At first, everything was fine. Dickerson and I would start work around 3 pm, opening the bar around 4 pm, and working until 2 am, a few hours after last call. We worked 6 days a week. It was grueling at times, but it was also exciting. Some nights were slow, but others were so busy that it had me wondering if we needed to hire more staff. Give it a few months, we decided. Then we’d decide if we needed extra weekend help.

               One afternoon a few months into our partnership, Dickerson came to work looking frazzled. His shirt had a salad dressing stain on it. I had never seen a stain on any of his clothing before. It caught my eye because it was so bizarre, as if he had three eyeballs instead of two.

               “You’re wearing your lunch,” I said, pointing it out.

               He looked down at his shirt. “Oh,” he said, then cursed under his breath. “Dammit, I wish I had a clean shirt here.” He looked up at me, and in his eyes I knew there was something wrong. I wanted to believe with all my being that it wasn’t something about Ellie. But I knew him well enough to know that there was always a problem with Ellie.

               “Just have Ellie bring you a clean one when she gets off work,” I suggested, running a cloth down the shiny wooden bar.

               “She was still asleep when I left,” he said. I frowned at that, wondering why that would be. He saw the expression. “She switched to nights.”

               “She did?” I asked, surprised. “Why? I thought she hated nights.”

               “She does,” Dickerson said, rubbing the salad dressing stain with his finger as if it would magically disappear. “But she switched so that she and I could be on the same schedule at home.”

               I bit my tongue. There was no need to pry or to tell him what I thought of this. What his wife did was his business, not mine. I had made a habit of not commenting on their relationship. “Does it work out like that?”

               “No,” he said quickly. Too quickly. I glanced up from the bar, my hand and the cloth stilling. “Maybe on her off days.” He shrugged.

               “She hasn’t come in yet,” I said, changing the subject. “Not interested in night life?” I went back to polishing the bar. The smell of the cleaner was irritating and I wrinkled my nose at the fake pine tree scent.

               “I don’t know,” Dickerson said. Aside from nothing, “I don’t know” was the most frequently said thing about his wife and her behavior.

               “Well, next time she’s off, tell her she should stop by.”

               Even as I said it, I knew she wouldn’t, because if she did, she would have to see me.

               Most days were easy. Dickerson and I had a sibling-like rapport with one another. We thought alike about the business. We had the same sense of humor. The things that one of us thought were problems were on the other one’s list for proactive management. It was easy to run the business with him, despite it not being easy to run a new business. Still, Dickerson’s skill with our finances was superb, and I crossed my fingers that our good luck combined with the work we were putting in would pay off.

               And the work we put only got more grueling over the first year. So much for Ellie’s shift to nights so they would be on the same schedule. For months he and I both seemed to live at the bar. Ellie never came in.

               But around the first anniversary of our official business partnership, things started to slow down, and I was able to spend a few hours of week not thinking about the bar. Most of the time this involved me sitting at home binging television shows that everyone else was talking about, or endlessly scrolling on social media, but occasionally, I had more interesting things to do. Like dates.

               I was out with a guy one evening, when I got a call from Dickerson. I frowned at the phone, wondering, like everyone my age, why he didn’t just text me instead. “Sorry, I should take this,” I said.

               “No problem,” Jay—my date, a guy I had been out with three times before—said politely.

               I excused myself from the table, and stepped outside the hole-in-the-wall burger place that was one of my favorite greasy spoons in the city. “Hey,” I said, leaning up against the brick wall to the left of the door.

               “Hey, Nattie, I…” He faltered. My stomach dropped. Dickerson was smooth. The only time he ever got tongue tied was when something was really wrong in his life. My mind went through the possibilities at lightning speed in the few seconds of silence that followed. The bar burned down. His dad died. He had been caught for embezzling. He was getting divorced.

               “Hey, come on,” I encouraged. “What is it?”

               “Nattie, I can’t spend as much time at the bar as I have been,” he said. It sounded like someone was poking a knife against his back, as if each word hurt him.

               “Oh…well, that’s fine. You and I have both been working a lot. Like, too much maybe.”

               “No, no, I mean…I can’t come in to work like I have been. I need to work more at home.”

               Now there were other things playing through my mind. Ellie was pregnant. Ellie was sick. Ellie was jealous. “You can do some work at home, that’s no problem,” I said.

               “Okay, Ellie just wants it that way. It’s easier.”

               There was a question right on the tip of my tongue, one that I couldn’t ask over the phone, but one that I knew would swirl up the surface one day despite how much I wanted to keep it suppressed. I asked a different question instead. “What do you mean it’s easier?”

               He was silent. I could hear him shifting, could picture him running his palm down his perfectly pressed shirt, chewing the inside of his cheek to keep himself from telling the truth.

               Because he couldn’t see me, I rolled my eyes. I wouldn’t have done that if we’d had this conversation in person. His silence was all the confirmation I needed. Ellie didn’t like me, because I was a woman, and therefore a threat. But he didn’t want to tell me that, because it was too upsetting. Sometimes I wondered why he thought that never talking to me about it wasn’t upsetting, but I was pretty good about recognizing that people’s decisions and choices had nothing to do with me, even if it seemed like they did. He wasn’t truthful about this part of his life because he couldn’t handle it, not because I couldn’t.

               “Do you mean, it’s easier for you?” I asked.

               More fumbling from the other end of the phone. “I just mean that if I’m at home, then I can spend more time with Ellie.”

               If you’re at home, then you will spend less time with me. I mentally wadded that thought up and put it right into the garbage can where it belonged. “It’s not a problem if you need to work at home from time to time, but I do need you sometimes at the bar. You know that’s easier for some things.”

               “Oh sure, Nattie. I didn’t mean I’d never be there.”

               “Okay, there’s no issue then,” I said.

               The rest of the conversation was a lot of me assuring him it was fine as he hemmed and hawed over his request. By the time I got back to the table, Jay had finished his entire meal, and was almost done with his shake. He looked up at me, concerned, and possibly annoyed at my prolonged absence. I wondered what he would think of me spending 60+ hours a week in a cramped office with another man. The difference between me and Dickerson is that I wouldn’t put up with that from a partner.

               “I’m really sorry,” I said. “That was my partner.”

               “Your partner?” Jay asked, a little too loudly.

               I didn’t like the anger I saw brewing in his eyes and decided to shut it down forcefully. “My business partner,” I said. “His name is Dickerson, and I’ve known him for over a decade. He’s a close friend, and we own a bar together.”

               “Oh!” he laughed, which eased some of the tension in me. “When you said partner, I thought…”

               “Like a romantic partner?” I asked, picking up my hamburger and taking a huge bite. I reached for a napkin to wipe mustard from the side of my face. “No. He’s married and I don’t want him,” I said as definitively as I could.

               “Got it,” Jay said, slurping up the rest of his milkshake. “You know, I used to date this woman that couldn’t stand me being friends with other women,” he said.

               “God, I hate that,” I said, slowing shoveling the French fries into my mouth. “As if being someone’s friend automatically sets you up for romance.”

               “Right,” he agreed. “It seems like people who don’t have siblings of the opposite sex are more prone to it.”

                “Oh, that’s interesting,” I said, thinking through the possibilities. “I’d like to see data on that,” I joked.

               Jay laughed. “Well, I don’t have any data, but I have sisters, so maybe it’s easier for me not to see every single woman as a potential partner.”

               I wondered if Ellie had brothers. It’s not something I’d ever asked Dickerson about. My internal frustration over the oddity of the phone call had only been building. “My business partner’s wife hates me,” I spilled.

               “Really?” Jay asked. He reached across the table and took one of my fries. “Why?”

               “Because I’m a woman,” I said, my sneer a mile wide.

               “Oh,” he said. He wiped his fingers on his napkin, his eyes not leaving me. “Is that why you looked so sour when you came back? Did you fight about it?”

               No. We never fought about anything, because Dickerson and I didn’t talk about the thing that would cause the fight. “No,” I said.

               Jay left it alone, picking up that I didn’t want to talk about it, or couldn’t. “You wanna get an ice cream?” he asked, eyeing my near empty plate.

               “We just had milkshakes,” I said.

               “So?” he asked, smiling.

               I laughed. “Sure. I know a nice place.” It was a nice place, but the rest of the evening was not as nice as the first part had been, because I knew a storm was blowing in, and I didn’t know how I was going to weather it.