“He came back up an hour later with a different posture. He had his shoulders down and eyes up. Ordered a second one. Same beer. He paid, tipped, and then left.” I took a bite. “That’s a full arc, as far as I’m concerned.”
“You decided he needed something.”
“I decided he needed an entry point,” I said. “It's the same thing on most nights.”
"Pasta's good," Pratt said.
"Thanks. Nora has a theory that every bar has a frequency, like a radio station, and the bartender's job is to keep the signal going. Lose the signal and the room goes to static. She's notwrong, but she's also deeply philosophical for someone who refuses to explain how she takes her coffee."
"How does she take it?"
"Black, but she makes a face every time, like she's terribly disappointed. Three years of this. No explanation offered."
Pratt ate another forkful and then set his fork down. "How do you decide," he asked, "whether someone needs something or wants something?"
I opened my mouth to deliver the easy answer, a bartender one about language and positioning. I had it fully assembled, but it didn't come out.
"Need shows up first," I said. "Before they know it themselves. It's in how they sit and whether they make eye contact or avoid it. Want is noisier. It announces itself. Need waits."
"And you act on it before they ask?"
"Most of the time."
"Does that ever go wrong?"
"Sure. I sometimes read someone as needing space when they want to talk. Or I come over and they aren't ready. I recalibrate." I picked up my fork. "The read isn't always right, but not reading at all is worse."
He considered that and nodded once.
I changed the direction of the conversation.
"I saw on the bar's TV that you're from Minnesota, right? Is it as cold there?"
He answered quickly and easily, as though he had answered it dozens of times and knew the response. "Colder. I think it's even that way indoors. In Minnesota on February mornings, the locker room hadn't heated up yet. You'd sit on the bench with your gear half on, and the cold would come up through the concrete and your skate blades and settle in your feet. It didn't hurt exactly."
"But you felt it."
"You felt it." He set his glass down. "My father ran the four-thirty sessions on Saturdays. He thought early ice built something specific."
"Did it?"
A beat. "I don't know what would have been different if I'd had late ice instead. So I can't say."
It was a perfectly Pratt answer.
"Did you want to be there?" I asked. "At the four-thirty sessions."
He looked at his glass. "I wanted to be good. The sessions were necessary for that."
"That's not an answer."
He didn't fill the silence that followed. Neither did I. It sat between us over the remains of the pasta and the wine..
Pratt carried his glass to the sink, rinsed it, and set it in the rack beside mine. He was ready to go.
"Thank you for dinner," he said.
"You brought the wine."
