Chapter 14
FOURTEEN
ADAM
Grace navigated the giant Costco cart through equally giant Costco aisles as Adam managed the list. They didn’t technically need to go to Costco together, but Adam honestly felt like it was too overwhelming to do alone, and Grace never wanted to miss the customary hot dog and soft serve at the end of the trip.
“Paper products first?” Grace asked, heading to the back of the store. Sure, they could pay a supplier to deliver the paper towels, napkins, and toilet paper they needed, but that was expensive, and they didn’t have enough wiggle room in the budget for convenience.
For the first time in days, Adam wasn’t obsessively checking his phone, but only because he knew Skylar was on an airplane.
He’d been called up that morning, and instead of getting on the team bus to come home, he was on his way to Colorado to meet the Northern Lights.
The guy he was replacing went down the night before with a knee injury that Skylar’s text that morning said could be season ending, if not career ending.
If it ended that guy’s season, Skylar wouldn’t be coming back to Iowa.
“Ad, did you hear me? Brand name is cheaper than Kirkland this week.”
“Huh?” Adam asked, zoning back into their mission.
Grace tossed a giant pack of Charmin into the cart.
“I’m sorry,” she said, her hand touching the sleeve of his jacket so gently that he didn’t even feel it.
“I knew it was coming. Logically. But since it could have been any time, it could have also…been never.”
“I know. But he’s just in Minnesota.”
“He’s in Colorado. Or almost in Colorado.”
She arched a purple eyebrow at him. She’d refreshed her faded lavender hair into a vibrant violet. She had a spreadsheet to track her tips according to how faded her hair got.
“I fucked up by ignoring him after he stayed over.”
“When he came into the bar, he was still a puppy dog chasing a bone. I don’t think you fucked anything up.”
“I squandered time we could have spent together.” Maybe most uncles and nieces would avoid love-life talk, but Grace always felt closer to being his cousin than his niece.
Adam wasn’t old enough for her to be his kid, and since they ran a business together, they felt more like peers.
Especially over the last handful of years.
“You could go visit him. When he’s back in Minneapolis. It’s not a bad drive.”
“What about the bar?”
“Willa wants extra hours. I’ll work more. I don’t mind. If it means you can get time away, we would all pitch in for you.”
“Michael wouldn’t mind?” Adam already felt guilty for all the time Grace spent away from her boyfriend for the sake of the bar.
“Michael isn’t the boss of me.” Michael was a tall, heavily tattooed man with a huge beard who occasionally fostered kittens. He might not look like the ideal man to date your niece, but he was Grace’s biggest supporter. He had Adam’s stamp of approval.
Adam sighed. “Okay. I’ll look into it.”
“Promise me you actually will.”
“I want to see him,” Adam said. He looked down at the Costco list and sighed. “I wish we could give out Taco Bell napkins for drinks.” They had already downgraded from custom napkins to boring plain ones. He could stay in budget if he could use the napkins he had in his glove box.
“We could try having a cozy candlelit night where we shut the power off. Regulars would probably be into it.”
“Or even better—we convince people to pay us to not hang out in our bar or drink our alcohol.”
“How long do you think Heathens has if things keep going like this?”
Adam sighed. He worried their budget over and over in his mind, trying to configure the numbers in a way that suddenly made this business sustainable, if not profitable.
“At this rate, I think our best bet is the end of the year,” he admitted.
Grace chewed her lip.
“Okay. We’ll figure something out.”
Adam didn’t have a lot of hope anymore. He’d spent nearly ten years running this bar, and they had been through a lot of dips and a lot of comebacks. It was possible, theoretically.
Adam didn’t know if he had the will left to pull out all the stops to make it work.
As Adam approached the ten-year anniversary of Heath’s death, he realized that his apartment was still filled with Heath’s things.
He had moved boxes and boxes of his dead brother’s items into his microscopic apartment and gotten used to the piles of things as though they were his own.
Pieces of furniture, closets overflowing with Heath’s clothing, mementos, personal items, memories.
He had held on to the bar for so long to honor his brother and to keep a thread between the two of them pulled tight.
In many ways, he had never moved on, and he didn’t want to.
He didn’t see why he needed to get rid of Heath’s things if he didn’t have things of his own to take up the space.
He didn’t see a reason to move on from the bar when there was nothing else that he thought he should do.
His brother had lived a life of purpose and passion, and Adam had neither of those things himself.
Now, the end of the bar felt imminent. He knew he had to have a conversation with Grace coming up where they would make final decisions about what would happen to Heathens, and it brought up the realization that with the closing of the bar, he should probably also go through his brother’s old things.
Adam started with a pile of boxes that he stacked in his living room behind his record player.
Pieces of ephemera, paperwork, things that Adam had no context for.
He kept an old deck of cards and the box of records he still hadn’t opened and donated everything else.
There was a stack of papers for Grace, who was in charge of his estate now that she was an adult.
Once he made it through the boxes, he started on a closet. Getting rid of Heath’s clothes felt more personal and emotional than getting rid of old bills, old mail, and meaningless documents. The clothes hadn’t smelled like him in years. Now, they just smelled like closet.
There were items that were so worn out that they wouldn’t be accepted by a thrift store, and Adam put them in a toss pile.
Nicer items went in the “thrift or Grace” pile, and he kept a jacket for himself with the Heathens logo on it that he remembered his brother getting custom made when the bar opened. Grace already had one of her own.
At the end of the afternoon, his apartment was torn apart, things everywhere, piles all with different meaning strewn across the floors and every flat surface.
He bagged up the garbage and dragged it and the recycling down to the bins behind the bar.
He put the things for the thrift store in the back of his truck and the pile of things for Grace in the front.
He considered donating his old guitar, but he held on to it, not ready to let it go.
Even though it was a freezing cold day, he was sweating with the windows to his apartment open, letting frosty air in. This was a task that he’d been putting off for years that was only manageable now because he was putting off something worse.
Now with bits of the apartment cleared out, Adam realized how few personal possessions he owned.
Nearly all of the furniture had been Heath’s.
The art and photos on the walls he took from the bar or from his brother’s apartment.
He could pack up his life here into one car and move anywhere in the world.
And of course, at the moment, his heart was calling to go home to Minnesota.
Since it was a Monday and the bar was closed, he made a quick stop at Grace’s apartment to drop off the items he picked out for her. She scanned and approved the items he would drop at the thrift store.
“It’s pretty ridiculous that it’s nearly been ten years already,” Grace said as Adam helped her carry her father’s items into her apartment she shared with Michael.
Adam had initially planned on dropping and running, but handing off Heath’s items to his daughter brought an unexpected level of emotion to the surface for both of them, and he ended up in her kitchen, drinking a cup of tea that she made him without having to ask him how he took it.
“You know,” Grace said, “I’ve missed him every day since the day we lost him, but his story is a great reminder of how short life is.
I have always looked back at my dad’s life and felt that it was a shame that he never found his life’s true love.
We both know that was never my mom.” Adam laughed as Grace continued.
“He had the great love of his bar and the great love of his child, but never a partner.”
Across the small kitchen table from her, Adam felt like she was saying something pointed to him. “While I was packing these things up, I realized that it would take maybe an hour for me to move all of the things that I love out of my apartment and into my truck.”
“You’ve been here for nearly ten years,” Grace said, “and you haven’t even settled in. You’re living in an apartment that came with the gig. Before today, it was filled with a dead man’s things. You’re working somebody else’s job, taking care of somebody else’s bar and somebody else’s kid.”
Adam balked. He loved Grace like she was his own, and they both knew that Grace wasn’t saying it to push him away. She was saying it as a kindness. Of course, they owed each other a great deal, but Adam wasn’t her dad.
He felt like he was on the edge of a cliff, and everyone around him was trying to convince him to jump.
“Have you heard from Skylar yet?” Grace asked. It had only been a handful of hours since they’d gotten back from Costco and Adam had loaded the back room with paper towels and toilet paper.
“Yes,” he said. “He landed in Colorado safe, got an Uber to the hotel his team is staying at. The Northern Lights hadn’t made it to the city yet, but he’s excited, and he sounded sad.”
“We both know why he was sad,” Grace said. “For the same reason you’re sad. There is so much that you have done in your life out of duty, and to some extent, that’s why you are such a good man. But it’s time for you to understand that your duty now is to yourself.”
Adam sipped his tea. “What are you going to do if I leave?” Adam asked, testing the waters. When he imagined it in his head, he was leaving Grace completely behind. A ruined bar, no hope. He hadn’t considered what else Grace would do.
“Maybe it’s time for me to have a life change too,” Grace said. “I think Michael might propose soon. He has this idea that he wants to live in Vegas for a couple of years before we have kids.” It was easy to picture the two of them in Vegas.
“I didn’t know that you were thinking of moving away.”
Grace shrugged. “It’s just a thought. We haven’t made any plans.
I have a bar to run, after all.” Adam knew the feeling.
But maybe soon they wouldn’t have a bar to run.
“Speaking of the bar, I was thinking we could throw a Christmas party. I know a lot of our folks would appreciate a place to go on Christmas. And maybe we could make more money. Float us through the first couple months of the year?”
“You think we could make that much?” Increasing prices didn’t make the difference they were hoping for.
“I have no idea. But we run some specials. Do some advertising.”
“We could have folks bring food pantry donations.” Christmas Day was too late for something like Toys for Tots, but people needed to eat every day.
“This isn’t going to last forever,” Grace said. “But it can be fun while we have it.”