There is a bar for every loneliness. I found mine in northern Ohio, near the sour edge of Lake Eerie. A place blighted with the vaguest sadness, a dull ache that made you feel unsure how you’d gotten there or how long you’d been, left you certain only that something was missing—maybe mountains, maybe beauty. In the spring there was a fever that swept through—thunderstorms, heat, the first trip out of the house without a down jacket, the lusty teenager on a BMX outside the gas station. But I found the Timbers in late October, when I was starting to take stock before winter and found everything was coming up short: I had an apartment in an old house where the floors were so crooked I slept rolled up against the wall, and a job at the local Mickey Mart selling cigarettes and cheap beer. There was a girl in Baltimore who I saw once a month or so, who didn’t really love me, and once or twice a week I’d come home to find the same stranger passed out in my stairwell, this mystery drunk who seemed drawn to my house like a homing pigeon, a giant, comatose reminder that my life was not even so exciting as to warrant needing clear passage through the front door.

I’d seen the Timbers a hundred times, easily—a squat building with a chicken wire roof and a strand of perennially blinking Christmas lights—but I’d never gone in before, mostly because it seemed like the kind of place you’d either need to be invited to or stumble unknowingly into, led by the desperate or desperate enough to go alone. It was once a train depot, a nameless stop between shithole towns. I parked between two rust-eaten pickups and opened the front door, which was only four feet tall. There were maybe ten people inside, men mostly, eyes on the video poker or the pool table. Two or three women sat on barstools and they glanced up at me quickly and then away again, deciding, I was sure, that I wasn’t sexy enough or clever enough to be competition, just some girl from the next town over who’d lost her way.

The walls were papered with bikini models who would’ve been lucky to make the cover of B-grade porn magazines in the late eighties, and the ceiling was festooned with lingerie—lingerie that might have been donated by patrons but more likely had been placed there by the owner to make the Timbers seem sexy and exciting, to make it feel wild, like you might just turn around from your game of darts to find the girl next to you unhooking her bra. The floor was plywood and dirt. A man stood in the back of the room, setting up karaoke equipment.

I ordered a beer and sat at a little table in the back. I smoked cigarette after cigarette, death-wish smoking, and looked around. I felt ill with my life, sick and heavy.  There was nothing holding me in that town. The only way I could explain being there was that I found comfort in feeling ruined and knowing that I hadn’t seen any of the signs, as though it was inevitable. That morning at the gas station I’d bought a stack of lottery tickets and even if I were to win I probably wouldn’t buy so much as an airplane ticket. I’d probably still sit and smoke Camels out the window of my crooked-floored house and call Baltimore and listen to the long silences on the other end, and walk past the vagrant on the stairwell and say, Oh, excuse me, as though I was the one out of place.

The man at the karaoke machine had turned it on and started singing. He was troubling to look at—a little like the Marlboro man, sixty pounds heavier and maybe sixty years old, with a craggy face and a barrel of a belly and a handlebar mustache and a sweet, lustrous voice. He wore a long flasher’s duster, and had a long beard and long, bald-on-top hair. I finished my beer and ordered a whiskey and watched him turn the microphone in his hands. The women at the bar were looking through the songbook, daring each other to sing. The man at the microphone introduced someone named Dwayne, a surly man in a camouflage hunter’s outfit, who sang Joleen without irony, begging all of us not to take his man. 

The Marlboro man was near my table and I reached out and tapped his shoulder.  “You’re a good singer,” I said. 

“Thank you,” he said. He nodded at the table in front of me. “You’re a good drinker.” 

“I’m Megan,” I said.

“I’m Bill,” he said, and, inexplicably, handed me his business card. Mr. Bill Kidd, Karaoke No Joke-y!

“Nice to meet you, Mr. Bill Kidd,” I said.

“You know this song?” he asked. Dwayne at the microphone had finished singing Dolly Parton and launched into an a capella version of a Garth Brooks song. “The douche bag’s real name isn’t Garth,” he said.  “It’s Troyal.” He shook his head sadly. “I knew a man once who used to go down to Tijuana. Go for a few days, see this prostitute, you know how it goes. But he went to a donkey show and he saw Garth Brooks there. It just goes to show you,” he finished, “A man and a donkey. It doesn’t matter how many records you sell.”

“You’re just jealous,” I said.

“You bet your ass I am,” he said. “God knows I don’t want to die before I see that.”

***

The next few hours I don’t really remember. The bartender kept bringing me whiskey, long after I’d stopped anxiously asking for it. I danced badly with Dwayne of Joleen. A man named Dickface explained to me that he had suffered from a tragic and infamous accident involving the Timbers dart board three years earlier, but refused to explain the particulars of what had happened. And then Mr. Bill Kidd finished singing something slow and sad and I finished another drink, and I cornered him at the bar and asked him the question I ask everyone when I’m drunk, this ugly vocal tic I have. I leaned over his half-smoked cigarette and asked, “Do you believe in love?”

And just a word on this question—if I were ever to say it to you in a bar, I would hope that you would fight back the urge to hit me, but even more that that I would hope that you had an urge to hit me. I hate that I say it; I warn myself not to say it; and then I do say it because some hideous, shameless part of me really wants to know. And that part knows, too, that the disgust at this question fades after a certain number of drinks, and capitalizes on that knowledge. And so, before you judge Mr. Bill for his response—which I can’t exactly remember but am certain was earnest—keep in mind that I wouldn’t keep asking it if

1.) I wasn’t drunk as shit, and

2.) I wasn’t regularly met with some measure of satisfying conversation.

I don’t know what we said after that, really. I tried to explain myself, I think, hunched over the ashtray and slurring about the women who hadn’t loved me enough or at all, about things I intended to do and things that had failed to happen. He told me about his ex-wife and his mother. I left at two in the morning and drove shakily home and put his card next to my telephone, as though I wasn’t a lesbian and he wasn’t a member of the AARP, as though I’d meant, when I asked him if he believed in love, if he believed he could love me, as though we had this long and glorious history ahead of us that was only waiting for my first phone call. 

***

“He’s a serial killer,” my best friend Laura said.  “He’s a serial killer and he’s going to kill you and steal your wallet and braid your hair into a rug and keep it in the back of his child molester van.”

It occurred to me that telling anyone that I was going to be spending my evening with a man who drove a windowless van and did traveling karaoke for a living and was named after an old and murderous gangster and who also happened to carry a small leather bag full of bones on his belt (“Chicken bones, pork bones, and finger bones,” Bill explained, that first night at the Timbers.  “Got them off a head doctor in New Orleans.  I like to keep a little power hanging between my legs.”) might have been a mistake. “I’m fine,” I said.  “I won’t ride in his car.”

I met Mr. Bill at the Timbers and followed him east to One-Armed O’s, a little bar presided over by a littler woman. O had lost her arm, she told me, back when she was still Olivia, a ten-year-old girl in a shed full of farm equipment, crawling between hay bales, rusted parts, heavy steel blades. She and Bill flirted with each other in the covert, familiar way of long-ago lovers.

“So you’ve found our Bill,” she said to me. “How’d you get tied up with this old coot?” She looked at me suspiciously, pouring a one-armed shot of Wild Turkey with practiced ease.

“The Timbers,” I said, and she nodded knowingly.

“Lotta people meet at the Timbers,” she said. “I had three boyfriends I met at the Timbers. And did you hear about Dickface? That’s a story that’ll make you cry. His wife divorced him after that, just cause of what she seen when he came waddling home from that dart game.”

“He was telling me about it,” I said.

“I’ve never seen you,” O said.  “You just turn twenty-one or something? Who’s your family?”

The way O said family made me realize she didn’t mean my parents, and it made me sad, the size of what I didn’t have, the way I’d been chasing my life, wanting it lined up, tidy fortunes, where I’d been and where I’d go. The year before, on the Brighton seacoast, in a dark and cluttered apartment, a girl I was in bed with cupped my forehead in her palm and said, You have a busy mind, and I could only think that there wasn’t enough time. Even as we lay there, pretending to know each other well enough for longing when I already suspected that I wouldn’t love her or the place enough to belong there, time was dragging through us both.

“I’m not from here,” I said.  I felt like I’d failed a test. O narrowed her eyes.  “My family’s in a town in Washington.” Before I’d left the Northwest and moved East I’d stood on the sinking porch thinking with a cold anger, Everything I am is here, in these rooms, trembling.

She poured another shot for Bill. “You sing?” Her face lit up.

“She’ll sing,” said Bill.

***

About two weeks later, Mr. Bill and I began the Traveling Country Duo Extravaganza. Mr. Bill did setup and priming and tear-down. I took the mike for a single song with him, once each night in each of the shittiest bars you’ve ever seen. I’d meet him at the Timbers, and from there Mr. Bill would lead me to the Elks Club, the VFW Hall, One-Armed O’s.

We sang the same song every time, the Sheryl Crow/Kid Rock duet “Picture,” where the couple who truly loves each other has separated and the woman is drinking wine and going to church and the man is snorting cocaine in a hotel room and both of them are miserable. Towards the end of that song, Kid Rock screams, “I was off to drink you awaaay…,” and that was where Mr. Bill really stole the show. Even a deaf man might have set down his drink to marvel at Mr. Bill, down on one badly-needing-replacement-knee, handlebar mustache grazing the microphone, deep and soulful and resonant in all of that sorrow and pain.

“I had a sister,” Mr. Bill said. We were at the Boozefighter’s Pancake Breakfast.  The Boozefighters—the local motorcycle gang—were a northern Ohio legend, everywhere and nowhere—like prostitutes in their conspicuous anonymity. They weren’t particularly mean, or terrible, and their riding skills were amateur, but they held frequent spaghetti feeds, and got drunk and fell down, and they tyrannized the township and made and broke alliances like the Mafia does in Italy. A man in leather pants, a bandana, and an apron that read Bonafide SOB was passing around tiny jugs of syrup. I could feel the eyes of every Boozefighter and his wife on me—each, I was sure, creating a different set of reasons for why I might be there. The Boozefighters could only be infiltrated by blood or marriage, and even then girls weren’t allowed on the bikes.

“Had a sister?” I asked. Mr. Bill had a mother, who he lived with, and an ex-wife and a son, although the mother didn’t speak to anyone besides the television, the wife had told Bill that she’d just as soon kill him as see him again, and the son was slowly distancing himself, claiming that Bill’s drinking was reckless.

“Cancer,” he said. “God, she was beautiful. Caroline. Just a drop-dead beauty.”  Up at the front of the room someone announced that prospective cakewalkers need gather at the side door. “She took me out in those scrappy-ass hills once,” he said, gesturing east, as though toward some great vista and not just a particle-board wall. There were no hills there, even outside the pancake hall. Maybe, I thought, when you’d lived in such flatness for so long, you started to notice subtler things, gradations that barely would register on a level. Maybe the mind creates what it misses.

Bill shook his head like he was trying to remember. “She took me, and my father’s hunting rifle—lifted it right out of the rack—and told me we were going to shoot a bobcat. She’s all of twelve and I’m snot-nosed and running after her, and we’ve packed these sandwiches and we’re walking around up there for four, five hours. She’s got the gun all up and on her shoulder like goddamned Elmer Fudd, and I believe her and believe her.” He looked up toward the door, nodded toward the crowd gathering for the cakewalk. “Larry Evans will win, I tell you what. He wins every year and takes a Boston cream pie home to his girlfriend and tells her he made it. Shit’s rigged.”

“What happened with the bobcat?” I asked.

“I’m telling you, though—watch,” he said. “Boston fucking cream.” He raised one hand and gave the finger to a weathered-looking man who was crowding the cakewalk MC. “But see—we’ve been hunting this bobcat for hours, and she’s got me convinced. And then I get hungry, and I’m pissed cause she ate my sandwich—I forgot to tell you, the bitch ate my sandwich—she could charm the food right out of your mouth, that was what Caroline was like—and I say, ‘There’s no bobcat. We’re never going to find one.’”

Up on the stage, the MC and Larry looked like they might get into a fight.

“And then, just like that, she lifts the rifle, and points it at this tree—she’s never shot a fucking gun in her life—and fires it. And this bird just drops to the ground.  Dead.”

The whole world was beginning to feel that way, I thought. Full of hidden things that revealed themselves just in time to be lost.

Bill looked up at the stage. The MC was leading Larry toward the door. “Well, will wonders never cease,” he said.  He half stood. “No pie for you this year, jackass!” he yelled.

***

“What we’ll do,” Mr. Bill said, “Is we’ll leave here in May, when it starts to get warm. We’ll get you a motorcycle, and we’ll ride up to the Eerie Islands, just find a camp there, stake out a place for the summer.” We’d stopped at the lakeshore on our way back from a Vermillion bar.

May. It seemed so far away, unfathomable, but I was swept away with the idea of it. We would have a little camp, small tarpaper buildings, a firepit.

“I’ll buy a trailer,” he said. “We’ll make our way around the islands. Sell something. You’ll get good on that bike.” He rubbed his hands together for warmth, looked out at the dark water. “Goddamn dirty lake.”

I thought about it. Imagined the smell of burning wood, lightning-cracked trees down from the beach. An old radio playing country music—“That’s what you have to understand,” Bill had said. “It’s not just country. It’s sorrow, and blood, and want, and whiskey when you’re not sure whether to call it the first of the day or the last of the night before.” 

I thought I might love him, for a minute. I thought about pulling him toward me, kissing him. “Maybe,” I said, instead. “We’ll see.” I looked at him for a long time.

***

Mr. Bill had not always done traveling karaoke, he told me. He had owned a bar, a dark little motorcycle dive called, predictably, Mr. Bill’s, the original seat of the Boozefighter motorcycle gang. Mr. Bill had taken them in like a mother when they were madman drunk, nursed their furies, phoned their wives. At 2:30 when the bar closed everyone would wheel their motorcycles inside through the back door and pull down the shades and rage on until morning.

I never quite got the story straight on why Mr. Bill’s shut down. Or how Mr. Bill himself went from having a wife and a son and a business, breaking every noise ordinance from North Olmstead to Vermillion and going home to have this beautiful girl kiss him and lead him to bed, to living with his mother and dog and driving from karaoke gig to karaoke gig. And I’m not passing judgment on the van or the career or the lack of wife; I think that all of these are things that, in the right context, could be the ideal trappings for someone’s ideal life. But for Mr. Bill, it was a crucial disappointment, another thing lost. 

***

     “This is getting really weird,” Laura said. We were drinking jug wine at the window, the only place we ever sat. “You really don’t think it’s weird?”

“Really, you should meet him,” I said. “I like him.You’d like him.”

“You should invite him over.”

I thought of what it would be like, Mr. Bill in my house, hunched at the little table that slanted toward the floor. His duster hanging over the back of a chair.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe we’re not coming-over kind of friends.”

***

The phone rang at two in the morning on a Thursday night, bitter cold. I stumbled out of bed. The room was lit up with street lights, the snow outside falling again.  “Hello?”

“We got a little situation down here,” a woman said. “Little bit of a situation.”

“What?” I tried to place the voice. “Who is this?”

“Lena,” she said. “The Timbers. I got Bill here.”

I was groggy, remembered a sarcastic woman in jeans and impossible high heels, the antithesis to O’s gruff warmth. “What happened?”

“Well, Bill got himself a little liquored up and plowed on into the telephone pole across the street. Said he wanted you to come get him.”

“Me?”

“Baby, you’re the closest he’s got to a wife,” she said, and hung up.

This might be story about love. Or cruelty, or lunacy, regret. Mr. Bill and I were spending three or four days out of the week together and I had told no one but Laura. It was his age, maybe, or his novelty. The fear that an outside party might think we were sleeping together, or that they might suspect that I was doing exactly what I was—playing in someone else’s life.

I drove to the Timbers and found Mr. Bill outside of his crushed van. He was reeling. “They already called me a cab,” he said. He slid down the side of the van and sat in the snow, a giant child. “That’s my van,” he said. “Got my beads in it.” He looked up at me. “Couple a college girls gave me those beads. College girls.” He cradled his head in his hands, scuffed at the dirty snow with one boot. “Musta been a long time ago.”

The cab pulled up and I helped him in. “Take him to Lorain,” I said. “What’s the address, Bill?”

“Aw, I know Bill,” the cabbie said. “Keeping the dream alive, one drink at a time.”

“This man,” Bill said, slapping the seat and missing, hitting his leg, “This man, he’s in love with O.”

“Knock it off, Bill,” the cabbie said.

“And I’m—” Bill said, pointing one finger at himself.  “In love with you.” He turned the finger around toward me, an accusation.

“All right, Bill,” the cabbie said. “That’s it. I’m taking you home to Mama.”

Bill looked up at me, all hope. “See you tomorrow?”

I looked out at the street. The snow was dry as flour, stinging. A motorcyclist pulled up at the intersection. I couldn’t see his face. He raised his hand and Bill returned the greeting from inside the car. I thought of Mr. Bill’s during its heyday, how he must have watched, every morning, the line of bikes stringing out and away from the dark square of his door.

“Sure,” I said. “Seven o’clock.” He patted my arm, slipped his pack of Marlboros into my hand.  The cab skidded a little on the ice as it pulled away. 

***

I stood him up. I sat by the window, smoking Mr. Bill’s cigarettes. I picked up the phone and called Baltimore. She wasn’t home and I left a message, Just wondering—maybe I could come up—maybe we could take a trip—Everything I said was sour with need. I looked around the house. There was a spoon lost beneath the table, weeds in the sills, cigarettes crushed into a jar. How easily I’d run toward this new life but I knew, I’d known, that I would never live on the Eerie Islands with Mr. Bill. I wouldn’t ride a motorcycle. The more I thought of our camp, the tarps and sand and firepits, the cloudier it got. It didn’t matter how we chose to live, I thought, because it would always just be determined by how we loved.

I’ve lost a lot of places—Baltimore, all red brick and sirens; Sioux Falls, South Dakota; one of the Cyclades Islands off the coast of Greece; Brighton, with its gray sea and collapsed pier. If I were a kinder person, I thought, a better person, if Baltimore had loved me, if I’d been able to tell the truth, if I’d known what the truth was, if I’d been able to say to Mr. Bill, Listen, I’m not sure what we’re doing here—what then?

I sat watching my own reflection in the window. Nothing was fixable, I thought.  Nothing was right. I stared at my hollow-eyed, murky face in the glass. An ugly face. It was a shame, to have such a face in a place with so little beauty already. 

“Bill called,” Laura said. “Four times.” Each message as friendly and terrible as the next: Just wanted to say hi. There’s a lobster dinner over at the club, thought you might want to go. Maybe I’ll see you tonight at the Timbers…

And then, slowly, the calls stopped. It was exactly what I expected. What I’d asked to lose and lost. Billboards, cold-cracked earth, tollbooths, salt shacks. A hundred fish washed up on the Eerie shore. Ohio. It wasn’t so much to begin with, I told myself.  It wasn’t so much to leave behind.

***

He has a son, and his son has a little girl. At least I think his son has a little girl because Mr. Bill was sure it would be a girl, and told me as much. “Wife’s about five months in,” he’d said. “Five months and all she wants to eat are oysters and limes—now what does that tell you? A damn sour aphrodisiac, just like her mother.” He shook his head. “And I saw three magpies last week,” he added, and maybe that was what convinced me. It was something my own mother had said, with her hands over her belly, just before my brother was born—one for sorrow, two for joy, three for a girl, and four for a boy.

I’ve thought about his granddaughter, thought about all of the years of goodness and sorrow and triumph and loss she has to go—the world full of these little girls who are relentless, barreling toward a hundred different things. She would be three years old now, with the tiniest intimations of genetics that tie people together—she would have his nose, his bottom lip. I would take her up into the weak Ohio hills, show her the sparse trees, winter-bare, fragile as matchsticks. She would lean back on the ground, or against my shoulder. She would be eight or nine or ten. Here, I would say, is where your grandfather’s sister shot a bird down out of the sky, did he ever tell you that story? She would shake her head. I would point to the trees. Over there, I would say, Right over there, did no one ever tell you that? She would be radiant, waiting to see.