It was supposed to be a drink

I got off at Damen with twenty minutes to kill and walked up Milwaukee instead of standing outside the bar, because I didn't want to be the guy already sitting there when he came in. It was the last week of September and warm enough that I took my jacket off and carried it. Then I was a man carrying a jacket for four blocks in the dark, which is worse than sweating.

The plan was one beer. I'd said it to myself on the train in those exact words. One beer, home by nine, because I had a stair section going out Thursday and I hadn't touched the handrail detail.

The bar's the one near Fullerton with the plastic palm tree behind the register that's been up there longer than I've lived here. Old Style was four dollars. I got there first anyway.

He came in at 7:12. I know because I'd been looking at my phone.

His name was Sam, and he was Sam on the app too. Forty-one. He does elevator modernizations, mostly downtown, mostly the ones from the sixties that still have the original relay controllers in a closet on the top floor. I told him what I do, which is that I draw a rectangle on a plan and write a model number in it that a consultant gives me. He laughed at that.

His hands were wrecked. Both thumbnails were coming back from something. There was a pale band on his wrist where a watch had been all summer, and he had his keys on a carabiner and he moved them twice on the bar while we talked, and then moved them back.

He'd been married. He said it the way you'd say you used to live in Cleveland. I didn't ask and he didn't go further, and we ended up on the Kennedy for a while instead, which lanes are worse, whether the express is a lie.

We had three beers. I'd like to say I lost count but I did the math on the tab before he reached for it.

Around ten he said his place was six blocks and did I want to see a bad kitchen. I said sure.

His building's a 1914 two-flat off Belmont that somebody wrapped in the vinyl that's supposed to read as clapboard from the street and doesn't from anywhere. The front steps were poured over the original stone, which you can see at the edges. The transom above the door had been painted shut so many times it was round at the corners. I didn't say any of that out loud.

The kitchen was bad. Cabinets from the eighties, cast iron sink chipped through to black in one spot by the drain. The floors were quarter sawn white oak under three coats of gray porch paint and I did say that, and he said he knew.

We didn't stay in the kitchen. It was over before eleven.

Afterward he got up and came back with a glass of water and set it down on my side. I hadn't asked for it. The radiator came on at some point even though it was sixty-five out, and neither of us got up to open the window for a while.

There was a crack in his ceiling running corner to corner that I'd have charged a client four hundred dollars to look at and tell him was nothing.

I left at 1:40. He was asleep or he was doing a good job of it. I got my shoes on in the hall and the fourth tread down is loose.

Milwaukee at two in the morning is delivery guys and the man who walks a pit bull in a Blackhawks jersey. The dog wears the jersey. I got home and stood in my kitchen with the light off and drank a glass of water I also didn't need, and then I went to bed and slept fine.

Alarm's at 6:40. I hit it once. Coffee at the place on Sacramento where the kid behind the counter has never once said a word to me past the total. I got the bus and stood the whole way because a woman with a wheeled cart got on at Western and it's not worth it.

In at 8:40. Marta asked if I'd seen the markups from Tuesday. I had. The stair section went out at 11:20 and the handrail detail was fine.

There was cake in the kitchen at noon for somebody's last day and nobody would take the corner pieces. At two we had the call about the lobby and the developer's guy wanted the reception desk moved eighteen inches north, and we moved the reception desk eighteen inches north. I put seven hours on 2419 and one on marketing. My mom needed a number by Sunday for my cousin's wedding in Elmhurst, plus one or not, and she'd had a name off me once before. I didn't text her back that day either.

Same chair, same cup with the chip in the handle. Two guys arguing about the Bears back by the plotter, same as Tuesday. At 4:30 Dave asked how my night was and I said fine, went out for a beer.

I texted him Friday. He texted back Sunday, short. We met up once more in October and then it went quiet, no reason, nobody did anything.

The jacket's the one I wear when it gets cold. He wrote his cross streets on the back of a receipt at the bar before we left.

I've had it out twice since and both times I went in the pocket before I did anything else. It's a Jewel receipt. Bananas, cottage cheese, six dollars and change.