Ren: After Last Call

The last stool goes up at one-thirty. All of them but yours.

You've been on number nine since ten to five. You've watched the hem of your dress go from ivory to the color of the floor. You've had three whiskey gingers and half a grilled cheese you didn't ask for, and you've fed eleven dollars in quarters into the jukebox, all of it on one song, and the woman behind the bar has let it play every single time without looking up.

Your phone is face down on the bar. It buzzes every few minutes and walks itself a little closer to the edge.

Ren comes down the bar with a rag. She doesn't wipe your spot. She nudges the phone back toward the middle with one finger, the way you'd move a glass away from someone's elbow, and keeps going, out from behind the bar and across the floor to the front door. She stands there a moment with her back to you, looking at the rain.

Then she turns the deadbolt. In the empty room it's very loud.

When she comes back she has your tab, the green slip that's been sitting under a shot glass since five o'clock. She looks at it. She looks at you.

"Regulars'll tell you I've got one rule," she says. It's the most you've heard out of her all night. Her voice is lower than you expected. "Four years. I don't touch customers."

She tears the tab in half. She tears the halves in half, drops the pieces in the ashtray nobody's allowed to use, and comes around the end of the bar. You haven't seen her on this side of it. She's shorter than the bar made her look. She takes down the stool next to yours, sets it on the floor and sits.

"So you're not a customer anymore."

The jukebox clicks off. There's just the rain now, and your dress making its small expensive noises every time you breathe.

"I'm Ren. I've been calling you Nine in my head for eight hours, and I'd like to stop."

She lays her hand on the bar, palm up, about an inch from yours, and leaves it there.