Levi got to work on Saturday at a few minutes before 6pm as he always did. He took off his leather jacket, double-checked his gloves, clocked in, and put his brown paper bag of lunch in the fridge under the bar (a slice of American cheese and mustard on 88cent-a-loaf white bread and a small apple.)

He meticulously inspected the bar, the glasses, the garnishes, and got out his own special cleaning solution and a clean towel from a towering stack. He proceeded to wipe every surface behind the bar down, including the cash register. When he was done, he wiped the bar itself and went around to wipe the chairs. Satisfied, he put his bottle up and threw the towel into a five-gallon bucket for that purpose.

The day bartender, Armin, another college student, small and blond, finished up with a customer and turned toward him with a smile. He gave absolutely no indication that what Levi had done was odd.

"Hey, Levi. I washed and dried some more towels for you. How's your day going?"

"Thank you. It's fine. Did some work on the bike."

"Oh, good! Well, I'll leave it to you. Have a good shift."

"Thanks, bye."

The day was decidedly normal and calm. The Trost / Sina game was that night and Levi wasn't looking forward to the after-game crowd. Fortunately, the game was at Trost so, hopefully, most of the wild bunch would go to the nicer bars across the canal. Levi could only hope.

By 8pm all the worker bees had arrived and settled in to drink and the college students and young marrieds (almost all husbands) had had their suppers and had trickled in. Connie had joined Reiner and they were idly playing foosball in the corner.

Levi got a long break where everybody had their drinks and he went to his coat where it hung on a nail and extracted an envelope of papers. He spread them out on the prep table and began to study them.

They were all of his bills and expenses. He'd been looking at them and looking at them again for days. He was having money problems. Bad.

He picked up a small stack of hospital bills and meticulously went over the numbers again. In the end, he sighed and put them down.

He had to figure out what to do or, frankly, he'd be homeless. Aside from the (outrageous) medical bills, he didn't have much outlay. His rent and utilities, his meager food bills, (he lived on ramen noodles, cans of tuna, and cheese sandwiches,) his cleaning supplies, and toilet paper. He bought what clothing he had at thrift stores, had no air conditioner, and kept the heat down to arctic levels.

He wracked his brain to think of things he could give up. His one indulgence; his five-times-weekly workout at a dusty, ancient boxing gym, had been offset when the owner agreed to let him clean up the gym in return for using the facilities.

He sighed. He'd have to get a second job. He already sold plasma and boxed in fights at the gym. If he won he got $40 a fight. If he won.

A customer wandered in and Levi made his drink, making small talk, taking his money. He went back to his papers.

Where would he get a second job? There were virtually no businesses in the tawdry neighborhood, just the occasional tiny store or cheap restaurant, and most of those were run by families who only hired relatives. He stared at the back wall behind the bar, at himself in the old gilt mirror that hung there.

He could sell his motorcycle.

He felt unutterably sad at the notion. He loved that bike. It was the only thing of quality and class that he owned, had ever owned, in his life.

It was a 1949 Indian Scout, fire-engine red, and he'd laboriously restored it himself. He really loved that bike. It was a part of him.

It had been a surprise gift from his mother on his 30th birthday. She had talked her brother, Kenny, into parting with it after she got sick. She had shamelessly used the guilt card. She was sick, she didn't know how long she had, she wanted to give Levi something before she was gone, etc, etc. He had grudgingly given in.

It had been a banged-up piece of shit when Levi got it—he didn't know why Kenny had wanted to hang on to it, except spite, honestly. Its restoration had been a labor of love. He had begged and bartered and traded labor for parts until he'd gotten it shiny and running again. He'd worked every day for a week hauling bricks at a construction site, coming home every day, hands and arms scraped and bleeding, to fall into bed for a couple of hours till he had to be at work, to get it painted.

It was the only thing he had to remember his mother by.

Levi poured a couple of beers and made a Manhattan, taking the money and putting it into the cash register. He shut it with a ding. Reiner wandered up and sat at the bar. "You think we'll have trouble tonight?"

"Don't we always?"

Reiner chuckled. He glanced at the papers on the prep table. "Bills?"

Levi had a horror of talking about himself, about his private life but Reiner was a friend (If he could call it that. He really had no friends. Not anymore.) and he was at his wit's end. It might help his anxiety to talk about it a tiny bit.

"Yeah. I'm fucking broke."

Reiner, who made even less than Levi and who had two jobs himself nodded.

"Second job?"

"I'm thinking so."

"Bummer."

Connie joined them at the bar, perching on a seat since his feet didn't reach the floor. "You could get a roommate."

The look of disgust and terror that crossed Levi's face made both men fall silent. "I don't think so," Levi said quickly. "Uh … it's just a single room. I don't know where I'd put anybody else."

"You got a couch? You could get one of those sofas that fold out into a bed. You'd be surprised at the number of people looking for a cheap place to stay. College kids will take anything; a futon on the floor. That's how I got my place."

Levi's couch actually did fold out into a bed. It was just by chance. It had happened to be the nicest one he could afford from the thrift store. The bed part was just incidental.

Levi almost shuddered. The thought of another person in his home made him panicky even though he was agonizingly lonely.

Reiner caught Connie's eye and shook his head.

Even Connie could see Levi's distress. "So … so who do you think will win tonight's game?

Levi's shift had proven to be even worse than they'd expected. Sina Tech had trounced the Tigers and it wasn't an hour later when a full-on brawl started. A chair had been thrown into the liquor bottles behind the bar and they'd had to call the cops.

Levi didn't get out of the bar until almost three.

Later that night—or earlier that next morning—Levi drifted through his apartment, a cup of tea in hand, like a ghost. He had tentatively been turning around the scary notion of a roommate in his head. It was hard for him to even think about. What if the person was filthy? What if he moved Levi's stuff? What if he left wet towels on the floor and squeezed his toothpaste tube from the middle (he would absolutely have to have his own toothpaste. Absolutely. Yet, Levi wouldn't be able to look at it if it was squeezed wrong.)

He wandered to his single window, wide open despite the chill in the air. It was fixin' t' rain as his mother would have said.

Across the alleyway, Levi could see into his neighbor in the next building's window. It was a family; mother, and three kids. He'd never seen a father (He had seen the rare man—and heard them in the woman's narrow bed— through the open window.)

Seeing them made Levi happy. He wasn't an antisocial man. He didn't hate people. He just hated how nasty they could be. He longed, ached for human contact but he just … couldn't do it. He wasn't always like this.

He watched the woman as she cooked her family dinner. The three kids were very well behaved, the two oldest doing what he assumed was homework at the table, the toddler chewing on a wooden spoon at his mother's feet. Children were disgusting but he wouldn't mind knowing the woman. She was plump, brown-skinned, with long black hair, dressed in a loose flowered house dress like his mom used to wear, and humming as she stirred a big pot on the stove. The smell drifting over made his stomach clench. It smelled so good.

He wondered what it would be like to know the woman. He was so alone. He missed his mom. He missed Farlan and Isobel. His heart squeezed into a tiny, lonely ball.

He would never have confessed this to anyone—he tried not to think about it himself—but on the rare nights when the woman had a man friend over, Levi lay on his bed and jerked off, listening to the quiet moans (so as not to wake the kids, he figured) and the creaking of the bed.

He always got up immediately after coming, guilty and disgusted, and took a shower.