Chapter 39 Benji #2
“Nice to meet you,” I say. My voice is welcoming and professional. “Can I get you guys anything? We’ve got the full spread tonight. Tex and Sheila have been cooking since dawn.”
“We’re good,” the sergeant says. “Thanks.”
I nod and step back from the circle. One step. Then another. Clean and smooth, the way you exit a conversation at a reception when your job is done and the guests don’t need you anymore.
I walk to the buffet. I straighten a serving tray that doesn’t need straightening. My hands need to be doing things because if my hands stop, the rest of me stops. And if the rest of me stops in the middle of this party, I’m going to come apart in front of a hundred people.
Helping out with the party.
Not boyfriend. Not partner. Not Benji who flew across the state. Not Benji who rubbed cream into his feet for two months. Not Benji who sat on a tile floor and sobbed when his leg felt a pinwheel.
I’m the fucking help.
The person you acknowledge with a job description instead of a name.
And the cruelest part is that it’s almost true.
I am helping with the party. But that’s not why I’m here.
I’m here because the man in the wheelchair held my hand against his chest three hours ago and I felt his heartbeat.
His heartbeat said tonight is going to be good.
I’m here because I’m his.
And his sergeant doesn’t know that because Mickey made sure of it.
I walk behind the bar and Sheila is there. She looks at my face and her eyes narrow.
“You alright, baby?”
“Fine,” I say. I pick up a towel and wipe the bar top that Sheila already wiped. “Just staying on top of things.”
She watches me for a second. She doesn’t push. Sheila knows when a person is fine and when a person is saying fine. But the bar is full and the party needs her. She lets me have the towel and the pretending.
I keep working. I bring a plate of brisket to Mickey’s neighbors who I still haven’t met.
I pour sweet tea for Mickey’s mother, who arrived at six-thirty and is sitting near the window watching her son laugh with his friends from a wheelchair she didn’t know he’d need six months ago.
I bring her a slice of cake and she squeezes my hand and says “this is a beautiful party, sweetheart.”
The sweetheart almost breaks me. This woman hugged me in her kitchen. She told me to call her Mama Weaver. She’s sitting ten feet from a son who just introduced me as the help. She’s squeezing the hand of a man her son won’t claim.
I hold it together because holding is what I’m doing tonight.
The party keeps going. The bar is at capacity and the noise is a wall of music and laughter.
I’ve watched Mickey scan every room he’s ever been in. The cop brain that never turns off. He told me once that the first thing he does when he enters a room is find the exits. The second thing is find the threat.
Tonight the threat must be everywhere else because Mickey has stopped looking at me.
He was looking at me all night. The way he always does — across the room, through the crowd, finding me without trying. I’d catch his eye between tables and he’d hold it for a second and the second was ours. That’s been happening all night.
It stopped when the cops sat down.
I don’t know why. I just know that the man who couldn’t take his eyes off me three hours ago is now very carefully not looking in my direction.
His body is angled toward the sergeant’s table.
His laugh is loud and easy. He’s talking and shaking hands with every person who walks up to his chair.
The warmth is real. That’s the worst part. He’s not faking it with them.
He’s just not sharing it with me.
I keep working. The food needs restocking. Someone spilled a beer near the pool table and the linen I draped over it has a wet spot that needs blotting. I handle it because the handling is the only thing keeping me upright.
The party thins after ten. Families leave first, carrying sleeping kids.
Then the neighbors. Then the regulars. Then the bikers.
The sergeant and his guys leave at ten-thirty.
Mickey shakes hands with each of them. This is just a normal night for him.
The cops came to Tex’s party. They left.
Nothing unusual happened. Nothing at all.
Except that his boyfriend spent hours being goddamn invisible.
By eleven, the bar is mostly empty. A few stragglers. Sheila starting the closing routine. Stormy collecting glasses with the quiet steadiness that is his whole personality. Tex behind the bar, leaning on his elbows, watching the room settle.
I start cleaning. Tables first. I strip the linens off the pool table and fold them. I break down the buffet, consolidating the leftovers into containers, wiping down the serving trays, restoring the bar to its pre-party state.
I do this methodically, table by table, how I break down every event I’ve ever run. The breakdown is the last act of service. The familiar rhythm is what I’m hiding inside right now.
Mickey is by the bar talking to Tex. He looks tired and happy. The party was good for him. It wasn’t good for me. Both of those things are true and that’s what’s making it impossible to breathe.
I finish the breakdown and carry the trash out to the dumpster in the back. I come back in through the kitchen and take the stairs up.
I pack my bag in two minutes — clothes, toiletries, not much to show for the time I’ve spent here. I’m leaving the cream on the nightstand because it was always for him.
At the last minute, I grab Frankie. I tuck the pot into my bag and zip it shut. George stays. He was the first living thing I put in Mickey’s room to make it feel like a home, and he belongs here even if I don’t.
I take the stairs down. They’re quiet under my feet. The hum of the elevator would announce my leaving.
The rental car is in the parking lot. I put my bag in the back seat. I go back inside for one more pass.
Stormy is in the kitchen washing glasses. His back is to me, his shoulders hunched over the sink, his hands moving through the soapy water. I walk up behind him and he turns. I can see in his face that he notices something is wrong.
“Stormy,” I say. “You did a great job tonight. You made it perfect.”
He looks at me. Stormy’s eyes see more than they’re supposed to.
“Are you leaving?” he asks.
“Yeah, I need to head out early,” I say as if that was the plan all along.
He doesn’t ask where. He just nods. I pull him into a hug and he lets me. His arms come up around my back how they did the first time I hugged him, stiff at first and then tighter. God, how I’ll miss sweet Stormy. I hold on for three seconds and then I let go.
Sheila is behind the bar counting the register. I walk up. She glances at me, and her eyes go to my jacket and the expression on my face that I’ve been holding together for hours and can’t hold for much longer.
“Sheila. The food was perfect. You’re perfect. They’re all lucky to have you.”
“Baby.” She’s reading me and the reading is telling her a story she doesn’t like. “What’s going on?”
“I need to head out earlier than I’d planned.”
She holds my gaze for three seconds. Three seconds where she’s deciding whether to push or let it go. She lets it go. She comes around the bar and she hugs me and says into my shoulder: “You call me if you need anything. You hear me? I’m always right here.”
“I hear you. Thank you.”
I walk back into the bar. Mickey is still by the front, talking to Tex. The party banner is hanging above them.
I let myself look at him one last time. His profile in the bar light. The shoulders. The hands on the armrests.
Then I turn and walk out the front door.
The parking lot is dark. The neon sign casts colored light across the asphalt. I get in the rental car, put the key in the ignition and sit there.
My hands are gripping the steering wheel and the smile that I put on four hours ago is the last thing to go. It finally goes in the parking lot of Big Tex’s Roadhouse, alone.
I should never have come here.
I drive and make it two miles. The putt-putt golf place has a parking lot that’s dark and empty.
Dante answers on the second ring. “Hey. How was the party?”
The sob comes from the bottom of my chest and it bends me over the steering wheel.
The phone falls against my knee and I’m crying in a putt-putt parking lot in Panama City Beach under a huge ostrich that has a giant hole in his butt.
This isn’t grief about a bullet or fear about a wheelchair.
This is finding out I’m not enough. Not enough to be named.
Not enough to be claimed. Not enough to be anything other than the fucking help at a party.
“Benji.” Dante’s voice goes serious. “Benji, what happened? Talk to me.”
“He introduced me as the party planner,” I choke out. “His sergeant was there. His cop friends were there. And he said this is Benji, he’s helping out with the party. That’s what he said. That’s who I am, Dante. I’m the help.”
“Where are you?”
“A putt-putt parking lot.”
“Are you driving?”
“No. I’m parked. I’m under an ostrich with a hole in its butt that people are using as a trash can.”
“Stay there. Don’t drive. I’m texting you an address and a lockbox code. It’s my Airbnb ten minutes away. Go there. Get off the road and go straight there. I’ll stay on the phone with you the whole way.”
“I packed my bag. I left George. I took Frankie.”
“Okay. Frankie is yours. George was always his.”
“I can’t go back, Dante.”
“You don’t have to go back tonight. You go to my Airbnb. You sleep. I was planning to come in tomorrow afternoon for open houses. I’ll try to get an earlier flight. We’ll figure it out when I get there.”
I put the car in drive. The putt-putt parking lot disappears in the rearview. I drive while Dante stays on the phone. His calm voice fills the car. He doesn’t lie and tell me it’s going to be okay. He doesn’t say Mickey didn’t mean it.
He just stays on the line and lets me cry. The staying is what I need because the man I love just proved that the one thing I can’t survive is being erased by the person who’s supposed to see me the clearest.
The Airbnb is a cottage on a side street. White clapboard, blue shutters, a porch with two rocking chairs. The lockbox by the front door opens with the code.
I set Frankie on the windowsill and lie down on the bed. Dante is still on the phone.
“I’m here,” I tell him.
“Lock the door,” Dante says. “I’ll be on the first flight in the morning.”
“You don’t have to change your flights because of me.”
“It’s already changed. Don’t argue with me. Go to sleep, Benji. I’ll be there early.”
The line goes quiet. Not a hang-up. Just Dante being there without talking, the line staying open if I need him.
I don’t sleep. I lie in a beach cottage with the feel of Mickey not looking at me still on my skin.
The party was beautiful.
I always make sure of it.
That’s what I do. I make every room I walk into more beautiful than it was before I got there. And then I stand in the middle of what I made and I’m the one thing in the room that doesn’t get named.