Doc Fellows Pharmacy was a staple of the Fair Play town square. It grew with the town, adding on a lunch counter to service motorists passing through the new highway. The town didn’t grow long; then it stagnated; then it began to fall off. Businesses closed left and right. Ethan Fellows didn’t want to close but eventually shut down the pharmacy side and maintained the lucrative other half. He went from pharmacist to line cook. Soon the lunch counter wasn’t enough to stay afloat. He was going to close his doors when Milton Charles showed back up to town.
Milton Charles was as much a Fair Play fixture as Doc Fellows, with Doc Fellows first opening his doors shortly before Milton showed up out of nowhere. Ms. Culpepper remembered the scrawny bag-of-bones on the doorstep of her boardinghouse. He couldn’t have been more than 18, but he had much older eyes: eyes always on the move, making notes of the entrances and exits of whatever room he happened to find himself in. He was pouring sweat, constantly using his sleeves to wipe his forehead. He was wearing a gray flannel suit and left his jet-black hair uncovered.
He asked if she had any vacancies then asked how much was room and board, putting an emphasis on the “and board” part. She gave him the rate. He pulled out a wad of cash, peeled off a few bills and handed it over to the widow. He told her that should cover the first and last month’s rent, with no idea that timid Ms. Culpepper rarely felt comfortable asking for the rent at all. He told her he valued his privacy and eating two meals a day. When the headlights from a passing car illuminated the living room, Milton bent down to tie his shoes and waited until the lights were gone before standing back up. He opened the front door, looked left and right, and, turning back towards Ms. Culpepper, told her he’d be back in the morning.
After that night, Milton Charles was only in the boarding house to take his two meals, pay his rent, or, on the rarest of occasions, to sleep.
Ms. Culpepper talked to her neighbors and her church friends about her scrawny new boarder with the extravagant way with money. People talked about two things: his seemingly never-ending source of money and just how much sweat he seemed to exude. He swapped the gray flannel suit for cotton, then seersucker, and finally a linen suit, but nothing helped. It seemed as if he couldn’t acclimate to the climate.
His last night at Ms. Culpepper’s was as abrupt as the first. He made a rare nighttime appearance, right as Ms. Culpepper was finishing her last cross-stitch. He was wearing a soldier’s uniform, and his face was covered in lipstick marks of different shades. He told her—all while rushing around the house, packing up his stuff—he’d enlisted in the Korean War, gave her a $100 bill, a kiss on the cheek, and told her she made the best cornbread in the world.
A few days later, deputies from a nearby county started asking the Fair Play townfolk if they’d seen someone matching Milton’s description. They told them what they knew, which wasn’t much—it seemed no one knew where he went. When they asked Ms. Culpepper if she remembered what branch of the military he joined, or if she could remember even the color of his uniform, she told them how sorry she was that she couldn’t remember and offered them another slice of fresh-from-the-skillet cornbread.
The war had been over a year when Ethan went to close his store and Milton reappeared. The town was split on if the man claiming to be Milton Charles was the same as the one who lived with Ms. Culpepper. The Milton who showed up was bald, dry and weighing at least three of the Milton’s they remembered. He returned to the boardinghouse to pick up some things he said must have fallen beneath the floorboards and Ms. Culpepper wondered if his eyes had always been hazel.
Milton made Ethan an offer for the shop: an offer he begrudgingly accepted. Milton wasted no time closing off the entrance to the pharmacy, converting it to an apartment, and turning the lunch counter into Fair Play’s first and only bar. He didn’t waste money either: the only things he did with the space was tear out the griddle, put up a rack to put the bottles on, and replaced the Pepsi dispensers with beer taps. He even left the name on the store front and sign—although he updated it from simple paint to a snazzy neon piece—a point that Ethan Fellows took offense to, seeing as it was his name now synonymous with debauchery.