The wrong man was behind the bar.
Shorter, blond, early twenties, wiping the mahogany with a rag that was too wet and leaving a streak. He looked up with the expression of someone ready to be helpful, which was already a problem, because the bartender, the real bartender, was never ready to be helpful. He was just present. He existed in the spacebehind the bar the way the bottles existed on the shelf, with the settled certainty of something that had been there long enough to stop thinking about whether it belonged.
“What can I get you?”
Milo stared at him. What can I get you. As if Milo were anyone, walking in off any street, wanting any drink. As if the glass wasn’t supposed to be already poured and waiting on the ghost ring where it always sat, the good bourbon, two fingers, the knowledge in the man’s hand and not his head.
“Bourbon,” Milo said. “Neat.”
The kid reached for the well bottle. The cheap stuff. Poured it into the wrong glass, a tumbler instead of the rocks glass, and set it down with a little nod like he’d accomplished something. Milo picked it up and drank and it burned going down in a way that the good stuff never did. The good stuff settled. This stuff just hurt.
He sat on the third stool from the right and the game replay started up again immediately because there was nothing here to stop it.
The replacement bartender wiped the same section of bar he’d already wiped, the rag leaving the same wet streak. Milo watched his hands. Small, quick, efficient. Not the hands he was looking for. Not the broad hands with the blue paint ground into the creases, the knuckles that wrapped around the bottle’s neck, the cloth turning in circles along the rail like the cleaning was a conversation between the man and the room.
Milo stopped watching the bartender’s hands. He drank his bad bourbon and let the game play in his head. The puck in the slot. The pad. The flat dead sound. No one here to make it stop. Just the room, doing nothing, being nothing, a bar without the thing that made it more than a bar.
He was on his second drink when the door opened.
Cold air, two bodies, loud. A man and a woman, the man’s voice carrying the kind of confidence that came from a couple of drinks and a firm belief that his opinions mattered. They sat three stools down and the man ordered two beers without asking the woman what she wanted and Milo’s jaw tightened and he went back to his bourbon.
Then the phone came up.
“Holy shit.” The man’s voice, louder, angled at Milo. “Babe. Babe, that’s Milo Vance.”
Milo didn’t move.
“Dude.” Already recording. Milo could see the phone’s glow in his peripheral vision, held at chest height, the lens pointed at his profile. “Dude, four to one. Rough night, man. What happened out there?”
The replacement bartender looked over, uncertain. The woman said something low that might have been “leave him alone.”
“Nah, hold on.” The man stood from his stool. Columbus jersey. Of course. “Hey, Vance. Two shots, right? That’s what, like, eight minutes of ice time for zero points? My fantasy team is pissed at you, bro.”
Three feet away now. The phone’s glow closer. The faint hum of video recording.
Milo looked up.
The man was grinning. Mid-thirties, soft through the middle, a Werenski jersey he’d probably bought at a mall kiosk. He had the phone angled for the reaction shot. This was the part where the athlete was supposed to be a good sport. Laugh it off. Give him the content. Perform gratitude for the attention of a stranger who’d paid sixty bucks for a nosebleed seat and decided that entitled him to a piece of Milo’s worst night of the season.
“Turn the phone off,” Milo said.
“Come on, man, it’s just for my boys back in—”
“Turn it off or I’ll put it in your beer.”
The grin took a second to fall. The stages played across the man’s face: the laugh that started and died, the realization that Milo wasn’t joking, the glance down at Milo’s hands on the bar. Milo’s hands were relaxed. That was probably worse.
“Jesus, dude. It’s a fucking bar.”
“It is,” Milo said. “So fuck off and drink in it.”
The man muttered something about Milo being an asshole and went back to his stool, already narrating the injustice to the woman, who looked like she’d rather be anywhere else. Milo went back to his bourbon.
The replacement bartender appeared at his end, hovering. “Hey, man, sorry about that. You want another one? On the house?”
The real bartender wouldn’t have hovered. He would have handled it. Milo didn’t know exactly how, but the man had a way of managing his space without raising his voice, the same way he moved behind the bar without turning sideways. The room would have been handled and Milo wouldn’t be sitting here with bad bourbon and a stranger’s phone playing on loop behind his eyes.
“No,” Milo said. He put cash on the bar, more than the drink cost, because the kid had tried. He stood and put on his jacket and walked out.
