He didn’t quit, and we didn’t talk about that night in November again. We just lived in an uneasy tension for the next several weeks. On New Year’s Eve, the bar was filled with people, and we were too busy to be distant or angry with each other. By the time the ball dropped, we were laughing like nothing has ever happened, and as one year bled into another, he leaned down and kissed me on the forehead. I was surprised at the affection, but it felt like an apology, a eulogy of sorts for the things that had been said, and the feelings that had been stirred. After the patrons filed out and we were left alone to scrub down and lock up, he leaned over the bar with a serious look on his face.

               “We’re splitting up,” he said quietly.

               For a panicked moment, I thought he meant that he was leaving the business. “You and Ellie?” I asked.

               He nodded. “She’s…it’s just not what I want,” he said.

               I nodded, keeping my composure, and my cool, even as inside I was screaming I told you so! But I’d never told him so. I never had commented on her at all. Not to him.

               “What do you want?” I asked, thinking of that forehead kiss.

               But he just smiled at me, then began slowly mopping the floor.

               And that was it. He never told me anything more about it. He returned to what I considered his normal behavior, and we fell into an easy rhythm, putting the baggage of that past year behind us. I still wondered, but I figured if Dickerson wanted to tell me, he would. It wasn’t my place to pry. I tried to put to my curiosity on the shelf, but it stuck with me. What had happened? Had he chosen me over her? Had the problem in the marriage really been about his friendship with me?

               I was at the grocery store one Saturday morning in March when I ran into Ellie. She was sorting through apples, and I almost turned around to avoid her, but I decided instead to be brave. “Hey Ellie!” I said.

               She ignored me. “Ellie?” I asked, now unsure if it was her. She looked different than I remembered. Her hair was different, and she seemed older in a way I couldn’t identify. “Ellie Dickerson?”

               Then she looked up from the apples at me, glaring, eyes like fire. “It’s Elle,” she said.

               “Oh!” I said. “Sorry, I didn’t know you were going by Elle now.”

               “I’ve always gone by Elle,” she sneered. “Barrett was the only one who ever called me Ellie.”

               It was weird hearing her use his given name. I laughed, trying to ease the tension I felt. “I know the feeling. No one calls me Nattie but him.”

               Her face was solid rock. “I know,” she said.

               Something clicked inside me, a key pushing all the lock pins into place at that same time. “You know, nothing ever happened between Dickerson and I.”

               She did not believe me. It was written all over her face. “Well, he chose you anyway,” she said.

               I had regrets about getting into the conversation with her. “Chose me?” I asked, wearing my confusion unabashedly.

               “I was never his first choice. It was always you,” she sneered. She put the apples into her cart and began to walk away, but I stopped her.

               “Wait!” I said. I had to know, and since Dickerson would never tell me, I had to ask her. “Do you think he’s in love with me?” I asked. It didn’t see it. I didn’t feel it. But that New Year’s Eve kiss was still surprising, unexplained, a possible invitation that I just hadn’t opened yet.

               “I’m sure you can figure it out, Nattie,” she said. She almost huffed at me as she retreated, disappearing through the produce section while I stood alone, wondering how I could have missed all the signs.

               That night at the bar, I was resolved to get to the bottom of it, even if it meant another uncomfortable conversation in the office. If we were going to be friends, I needed more from him than a tight lip about the important things in our lives. If he had feelings for me, I needed to know. It was Saturday, so I figured I wouldn’t get the chance to talk to him until after closing. All evening I had the things I wanted to ask and say ready to go, queued up in my brain and ready to be released.

               Around 10:30, I was returning to the main room from running the dishwasher and I stopped dead in my tracks as I watched Dickerson leaning over the bar, flirting with another man. I blinked, mentally rubbing my eyes to make sure what I was seeing was actually happening. Yes, he was definitely flirting. The way the patron smiled at him, and Dickerson tried to hide his own smile. The way he raised his eyebrows at him, the way he lingered, even though Dickerson had already given him his drink. The slinking motion of his retreat to the table where his friends waited. Dickerson wiped a grin from his face and turned his attention to the next customer.

               “I’ve got it, if you want,” I said, coming to his aid. He hated working the bar.

               “Oh, I’m okay for now,” he said, his eyes sliding to where the man had gone.

               Later, I watched him mopping the floor. The giddiness from earlier had faded but I still saw the afterglow. I wiped down the bar and waited for the right moment. As his cleaning brought him closer to me, I decided it was now or never.

               “You’re gay,” I said, a question barely hiding in my intonation.

               He swung his head round and stared at me for a moment, and I thought he was going to forgo answering, but then he smiled. “Maybe,” he said.

               I smiled to myself. Vindication. “I ran into Ellie this morning,” I confessed. “She was not very nice to me.”

               Dickerson grimaced. “Yeah. Sorry about that.”

               “She thinks you’re in love with me,” I said.

               “I know,” he said. “But it’s not like that. You know that…right?”

               “Of course,” I said.

               He deflated, the anxiety spilling out of him. “But it was never gonna work with her,” he said.

               “Why were you with her?” I asked, tossing the towel from hand to hand.

He sighed. “Expectations, I guess.” He put the mop into the bucket and began wheeling it to the back. “Rich family, cute girl who looks like she belongs with me. She was crazy about me. It felt good.”

It was the most he had ever said about his relationship with her. “Until it didn’t,” I said.

He nodded. “Yeah. Until it didn’t.”

So Ellie was wrong, her jealousy completely misdirected, which felt good. But I was also wrong, which felt humbling. Dickerson had never made me into a problem for his wife, but he had allowed her think what she thought without correcting her. He was going through something that had nothing to do with either of us. I should have listened to that voice instead of the one that was telling me to take out my frustrations on him and Ellie. Looking back on everything, honesty from the beginning would have been better for all of us, but sometimes people can’t be fully honest, even with people they love, because they aren’t being honest with themselves.  

               So, for the next several months I spent a lot of time at the bar working while Dickerson spent a lot of time at home working. It didn’t bother me much—I actually found I got more work done without him there to distract me with jokes and gossip and recaps of televisions—but it did bother me on a subatomic level. An irksome wondering had entered my brain—what was he doing at home? If Ellie was still working nights, then what was the point of him being at home by himself? He would text me updates, or sometimes email them to me, or if it was something that needed my attention he’d call and say, “I’m coming by in a bit so we can talk about this.” It felt normal enough, but try as I might, it also felt off, and I couldn’t put my finger on exactly why.

               “It’s not like he’s ignoring me or work,” I told Jay. We’d moved into a steady pace in our relationship, and I was pretty sure I was the only woman on his horizon, but we hadn’t had that conversation about labels yet. “So, I don’t get why I can’t shake this feeling like something is wrong.”

               Jay gave me a knowing, sympathetic look over the top of his glass before he knocked back a swig of the beer. “Because you feel like you’re the problem,” he said.

               The veil lifted. “Yes,” I said, wondering why I hadn’t been able to articulate it like that before. “Yes! I feel like I’m the problem here, but I didn’t do anything.”

               “Except exist as a confident woman in the world,” Jay said, a smirk parting his lips for a moment. He reached across the bar and squeezed my hand. “But it’s not, true. You’re not the problem. Whatever is going on between them doesn’t have anything to do with you.”

               Jay was right, but it was still impacting me, especially when Dickerson started ignoring my texts, ducking my calls and forgoing long in-person conversations. A few times here and there and I would have assumed he was having a bad day. But it continued for weeks until I just couldn’t take it anymore. The pot had boiled over.

               Dickerson came by unannounced around 1:30 in the morning on a Thursday evening in November. He nodded at me as he came through the doors and went straight into the office in the back of the bar without a word. I gave him a few minutes to get settled into whatever he had come in to do—and to compose myself so I didn’t immediately explode—before I deliberately walked with light feet (to avoid marching) to the office myself.

               I pushed open the door. He was sitting at his desk scrolling through a spreadsheet on his laptop. I came in without a greeting, and pulled up a chair next to him. Only then did he acknowledge me.

               “Hey, Nattie,” he said, but it sounded forced, off, thick, wrong.

               “What’s going on with you?” I asked tenderly.

               “What do you mean?” Either his bluff was really good or he truly had no idea what I was talking about it.

               “You’re ignoring me,” I said.

               He glanced away, just for a second, but it was long enough for me to know that his impulse was to keep it repressed, to tuck away whatever he didn’t want to say to me and pretend it didn’t exist. “I’m…not doing it on purpose,” he said.

               “How do you accidently ignore somebody?” I asked, feeling my ire rise. My face felt hot.

               “Look, I’m…well, it’s complicated. I’m trying to figure some things out.”

               “About me?” I asked.

               He looked at me like I had five eyeballs in my head. “About you?” he asked, a frown of confusion crinkled his features.

               “Because Ellie doesn’t like me,” I said. “And you’re choosing not to deal with that by choosing not to deal with me.”

               “What?!” he said.

               I should have taken note of how his body had stiffened, how his surprise has turned to anger and his eyes held a wounded look instead of a panicked one. But I didn’t do that. I plowed ahead of full speed, releasing years of confusion, hurt and anger over the poor treatment I’d received from Ellie, a woman whom I had wanted as a friend, but had rejected me because of her own insecurities. “I didn’t do anything to deserve this from either of you,” I said, even as he tried to interrupt me, tried to explain something that I didn’t want to listen to. “I have tried really hard to let the two of you figure it out on your own, and I feel like I’ve been more than gracious enough to both of you. But if you’re going to throw away a friendship because your wife doesn’t want you talking to other women, I guess we were never friends in the first place.” His frown deepened, and there was anger in his eyes, in his posture. I had hit a nerve that was unraveling him but I didn’t care. “I asked you to do this with me despite knowing that she would be a problem. People tried to warn me and I didn’t listen because I wanted you with me on this.”

               He closed his eyes, his face flat, his breathing slow, like he was releasing the steam. “You don’t know everything, Nattie,” he said through his teeth.

               “I don’t know anything!” I said. “Because you never tell me anything. You never talk about this one part of your life with me. What am I supposed to think?”

               “I’m really trying to do the right thing here, Nattie,” he said, and he was about to say more, but I cut him off.

               “The right thing would be to deal with whatever issue is between you and your wife without dragging me into it.”

               “Dragging you into it?” he asked. “What the hell? I haven’t drug you into anything!”

               “No, you just cut me off instead.”

               And there it was, the seed that had grown the thorns of pain I felt over his behavior. He softened, and I did too. He looked away from me, closed his laptop, and tucked it back into his bag. Then he turned towards me and took me by the hands, leaned really close to my face and said, “It has nothing to do with you.”

               I wanted to believe him, but I couldn’t if I had no other explanation. “Then, what is going on?” I asked. “Why are you ignoring me?”

               He wet his lips, tucked his bottom one in for a minute, as if buttoning it up.

               I dropped his hands. “I’m going home,” I said. “I’ll see you when I see you, I guess.”

               That was it. He didn’t try to stop me, didn’t try to explain. He let me walk away from him without putting up a fight.

               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.