Chapter 32 Dante
I walk into the Roadhouse still shaking. Benji’s off his stool before the door shuts behind me. Then I see his face. He’s not surprised I’m upset. He knows something.
“I’ve been calling you for an hour.” He’s got my arm. “Where’s your phone?”
“In the car. Benji—”
“Come upstairs.” His hand’s already steering me toward the back. Away from the floor. Away from Sheila down at the taps. She’s stopped pouring. She’s watching me like she already knows the worst of it and I don’t.
She catches my eye as we pass. “Baby,” she says, “I recognized his face. I’ve been reading men’s eyes for thirty years to know when to cut ‘em off, and I knew his the second they put that poster up.” Whatever’s on my face stops her. “I’m sorry, baby. Go on up. Benji’ll show you.”
The apology in her voice is the first bad sign. Sheila does dry, unbothered. An apologetic Sheila is a bad omen.
Upstairs, the laptop’s already open on the little table, turned toward the chair Benji set for me.
He doesn’t make a speech. He loves me too much to drag out whatever’s coming.
He just says, “I’m so sorry. I tried to get to you before you—” and he doesn’t finish that either. He turns the screen toward me.
It’s a poster. A flyer, the kind they staple to a telephone pole. The Panhandle Country Bash, starting tomorrow. The face on it is the face I left in a living room an hour ago. Clean jaw. Cut hair. The stranger wearing Levi’s eyes. Except now there’s another name under it. The name isn’t Levi.
Lee Streeter.
Everything in me locks.
That’s why he looked wrong. My brain stuttered on it in the doorway and Freddie’s screaming rolled over it. They weren’t hurting him. They were turning him back into this.
This stranger.
Levi’s beard came off because Lee Streeter doesn’t wear a beard. His thick hair got cut because this is how Lee Streeter wears his hair. They assembled a stranger out of the guy I thought I knew.
And now I know the finished product’s name. From a flyer.
“How long has this poster been up?” My voice doesn’t sound like mine.
“The flyer went up this afternoon around town,” Benji says.
“A promotional guy for the Bash came by and dropped a stack off. Some of Sheila’s regulars already had it on their phones before I’d even seen it.
I called you over and over, Dante. Kept getting your voicemail.
I drove to your apartment, didn’t find you.
Came back here and started building you the file.
If you were going to walk into this blind, you weren’t going to walk into it standing at the bar finding it out off a stranger’s phone. ”
“I’m not even sure what I’m looking at,” I say. “Who is he? What is he?”
“He’s—” Benji’s scrolling, and the screen fills with him.
Photos. A stage the size of a town. Magazine covers.
A list of songs I’ve never heard. “Dante, he’s huge.
He’s a country music star. Sells-out-stadiums huge.
I went down a hole on it for an hour. He’s been at it since he was seventeen.
There’s eight years of this guy, and all of it’s enormous. ”
He’s still scrolling, fast, like if he stops, he’ll have to look at my face.
“He’s had a tour, Dante. Forty-one cities.
Well, that one was last year. There were several others over the years.
And these numbers under the songs. They hit the top of the charts.
All of them. Every time one releases, it goes straight up.
” He nudges the laptop a half-inch toward me, like the angle will help me understand. “That’s him at an awards show.”
I don’t say anything. I’m looking at a man I’ve never met.
He’s wearing the face of the man I know. Knew. Never knew.
“It’s him.” Benji knows what I’m thinking.
“I sat here an hour trying to make it be someone else. It’s crazy, right?
I didn’t have a clue and I know you didn’t either.
I hate country music. Same as you. Never listen to it.
Fuck country music. I don’t know who Lee Streeter is.
The name means nothing to me. Have you heard of him? ”
I shake my head. “Never.”
“Just to be absolutely sure, I zoomed in on his jaw. It’s the same jaw.”
“I believe you, Benji. It’s him. I just came from the house. His beard’s gone.”
Benji’s mouth drops open. “They’ve already shaved his beard?
Damn, that didn’t take long, did it? I’ve been sitting up here being furious on your behalf for an hour so you wouldn’t have to do the first hour of it by yourself.
That’s the plan. That’s as far as I’ve gotten.
I usually have three contingencies by now and I have nothing, because there’s no version of this I can spin where it didn’t happen to you. ”
“I don’t know what to say. I’m completely shell-shocked.”
“I know,” Benji says, his hand on my shoulder, gentler now, because he knows the next part’s worse. “There’s a video. It’s going viral. It’s everywhere today. A girl put it up after she returned home from vacation here. That’s why it’s hitting now instead of a few days ago.” He clicks it.
I remember the night. I know it before the sound comes up, because I lived the other side of it. That same stretch of beach in the dark. Those dunes. That water.
A few nights back I stood at a terrace railing with my heart racing. He’d walked off down that beach and not come back, and I didn’t know where he was. The worst thought I’ve ever had ran on a loop.
He’s in the water. Gone.
I knew he was in trouble and I let him walk into the water.
And here’s where he was while I was losing my mind. Sitting on a log by a bonfire with a guitar. The fire’s roaring close by. A ring of college-age kids around him who don’t know him, and he’s playing. Then he starts singing.
My God, his voice.
His voice is not a small thing. It’s not the same as the under-the-breath singing he did during the ballgame’s seventh-inning stretch. This voice comes through the cheap speakers like it owns the room.
He handed this voice to everyone alive except me.
And it does to me exactly what it did across a couch during a seventh-inning stretch, only bigger. It gets in under the anger and pulls. I hate that he lied to me for two weeks, yet can still do that to me from a laptop speaker.
And the guitar, the melody he’s playing. I’ve heard it before.
Walking from the car into the house, a few bars off the water, there and gone. I thought bonfire down the beach, and didn’t think one thing more about it.
That was him too.
Twice now I’ve been close enough to the truth to touch it. The night of the bonfire. The night I heard him playing. Both times I walked right past it because I didn’t know there was a truth this big to find.
The video ends and Benji’s hand hovers at the trackpad.
“There’s a lot more,” he says. “Interviews, a magazine profile, multiple award shows. I have all of it queued in tabs. Then I sat here realizing I don’t know if walking you through it helps you or if I’m just handing you knives in order of size.
You tell me what you need. I can show you more or I can turn it all off. I’m here for you.”
“Play it again.”
I watch the video a second time with my hands flat on the table. Then I drop down in the chair Benji set for me.
I appraise people for a living. Four seconds, and it’s the best skill I have. I studied Levi for days. His fear, empty pockets. I’d have bet everything on my read. And I almost lost everything because my read was dead wrong.
I had no idea who he was and I was falling for him. Every hour of it was real on my end, and all of it was spent on a man who doesn’t exist.
I don’t know him at all. I never did.
“Dante.” Benji’s crouched down by the chair. “Say something out loud. I don’t care what it is. You went somewhere behind your face about a minute ago, and I need you back where I can see you.”
The burn starting in my chest is not happening here in the loft. I need to shut it down right now. The fix is what it’s always been. Get up off it and go to work.
Every line item flips over at once and shows its back. The tracked phone, the Status texts, Freddie screaming about years of work. He’s not a jealous boyfriend. He’s a handler.
Levi’s request for a heads-up before I swing by, call before you come. He wasn’t worried about the house being messy. He was keeping me out of exactly the room I walked into.
Then Freddie’s remark. What are you, a fanboy? He thought I was a Lee Streeter fanboy. One of the millions who already knew his face.
And then there’s the jail. Two in the morning, drunk tank at county lockup. I drove out in the middle of the night and signed out a stranger. I didn’t demand answers from him.
He has a team of people whose job is making that kind of thing disappear.
Lawyers. An unlimited checkbook. And he asked me to come get him out of a cell like he was a guy with not a single soul to call.
I made him a soft bed on my floor. I sat in my car in ninety-five degrees and set up a burner phone for him because I was worried about him not having a phone to call 911.
And the worst thing of all. I brought him here to my people and asked them to feed him.
My face is on fire. I can feel it. The anger comes up fast and hot, and it’s almost a relief. Anger I can hold. Anger has somewhere to stand.
Sheila looked after him for me. Tex gave him a seat and welcomed him in. Stormy wrote up a special tasting menu for him. They gave him their time and their care. They took Levi for a stray that washed up needing them. They spent an entire evening on him. For me.
We were all kind to a man who was slumming. It happened in the wide open, in this bar, where everybody saw.
I’ll never forgive Levi for this.
I can’t. There’s no way.
Benji’s watching me. He knows me better than anyone. Whatever I decide, he’ll back me all the way. He’s watching to see which way I go.
I go cold.
I feel it happen. The heat drains off. The shaking stops. The businessman comes up over all of it, level.
An hour ago, I had Freddie against a wall with my hand in his collar. A legal charge one inch away. The license, the listing, everything I’ve worked for, one swung fist from gone. For a stranger who’d been lying to me from the first day.
I almost set fire to everything I am over a guy I never even knew. That’s not happening twice. It terrifies me how close I came to losing everything over him.
There’s exactly one place where I’m still the man I was this morning. The work. The house listing is mine. The one that puts my name on this coast for good. It has nothing to do with him.
That’s what I’ll do. I’ll sell the house. I’ll be flawless. The buyer comes back soon and I’ll close her.
Levi goes back to the stranger he should’ve stayed, before I made him more than that. A tenant in a listing.
I’ll feel nothing. Feeling things is what just made me the biggest fool in my family’s bar.
“Dante,” Benji says, and I hear the fear in it. “Dante, please. Say something.” He knows me too well. He knows what it means that I’ve gone this still. “Okay. I’m going to say some things now, and the first one you’re going to hate, so get ready for it.”
“Benji—”
“You’re doing the closing voice. On me. In this loft.
I know that voice, Dante. I have stood next to you while you used it on buyers who wasted three of your Saturdays and then insulted you at the table.
You stayed level and pleasant the entire way through, and it is the most frightening thing I’ve ever watched you do to another human being, because it means the person in front of you has stopped being a person.
That voice is for strangers at a table. I’m not letting you point it at yourself in a room I’m standing in. ”
“I’m fine.” My voice comes out closing-table level just like he said. “It’s a listing. He’s a tenant. I’ve got a buyer coming back again.”
“Listen to yourself. I watched you. He got to you and I’m sorry.
” He stops. Everything goes out of him, and what’s left is just Benji, hurting for me.
“I can’t fix this. I’m not going to stand here and pretend I’ve got a plan.
But tomorrow a field full of people is going to scream that man’s name at a concert right down the road, and you’re not spending that day alone.
I’m coming over. I’m bringing food. I’m bringing drinks.
I’m driving you to open houses or whatever.
You can talk to me about houses from eight in the morning until the last encore if that’s what holds you upright.
I will sit in your kitchen or your car and take it, because you’ve carried me through bad situations and it’s finally my turn. ”
I stand up. My hands have stopped shaking. “Benji, I’m fine. I should pull the packet together for Jonathan.”
“Okay, but expect to hear from me tomorrow. I’m serious.”
He doesn’t try to stop me from leaving. I check my phone in the car, because work never stops. It lights up with the past hour of Benji calling constantly. Then, under all of Benji, one text from Levi’s burner phone.
Levi: Please don’t decide anything yet. Give me one day. Let me tell you in person. Please.
An hour ago that would’ve stopped my heart. Before I knew the truth. I turn the phone face-down on the seat.
Tomorrow a field of people is going to scream a name I never once heard him say and I’m not going to feel one thing about any of it.