“You drink that light crap again, Caleb, I swear I’m cutting you off.”

The woman behind the bar doesn’t even look at him when she says it. She’s drying a glass with a rag that’s seen better days.

Caleb leans back on his stool, boots hooked on the rung, cap low over his eyes.

“It’s still beer, Martha.”

“Beer’s supposed to taste like regret and bad decisions.”

“That explains your ex-husbands.”

She points the rag at him. “You’re thirty-two. No wife. No girl. Nothin’. One day a woman’s gonna walk through that door and you won’t even notice.”

Caleb snorts softly into his bottle. “Ain’t no woman just walking through that door, Martha.”

The bell above the door doesn’t ring yet — but a few heads lift anyway.

Outside the front window, an unfamiliar vehicle rolls slowly to the curb. Not a pickup. Not something beat up or mud-splattered. Clean. Dark paint. A little too new. A little too nice.

Conversations trail off.

Caleb tilts his bottle, then pauses mid-sip. He leans slightly to look past the window frame.

“…Don’t recognize that one,” he says.

Martha squints hard, presses her lips together. “That ain’t Jim’s. Ain’t Pete’s. And it sure as hell ain’t yours.”

The car idles. The engine sounds wrong for the town — too quiet, too smooth.

A phone screen lights up inside the vehicle.

Caleb lets out a soft breath through his nose. “Well I’ll be damned.”

Martha straightens. “Is that an Uber?”

The word lands weird in the room. Someone at the back snorts. Another guy mutters, “Out here?”

The rear door opens. Someone steps out. The driver stays put.

Martha shakes her head. “No construction guy around here drives somethin’ like that.”

Caleb nods once. “Nah. Too clean.”