Chapter 22 Dante
I hear the laugh before I’m through the door.
Loud, unguarded, bent over the bar. I don’t recognize it. Then I see who it’s coming out of, and I stop where I’m standing, because it’s Levi, head-to-head with Tex over something on the bar top, laughing until his shoulders shake.
Beside me, Benji makes a small sound like he’s watching a sunrise. “Oh…”
“Don’t,” I tell him.
“I didn’t say anything.”
He spots Mickey at the far end, squeezes my arm once, and peels off down the bar to go wrap himself around his fiancé.
I’m working my way in, a hand to shake here, a nod there, when I catch Sheila down at Levi’s end of the bar, leaned in close.
Whatever it is, Levi’s taking it like a man receiving a diagnosis.
Then she straightens up, sets a glass of water in front of him, and lifts a folded paper off the register.
That’s when the room changes.
Stormy appears near the kitchen door with a dish towel and no reason to be standing there. Tex crosses his arms. And Sheila comes down the rail toward me carrying the folded paper on a tray.
She presents it to me the way she sets down my unsweet tea. Then she waits.
Four receipts, stapled. Her handwriting, top to bottom.
Every course itemized, fourteen of them, oysters through a dessert platter.
Sweet tea, listed three times. And near the bottom, a line that says celery and ranch, which I read three times, because no one in the history of this bar has ever eaten the celery, and Sheila doesn’t write anything down by accident.
That one line isn’t a charge. It’s a message.
It means we could.
I can almost hear Tex saying it.
At the bottom, underlined twice, in handwriting Sheila has clearly rehearsed.
All items at market price.
No numbers anywhere on the page. The market is whatever she woke up feeling like.
I know exactly what this is. This is about the sweet tea. I knew I’d pay for that incident eventually.
The bar is so quiet I can hear Big Bertha ticking through the back door.
Down at the far end Levi has both lips rolled in like a man biting down on his own laugh.
Tex is leaned back beside him, a spectator at a fight he arranged.
From somewhere behind me Benji whispers over my shoulder, loud enough to carry, “Oh, Sheila’s an artist. I’m impressed. ”
The bar’s watching me and waiting to see if I flinch.
I never flinch. I write in a huge tip, set my card on top of the receipts, and slide the tray back. “Charge me whatever the market’s doing today, Sheila. And the tip was part of the deal Levi made with me.”
Sheila’s mouth twitches. She wanted a show.
I don’t give shows either. The room lets out its breath and goes back to its drinks, a little let down.
She takes the card, rings the register like a bell, and leans in close on her way past. “He ate good tonight. Cleaned every plate. Everything’s good, baby. ”
That’s the intelligence I actually came for, and she knows it.
Days ago, I stood in this bar and told all of them I didn’t want Levi here. A few nights ago, I had him by the collar, swearing he’d never come near here again. This morning I drove him to the door myself and called it a good deal.
Now the Roadhouse has him. I put it away and find the opposite end of the bar.
I take a stool with a view of the room and drink a bourbon I earned after a day of floors and flowers. The house is staged, dead-perfect, locked. Tomorrow isn’t here yet.
Somewhere in the back half of the bourbon I notice I’ve stopped running the list. No tomorrow. Just the jukebox playing classic rock, Tex rolling on, Levi cracking up beside him.
Sheila brings Levi his third beer, the last of the three we settled on. He takes it with a nod and doesn’t push for more, and he’s nowhere near drunk. He’s not the man I scraped off a sectional a week ago.
I gather up Levi to leave before midnight. Benji’s down the bar with a hand on the back of Mickey’s chair. He catches my arm as I pass. “Hey! You good for tomorrow?”
“Better than good,” I say. “The house is perfect.”
“Call me if you need me,” he says. “I’m sleeping with the phone in the bed.”
“No, you’re not,” Mickey says without looking up.
The house is finished and locked behind me, so there’s nothing to drive back and check tonight.
Levi spends the drive to the apartment loose against the door, window cracked, not talking.
I keep catching the vibe coming off him.
Almost contentment. I drive a little under the limit and don’t ask myself why.
At a traffic light, I get a clean look at him, and what keeps snagging me is how much better he looks.
The hollows under his eyes have started filling in, and there’s actual color on him under the beard now, sun instead of hangover.
Whatever’s putting the color back is working.
He looks good, is the plain truth of it — sun-brown, fed, easy in his own body for once — and I let myself know that for exactly the length of one red light. We’re both good at not saying things.
We go inside my apartment and instead of going straight to bed, I turn on the cheap TV. I should be tired. Maybe I’m too wired up about tomorrow. There’s a baseball game still going on the West Coast, and I put it on.
Levi looks at the TV, then at me. “You watch baseball?”
“Yeah, used to play when I was younger. This is the tail end of this one.”
He doesn’t go to the second bedroom. Instead, he drops onto the other end of the couch to watch the game with me. I notice he’s paying closer attention than he lets on. I clock it and say nothing, because I’m too busy being surprised by how easy it is to have him at the other end of my couch.
He’s got one arm stretched along the back cushions, sleeve shoved up, and the lamp is doing things to that forearm that I keep catching in my peripheral vision.
“My father had a game on every night of my childhood,” I say.
“He’d sit in his chair with the paper and pretend the game was just background, and then someone would botch a double play and he’d be up out of it yelling at a man in California who couldn’t hear a word.
My abuela shouting from the kitchen for him to sit down.
My tía Rosa telling my abuela not to shout.
The house arguing over a call none of them saw. ”
“Sounds loud,” Levi says.
“It was. Still is. Cuban house, three generations under one roof, everyone with an opinion and no one ever wrong. You didn’t get a word in unless you fought for it.” I don’t know why I’m telling him all this.
On the screen a runner takes a long lead off first, and Levi shifts, just slightly.
“He’s going,” he says, mostly to himself.
The runner goes. Clean steal, beats the throw by a step.
“You called that.”
“Lucky guess.”
It goes long. Tied in the ninth. Tied in the tenth.
Neither team can finish it and neither of us gets up to go to bed.
I’m not following it close, and I don’t think he is either.
The TV does the talking so we don’t have to.
The innings stack up. Somewhere around the twelfth I realize I don’t know the score.
Somewhere in the thirteenth inning, he stretches and says, half asleep, “What time is the showing tomorrow? Is it still at noon? Get me up in the morning and I’ll go with you. Take a shower there and you can run me back here before the buyers arrive.”
“The showing moved,” I say. “Ten, not noon. The buyer flew in tonight. They’re staying over in Seaside, so there’s no morning drive to slow them down. Jonathan called me this evening and locked it for ten.”
“Ten.” He sits up a little. “Not noon?”
“Yeah. Is there a problem?”
The moment I ask, I remember.
“The check-in is at ten,” he says. “The one I told you about. Every morning, same time. I can’t change it.”
“On the phone?”
“Yeah.” He looks at me. “On the phone that stays at the house. It has to be at the house. That’s the point. It’s where I’m supposed to be.”
And there it is, laid out between us. Levi gets to the problem the same moment I do.
The phone never leaves the house. He has to answer it at ten.
At ten the house is full of a potential buyer from Atlanta and me.
Levi can’t be in the house. A strange man in a listing is the showing dead on the floor.
The phone can’t come here. The instant it leaves that address, whoever’s watching the little dot knows he left.
“I can’t be in two places,” he says. “Damn.” The lightness in him is gone. I hate watching it. He’s already trying to figure out an answer. There isn’t one.
“Can I do it for you? I’m going to be in the house at ten anyway,” I say.
“I’ll be standing in the room with your phone in it.
Tell me what the check-in is, give me what I need to get into your phone, and I’ll send it.
You stay here. The dot never moves. Whoever’s watching sees exactly what he expects to see. ”
“It’s just one word,” he says finally. “He sends a text that says one word, status. I send back that I’m fine. Same thing every morning at ten. That’s all it’s ever been. If you do this, you’re lying to him to cover for me.”
“I sell people a story for a living,” I say. “I can certainly send one text.”
“Are you sure?”
“Of course. You’re staying here to help me. It’s the least I can do. Tell me your code.”
He gives me six digits at two in the morning. I type his passcode into my notes on my phone.
“One more thing,” he says. “If he calls instead of texts. Don’t answer it. Not ever. Doesn’t matter what it says on the screen, doesn’t matter if it rings ten times in a row.”
“He does that?”
“Once in a while. Spot checks. If I miss a call, that’s fine, that’s normal — I’m in the shower, I’m asleep.
A missed call I can explain from now till Sunday.
” He looks at me steady. “Your voice I can’t explain at all.
If it rings, you let it ring, and you text him after.
Missed the call, was in the shower, all good.
Lowercase. No punctuation at the end. No emojis. ”
“No punctuation? Ever?”
“He’d notice. I’ve been texting that man for eight years and I’ve never once used punctuation.”
“Lowercase, no punctuation, never answer.” I say it back like terms. “Anything else he’d notice?”
“Speed. Don’t answer the second it comes in. I never do. Give it a minute, two. Like I had to find the phone.”
“When you say you tell him you’re fine, are those the actual words?”
“The idea, not the words. Don’t type, I’m fine. That sounds like a hostage. You type two or three words. At the house. Lowercase, no period. He wants a location and a pulse. Give him both in three or four words and he’s gone.”
I’m building a man in my head now, out of his own rules.
“Levi, I won’t go into your phone,” I say. “I know what you’re handing me here. Your personal life is behind those six digits, and none of it is mine to read. I’ll reply to his text, and I’ll close it, and that’s all. That’s my word.”
“I know,” he says finally. “I trust you. That’s why I gave it to you.”
He settles back into the cushions. The baseball game is over.
I don’t even know who won.