Chapter 21 Levi #4
I’m gathering myself to stand when Tex comes off his final orbit and drops onto the stool beside me at last, leaning in close, checking both shoulders first, which is how I know whatever’s coming is meant for an audience of one.
“Don’t tell Sheila I told you this. You know that bill she’s been running up?
The final number’s been in the register drawer since this afternoon.
She wrote it out before you walked in, Levi.
Before the kitchen fired one shrimp. Before the oysters hit the ice.
” He taps the bar once, solemn. “She wrote the ending first and then we all lived it.”
And then, he reaches into his shirt pocket, and that’s when I understand why he finally sat down. He’s carrying the final bill.
Four receipts, stapled, folded once down the middle. He lays it flat on the bar in front of me and smooths the fold out with his palm, careful.
Sheila’s handwriting, top to bottom. Every course, listed. The oysters. Same shrimp, three ways. The gumbo. The deviled eggs. The celery and ranch. All fourteen, itemized in blue ink, and not one price beside any of them. No numbers anywhere on the page.
Tex doesn’t say a word. He puts one enormous finger on the bottom line and leaves it there.
All items at market price.
The laugh comes up out of me. It’s loud. The kind that bends me over the bar with my head down next to Tex’s, howling at four stapled receipts with no numbers on them.
Tex sits there beside me with his finger still on the line, glowing like a man who just won a prize he’s been working toward all night.
Then he folds it back down along its crease, slides off the stool, and carries it to the far end of the bar, where he stands it up against the register drawer for Sheila.
“Preview’s over,” he says, coming back. “She wrote it, she delivers it. I wouldn’t take that off her for money.”
I’ve not laughed like this, sober, with nobody on God’s earth wanting a single thing from me, in so long I’d quit believing I had it in me. My eyes are running and I can’t stop.
Then Dante walks in, and just like that the warm goes out of everything.
He’s got Little Blondie with him. The staging guy with the flower arrangements from that first morning.
They come in laughing, and Dante’s got a hand on the back of Blondie’s neck, loose and certain, and Blondie’s leaning into it.
They’re a unit. Two good-looking men who plainly belong to each other, strolling into a bar at the tail of a night they spent together.
It slashes through me fast like a blade slipped between two ribs. And fuck if it doesn’t hurt. I’m sitting on a stool I chose specifically so I’d see everything coming in that door, and I didn’t see this coming.
It walked straight past me.
I’m sitting here hurting over a man I’ve got no claim on, watching him keep his hand on the back of somebody else’s neck, and it’s the no-claim part that hurts worst.
And this entire time, he’s already been taken.
I’m wondering how much trouble I’d get into if I ordered a shot of tequila instead of the third beer I haven’t had when Little Blondie squeezes Dante’s arm and peels off.
He crosses to the end of the bar. To the man in the wheelchair, the Bay County uniform, the cop I’ve been keeping half an eye on all night.
He slides both arms around his neck from behind and bends down.
Whatever he says in the cop’s ear breaks a grin across the man’s face, and the cop reaches up and covers Blondie’s hands with his own like he’s done it ten thousand times and means to do it ten thousand more.
Jesus Christ.
That’s the unit right there. They’re the matched set.
Not Dante.
The cop and Little Blondie.
I’ve never had such an overwhelming feeling of fondness for a cop in my life. The blade slides back out in one clean pull. I’m light again. I pick up my beer with a hand that isn’t entirely steady, and I drink what’s left in the bottom.
Sheila’s there before I set the glass down. No plate this time. Just a rag in her hand she isn’t using and a look on her face.
She’s been watching me all night. She watched Dante walk in with Blondie’s neck under his hand. She watched the blade go in my side and she watched it come back out. She leans in close. Just for me, under the jukebox and the noise.
“Let me tell you something about that one.” A small tip of her head down the bar, to where Dante’s shaking a man’s hand, every hair right where he put it, the man assembled back to spec.
“He’s got a heart on him as big as that Gulf out there.
And he guards it like it’s the last one they ever made.
You’re going to have to work a lot harder than you’ve been working, baby. ”
I’ve got nothing for a comeback. Before I can scrape a word together, she straightens up, sets a glass of water down in front of me, and lifts the four stapled receipts off the register.
Sheila confirmed everything. She looked dead straight into the one place I keep locked and told me what she saw there. And now she’s making her walk down the bar, folded paper on a tray, headed for a man who doesn’t know yet what fourteen courses cost at market price.