Chapter 41 Benji
Dante opens the cottage door at eight-fifteen in the morning carrying garment bags.
“Get up,” he says. “Shower and change. I brought options for you.”
I’m on the couch because I couldn’t sleep in the bed. The bed was too comfortable and comfortable felt wrong so I took the couch. The couch was miserable and miserable felt accurate.
My face is swollen from crying. My eyeliner is smeared on the pillowcase. Frankie is on the windowsill catching the first light through the screen and looking healthier than I feel, which is insulting from a succulent.
“I don’t want clothing options,” I say. “I want to lie here and mope.”
“You’re not lying here or moping. You’re getting up, you’re putting on clothes that make you feel like yourself, and you’re coming with me today.
I have three open houses to check out this morning.
Multi-million-dollar properties on 30A. I need a second opinion and I need you to remember that you’re a person who walks into rooms and makes them beautiful. ”
“I don’t feel like making rooms beautiful today.”
“That’s why we’re starting with other people’s rooms. Hit the shower. Now. No arguments. The first showing is at nine-thirty and I’m not walking into a four-point-two-million-dollar listing with a man who looks like he slept in a flophouse.”
“I slept on the couch.”
“Believe me, I can tell,” he says. “Go shower and make yourself gorgeous.”
I do what he says because arguing with Dante in crisis-management mode is like arguing with weather — pointless and exhausting.
“I stopped by your apartment on the way to the airport,” he says.
“I grabbed the coral linen and the white button-down. Cream pants. Navy shorts. Your good eyeliner, not the drugstore one. And the brown belt, not the black, because the black one makes you look like you’re going to a funeral and today is not a funeral. ”
“You broke into my apartment in the middle of the night to pack me outfits?”
“I have a key, it’s not breaking in. And someone had to.
You left that man’s loft with one bag packed by a person in crisis.
Crisis packing is not packing. Crisis packing is shoving things into a zipper and hoping for the best. I was not going to let you face today in whatever you grabbed in the dark at midnight. ”
The bathroom is small and white. The water pressure is adequate, which is a word I would never use to describe water pressure if I were feeling like myself, but I’m not feeling like myself.
I pick the coral outfit. The coral makes my skin glow and my eyes pop.
Dante does my hair. He stands behind me with product and a comb.
His hands in my hair are steady and familiar.
He’s been doing my hair since we were twenty-three and he decided my styling was “an emergency that required intervention.” The hair goes back.
The volume comes up. He hands me my eyeliner.
“Sharp,” he says. “Today we do sharp, Benji. No arguments.”
I line my eyes. The pencil is steady even though my hands shouldn’t be. The eyeliner goes on the way it’s gone on every morning since I was sixteen and decided that my face was mine and nobody else gets a vote. The line is sharp. The wing is precise.
“And there he is,” Dante says in approval. “You’re back, Benji.”
We take Dante’s rental, a white SUV that he upgraded at the counter. Dante doesn’t drive economy when he’s working. The drive to the first open house takes twelve minutes on 30A.
The first showing is a four-bedroom house with a courtyard pool and a rooftop deck.
Dante works the listing agent while I walk the rooms. The rooms are beautiful.
White walls, wide plank floors, the clean coastal aesthetic that sells for a premium.
I run my hand along the countertops. I check the light in every room.
I stand in the courtyard and look up at the sky through the palms. Panama City Beach is ten minutes from here.
Same sky. Same water. I wonder if he’s looking at it too.
I push the thought away. I walk into the next room.
The second showing is new construction, five bedrooms, a pool that vanishes into the tree line.
The listing agent is a woman who shakes Dante’s hand and immediately clocks that Dante knows his business.
They talk comps and absorption rates. I drift through the house touching light switches and opening closets and checking the way the doors hang.
“What do you think?” Dante asks me in the kitchen.
“The bones of the house are good,” I say. “The finishes are builder-grade trying to look custom. The backsplash is wrong for the price point but the pool saves it.”
“See? This is exactly why I brought you.”
The third showing is a lot with a teardown and a Gulf view. We stand in the overgrown yard and look at the water through the sea oats. Dante talks about the build cost and the lot value while I nod.
After the showings we get lunch at a café. We sit outdoors under umbrellas. Dante orders for both of us. The ordering is one of the small tyrannies of our friendship that I’ve never fought, because Dante always orders well.
“You’re doing good,” he says, over a grouper sandwich and Cajun fries.
“I’m functioning. Functioning is not what I’d call good.”
“Functioning is the step before good. Good comes later. Now eat. How is your sandwich?”
“It’s fine,” I say.
Everything is fine. Fine is the word I learned from Mickey. I hate how natural it sounds coming out of my mouth. I push the half-eaten sandwich toward Dante to finish.
“Don’t you dare push food away,” Dante says. “That’s not who you are, Benji.”
I pull the sandwich back and eat it. My phone has been off since last night. I turn it on at the table. Eleven missed calls. Twenty-two texts. I don’t read them. I see the notification count and turn the phone back off. Dante raises his eyebrows but doesn’t comment.
“Never fall in love, Dante,” I say with a sigh. “It hurts too much.”
His eyes flash up to mine. “I can see that,” he says gently. “It hurts me to see you hurting. Don’t worry about me. I love everything about my life. Why would I take the chance of getting involved with someone and screwing everything up?” He smiles. “Maybe when I’m eighty. Or maybe not even then.”
“Do you ever think about finding someone?” I ask, even though I know the answer. “Ever?”
“No. I think about work, my friends, my big family. And you, of course. That’s enough for me. More than enough really.”
“Thank you for always being here for me,” I tell him. “You know what I’d like to do this afternoon?”
“I’m terrified to hear,” he says.
“I want to go swimming.”
Dante looks up from his fries. “Swimming? Where? In the Gulf?”
“Sure. It’s ninety-five degrees. Good weather. A perfect beach day with my best friend. What could be better?”
“Where do you want to go swim?”
“Panama City Beach.”
“Benji. No.”
“Why not? The beaches are public. It’s yellow flags, the water is as calm as a lake. There’s a perfect stretch of white sand right on Front Beach Road. Clean, wide, accessible from the public access point. Beautiful clear water.”
“As in the stretch of sand directly in front of Big Tex’s Roadhouse?” Dante says slowly. “As in the stretch of sand directly below the second-floor windows of Mickey Weaver’s loft?”
“Is it? I hadn’t thought about that. Isn’t that a funny coincidence.”
“Oh my God, you’re the worst liar in the state of Florida,” Dante says.
“I’m not lying. I’m choosing a convenient beach location based on proximity to a public beach access, free parking and water conditions.”
“You’re choosing to swim in the sightline of someone who can’t come down to the beach and who you’re currently furious with.”
“No, Dante. I’m choosing to swim at a public beach. If a man happens to be able to see the beach from his window, that’s purely a coincidence of geography.”
Dante stares at me, then the corner of his mouth lifts.
“You’re going to wear the good swimming trunks,” he says. “You look fantastic in those.”
“Yes, I’ll wear the coral trunks that match the shirt.”
“Perfect.”
“And I’m going to swim with my best friend.
In the Gulf. In front of God and the public and anyone who happens to be looking out their second-floor window at the water.
Because I’m not a man who hides, Dante. I’m not a man who stays in the back room or the back table or hidden behind the push handle of a wheelchair.
I’m going to be exactly who I am in the most visible place I can find.
If that happens to be forty feet from the building where the man I love decided I wasn’t worth introducing, then the architecture of this town is not my damn problem. ”
Dante picks up his sandwich and takes another bite. “I’m just going to say one thing,” he says. “Before this gets out of hand.”
“Say it.”
“Don’t you think it’s a little cruel to tease a man in a wheelchair? He can see you but he can’t get down to the beach. The sand isn’t accessible. He’s stuck up there watching.”
I look at Dante and I think about what he said for exactly three seconds.
“Mickey never wanted me to feel sorry for him or treat him differently because of the wheelchair,” I say.
“He told me that. Multiple times. And I never did. Because the wheelchair has never been a factor for me. Not one time. So no, I don’t think it’s cruel.
I think it’s simply two men going swimming at a public beach. While looking absolutely fabulous.”
He wipes his hands and carefully folds the napkin. “Okay, I’m in,” he says with a grin. “But we’re doing this right. If we’re going to the beach, we’re giving it the full beach day treatment.”
We stop at the cottage first where we both change into swim trunks.
Then we stop at the grocery store and Dante walks the aisles with the focus of a man provisioning a military campaign.
A cooler and a bag of ice. A bottle of rosé.
Dante doesn’t go to a beach without rosé.
Two sandwiches from the deli counter. A bag of chips.
A container of fruit. Sunscreen, SPF 50.
Dante doesn’t burn and I burn like a lobster in a pot and neither of us is going home with sun damage.
“This is a siege,” I say, watching him load the cooler in the parking lot.
“This is a beach day. Beach days require infrastructure. You of all people should understand this.”
We drive to Panama City and Dante pulls into the public beach access parking near Big Tex’s Roadhouse.
The beach is thirty feet from the building. The water is flat and calm. It’s a perfect yellow flag day.
The second-floor windows of the Roadhouse are visible from the beach. The wall of glass that looks out over the Gulf, the windows where Mickey sits every evening watching the water go gold.
I can’t see into the loft from here. The glass catches the afternoon glare and reflects the sky. But he can see out. If he’s up there, he can see the beach. He can see the water. He can see two men hauling a cooler and towels and a bag of supplies down the sand toward the surf line.
Dante spreads the towels. He positions the cooler between them like a centerpiece. He opens the rosé.
I stand on the sand and look up at the second-floor windows. The glass gives me nothing. Just sky and clouds reflected back. But I know that loft. I know exactly how much of this beach is visible from the place where he sits every evening.
I settle onto the towel, take the cup Dante hands me, and face the water.
Showtime.