ten-forty Doug Walker was already under the back booth with a socket wrench in his teeth and his reading glasses pushed up where he could deny owning them. The table had a wobble. Nobody had complained about the wobble. Doug had decided the wobble was an insult.

"You're going to fix the leg," Randy said from behind the bar, "and the floor's going to lean it right back. That table's been losing to that floor since the first Bush."

Doug laughed, which cost him the wrench. He came up grinning to retrieve it. "Then the floor's been cheating."

"Forty years," Randy said, delighted — with the floor, with the table, with the whole crooked arrangement. "Nobody's caught it yet."

The floor of Randy's had, over those forty years, negotiated individual truces with gravity. It sloped toward the men's room, and veterans of the place corrected for it without thinking, like a stair taken a thousand times in the dark. The jukebox played four songs reliably and a fifth only when insulted. A dart board hung by the kitchen door with eleven years of county bracket taped beside it, updated in pencil, defended like scripture. A regular named Walt sat in the corner where the vinyl had, over a decade, taken the exact shape of Walt. None of this was wrong. That was the thing Doug could never quite say out loud, the thing he was actually under the booth defending: nothing here was wrong, and it had taken a long time and a lot of people to make a place where nothing was wrong.

He torqued the last bolt, set the table down, and pressed a thumb to the corner. It held. It still leaned, but it held while it leaned, which was the most you could ask of anything in here, including the clientele.

"Sign's next," Doug said, climbing out. He nodded at the neon over the back bar — RANDY'S in cursive, dead for a year, a gray glass scrawl that buzzed for nobody.

"You said that last March," Randy said.

"I'm saying it better this time."

Randy gave that the nod it deserved, which was none, and both men were satisfied with how the exchange had gone, because it was the same exchange they'd been having since March and neither would have traded it for a working sign.

Doug wiped his hands on his jeans and looked around for the next visible enemy. That was the trouble with adult life. Nobody had warned him about cold solder joints, grease interceptors, and stools that failed one quiet screw at a time. When Doug was a kid, every third hazard had been quicksand, and every fourth problem had required an antidote carried across town in a glass vial by a man with three minutes left. The world had made a lot of promises about the kinds of danger a person needed to prepare for, then mostly delivered paperwork.

Heather came through from the back with a rack of glasses on her hip and started setting the room without being asked, because the room did not set itself and both men in it would forget that until it was a problem. She clocked the repaired booth, the wrench, the ladder Doug had not yet dragged toward the dead sign, and said "March," without slowing down, and Doug pointed at her the way you point at a referee who got the call right against your own team.

2. The Room, Doing Its Thing#

By one o'clock the room was doing the thing it did, which looked like nothing and was actually everything.

Walt arrived at 12:15, as he had arrived at 12:15 since before Heather worked there, and lowered himself into the seat shaped like Walt with the small ceremonial grunt of a man docking a boat he had docked ten thousand times. Heather had his bottle open before he finished sitting. Walt paid in exact change, counted out on the wood, always with the dime on top. Nobody knew why the dime went on top. It was understood that asking would ruin it.

Gene from the body shop came in with the mail. Not his mail — the bar's, and also his, because Gene had been getting his mail sent to Randy's since the divorce, on the theory that a bar that knew your order was more of a home than a house that didn't. Randy sorted it without comment: two envelopes for the bar, a parts catalog for Gene, and a birthday card Gene's sister sent care of the tavern every year because it was the only address for him she trusted to still be good.

"You're a post office," Doug told Randy.

"I'm a bar," Randy said. "Bars used to be everything. Post office, courthouse, hiring hall."

"Dating service," Gene said, not looking up from the catalog.

"That was you and Sharon meeting in here, and the bar takes no responsibility."

"Bar introduced us."

"Bar also introduced you to your lawyer," Randy said, and Gene laughed first — it was his to laugh at first — and then the whole end of the bar went with him.

The fryer in the back kitchen made its noise around 1:30, the descending groan it had been making for a month, like a large animal remembering an old injury. Heather leaned into the kitchen, listened to it the way a nurse listens to a cough, and adjusted its cycle without being asked. The fryer had maybe a year left. She had not told Randy that, because some news you schedule, and she was waiting for a week when the register tape could take a joke.

She ran the room like she ran everything: from the middle of it, at a walk. Forty-two years old, twenty of them behind one bar or another, and she had never once written any of it down: who was on their second job, who was off the wagon and pretending, whose kid had made it into State and whose kid had made it into trouble. Ray Delling hadn't been in since Tuesday, which meant his hip had gone again, which meant somebody ought to run his crossword book out to him, and she knew exactly which somebody would say yes before she asked him.

"Doug."

"Hm."

"Take Ray his book."

Doug took Ray his book. He complained about it, took it anyway, and spent forty minutes at Ray's kitchen table having the best argument either of them had had all week, about whether a helicopter could really do the thing a helicopter had done in a movie both men had seen eleven times. It could not. Ray knew it could not. It takes a strong man to hold the wrong end of an argument that entertaining, and Ray held it like a champion. Somewhere in the middle of it Doug re-hung the porch rail that had been loose since spring, because his hands did that kind of thing on their own when his mouth was busy. Ray called him a show-off and got a crossword answer wrong on purpose, to restore the balance of power, and Doug drove back grinning the whole way. This was also Randy's, even though it happened a mile away. That was the part no inspection would ever find on a checklist.

Kayla showed up at three with a camera.

Kayla Boone was Randy's niece, twenty-six, home four months now from a media career in Charlotte that she described as "wrapping up" in a tone that forbade follow-up questions. The career had involved a production company, a series about food trucks, and a round of layoffs conducted over a video call with the company logo as everyone's background. She had come home with a gimbal, a hard drive full of unfinished projects, and the specific restlessness of a person whose skill had survived the job.

"I'm doing a thing on the bar," she told Randy, walking the camera in a slow arc past the taps.

"What kind of thing."

"I don't know yet. Textures. B-roll." She shot the register, the tape hanging out of it, Randy's hand covering the tape without appearing to hurry. "Places like this are disappearing, Uncle Randy."

"This place isn't disappearing," Randy said. "It's right here."

"That's what disappearing looks like," Kayla said, "from the inside."

"Then get the sign. It's the most disappeared thing we got."

Kayla laughed, which ruined the shot, and had to set up on the dead neon all over again. Randy let her film. He would have cut off a hand before saying so, but he liked having her back, liked her weird project, liked that of all the addresses she could have taken her restlessness to, she had brought it here. Mostly he liked that he could still make her laugh in the middle of her own gloomy sentence, which was a thing her mother used to do, and which Randy considered a family responsibility now.

When Doug got back, the afternoon light had gone long and gold through the front window, catching the dust in the neon sign that didn't work, and Walt said the only thing anyone would remember him saying that day.

"Table's better."

Doug stood a little straighter for the rest of the shift, and everybody saw it, and nobody said a word, because at Randy's you didn't heckle a man for being happy. You saved it. It would keep.

3. A Promise to a Machine#

Across town, Jerry Collins spent the morning on the roof of the First Methodist fellowship hall, keeping a promise to a machine.

The rooftop unit was older than most marriages and had been asked to cool a funeral reception for a hundred and forty people in July. The church secretary had called him in a controlled panic. Jerry had come out the same day, because the funeral was Saturday and because he was constitutionally unable to let a room full of grieving people sweat through a eulogy over a capacitor that cost eleven dollars.

He worked slowly and without wasted motion, laying his tools out on a canvas roll in an order that had not changed in twenty years. He replaced the capacitor, then checked four other things nobody had asked him to check, because a machine that fails once has usually been thinking about it for a while. He wrote the readings in a small waterproof book. The book went in the left chest pocket. It always went in the left chest pocket.

From the church roof you could see most of Bellwether, which wasn't a boast about the roof so much as a confession about Bellwether. Jerry straightened up to stretch his back and took the town in without meaning to: the water tower, the courthouse, the dead furniture plant with its windows painted over. Except the furniture plant's windows weren't painted over anymore. There was scaffolding on the east wall, and a crane parked where the loading docks used to be, and on the roof — he noticed it without deciding to, as he noticed everything — four brand-new condenser units in a neat row, big ones, commercial, more cooling than any taproom he could imagine needing.

Somebody's spending money, Jerry thought, and filed it where he filed things, and went back down the ladder, because the funeral was Saturday and the capacitor was only the beginning of what this unit had been thinking about.

Jerry had spent two decades in commercial HVAC before going independent, and the going-independent had involved a hotel chiller, a falsified inspection report, and an argument he had won so thoroughly that he'd had to find a new career. He did not regret it. Working for himself meant that when he said a machine was fixed, that sentence didn't have to pass through anyone else's incentives on its way to being true. He knew the mechanical guts of half the county — every walk-in, every rooftop unit, every ice machine limping toward its own funeral — and the county, in exchange, knew Jerry as the man you called when you wanted it actually fixed and were willing to hear about what else was wrong.

The church secretary asked what she owed him.

"Parts," Jerry said. "The labor's for Dot." Dot being the deceased, who had once brought him a plate at a church supper he'd been fixing the freezer during, and had stood there until he ate it.

He came into Randy's at six, took his table — back corner, sightline to the door, a habit he'd stopped explaining — and had his first sip before Doug dropped into the opposite chair like a delivery of gravel.

"Question," Doug said.

"No," Jerry said.

"You don't know the question."

"I know the shape of it. It's got a movie in it."

"Road House," Doug said, undeterred and, frankly, thrilled. "The bar in Road House has one guy whose whole job is spotting trouble before it starts. I'm saying Randy's needs that."

"Randy's has that." Jerry nodded toward the bar, where Heather was reading a stranger's driver's license with the flat courtesy of a border agent. "You're describing Heather with worse hair."

Doug turned to watch, and his whole face opened up. Heather held the license one beat longer than the law required, handed it back, and said something quiet that made the stranger laugh and sit up straighter at the same time.

"Swayze needed a whole philosophy for that," Doug said, reverent. "She does it with a coaster."

"Be nice," Jerry recited, in the tone of a man reading assembly instructions, "until it's time to not be nice."

Doug pointed at him with the full delight of thirty years, because Jerry knew the line, because Jerry had always known the line, and pretending otherwise was the second-longest game either of them had going.

Nobody at the county office or the permit desk had ever figured Jerry out. They read him as contrary. He wasn't. He was exact. He would tell you no nine ways before dinner, and then the one time it mattered he would tell you yes and mean it with his whole back.

They had been friends for thirty years on the strength of a simple arrangement neither had ever said out loud. Doug believed the world was more dramatic than it looked, and was wrong daily. Jerry believed the world was more connected than it looked, and kept his evidence in binders. Each considered the other the manageable version of the disease, and neither had ever once been bored at this table, which is a more serious achievement than most marriages can claim.

"Dot Herring's funeral Saturday," Jerry said, by way of conversation.

"I heard. You do the AC?"

"Capacitor."

"They pay you?"

"Parts."

Doug nodded slowly, like a man watching someone else's good deed and filing it under expenses. "You're a soft touch, Jer."

"I'm a professional," Jerry said, "with a specialty." He didn't say what the specialty was. The specialty was the county itself.

"Anything good from up on the roof?" Doug asked, because Jerry on a roof was the closest thing Bellwether had to a satellite.

"Somebody's doing the old furniture plant," Jerry said. "Scaffolding. Crane. New condensers on the roof — four of them, commercial, oversized." He turned his glass a quarter turn, which was Jerry for a shrug. "Overbuilt for anything I'd put in that building."

"Probably storage units," Doug said. "It's always storage units. Whole country's turning into a place to keep stuff for people who moved."

"Storage units don't need forty tons of cooling."

"Then it's a gym."

Jerry let it go. It was a renovation across town, and renovations across town were none of his business, and he had a rule about collecting things that were none of his business, which was that he collected them quietly.

4. The Flyer#

The flyer showed up on a Thursday, which nobody would remember, on the end of the bar, which everybody would.

Nobody saw who left it. That bothered Doug later — a room where Heather knew every tab by heart, and a piece of paper had walked in and sat down without buying anything. It was heavy stock, the kind that costs money to feel like it doesn't, soft sage-green ink, a logo of a wheat stalk bent into something that was either a wave or a handshake. HERITAGE GRAIN COLLECTIVE, it said. Community flow. Heritage-forward fermentation. A third place for the new Bellwether.

Under the logo, in type small enough to be modest on purpose, was an address: 14 Foundry Street. The old furniture plant.

The bar had a wonderful time with it.

Heather read it once, turned it over, and used it as a coaster, which was a review.

Randy read two lines and lost interest at third place, on the grounds that he already owned a first place and didn't see the need for the other two.

"It means home, work, and then the spot that's neither," Heather said, not looking up from the well. "Coffee shops use it. It's a marketing thing."

"Gene gets his mail here," Randy said, as if that settled the taxonomy, and to be fair, it did.

"What is community flow," Walt said. It was the second thing he'd said that week, so people took it seriously.

"Plumbing," Heather said. "We've got it. It's what the men's room does in the spring."

The end of the bar came apart. Gene laughed the birthday card right off the rail. Even Walt's shoulders moved, twice, which those who saw it would describe to those who hadn't with the reverence usually reserved for weather events.

Doug picked the flyer up off the bar, out from under a sweating bottle, and read the whole thing. Then he read it again. The second read was slower. Everyone who knew him understood that quiet Doug was worse than loud Doug — loud Doug was weather, but quiet Doug was climate.

"Third place," Doug said, finally.

"It's across town," Heather said. "It's a brewery. There's four of them now. There'll be six by Christmas."

"The new Bellwether," Doug read. He set the flyer down very gently, the way you set down something you'd rather throw. "What was wrong with the old one?"

Nobody answered, because it was six o'clock at Randy's and nothing was wrong with the old one. Walt had his bottle. Gene had his catalog and most of his composure back. The fryer groaned in the kitchen and Heather adjusted it without looking. The jukebox played the fifth song, which meant someone had insulted it, and the gold light came through the front window and lit up the dead sign, and the whole room went on being a place a hundred people were quietly counting on.

Jerry, from his corner, watched his friend read the flyer a third time.

"It's paper, Doug," he said.

"Everything's paper," Doug said. "Right up until it isn't."

He folded the flyer once, sharp, and put it in his jacket pocket instead of the trash, and Heather — closing out a tab, listening to the fryer, running her standing count of the room — noticed that too.