20. Adrian
Adrian
The bread was perfect, which I took as a sign that the remainder of the week intended to behave itself.
I’d been running the morning shift on my own more than usual lately, mostly because Dona Carmen had been favoring her right wrist in a way she hadn’t mentioned.
I knew better than to bring it up. Stubborn as a mule, she mentioned things on her own schedule or not at all.
Pushing her produced the scowl of a woman who had survived seventy-three years without anyone’s input and saw no need to accept it now.
I’d noticed her favoring her wrist three times. I’d filed it three times. The filing system was getting full.
I texted Brendan a photo of the bread at six forty-three.
He responded at seven-oh-two with a photo of Puck sitting on a folder of what I recognized as the tapir imaging. Puck sprawled, legs stretched to their fullest, with the settled confidence of an animal who had correctly identified the most inconvenient location possible and intended to occupy it.
Another incoming text vibrated my phone.
Puck’s Dad: He’s helping.
Me: He’s a professional.
Puck’s Dad: He’s been moved twice and returned both times. I’ve accepted the situation.
I grinned at my screen for a second, then went back to the bread.
My phone rang at seven-fifteen, which was Abuela, because seven-fifteen was always Abuela. She called after her novela and before her stories, in the narrow window she had designated years ago for checking that I was alive and had eaten.
“?Ya comiste?” she asked, before hello. Have you eaten?
“Buenos días to you, too, Abuela. Si. I ate.”
“What?”
“Bread.”
“Bread is not breakfast. Bread is what you sell. ?Y proteína?” A pause, and then, with the casualness of a woman who had raised a child and a criminal suspect simultaneously, “You sound happy. Why are you happy at seven in the morning? No one is happy at this hour unless something happened.”
I had told her nothing about Brendan. I want to be clear about that. I had breathed not one word.
“Nothing happened,” I said. “I’m just having a good week.”
A silence came through the line that had texture to it. This was the specific quiet of a woman savoring newly acquired ammunition to be fired at a more convenient time. “Mm-hmm,” she said. “A good week. ?Tiene nombre, tu good week?”
Does it have a name, your good week?
“Abuela.”
“I’m only asking. When you were small, you got this exact voice about a boy in your class named Héctor, and then you did not speak to me for a month when I mentioned it. I have learned. I am being—” She searched for the English, found it, and deployed it like a blade. “—chill.”
“You are the least chill woman in the Western Hemisphere.”
“Bring him Sunday,” she said, and hung up, because she had gotten what she called for, before I had said a single thing, which was the whole trick of her, the thing that had frightened teachers and boyfriends and one very unlucky census taker back in the nineties.
Saturday arrived with the tornadic pressure of a system that had been building all week. I stepped through the back of Barbacks at four-fifteen with my pastry boxes, my Fanta, and the awareness, pleasant and unhurried, that Brendan would be in his booth later.
Yes, I was probably thinking too much, but it made me smile.
Benji was at the well. He looked up when I set the boxes down.
“You’re doing it again,” he said.
“I’m setting down pastry boxes.”
“You’re smiling at the pastry boxes.”
“The bread was good today.”
“Oh, no. This is more than your ‘the bread was good’ smile,” he said. “I know that smile. That one says, ‘The bread was good but something else happened, too.’ Out with it. What happened?”
I opened the Fanta.
“Benji,” I said. “You’re reading too much—”
“I’m observing professionally,” he said, and went back to his bottles. “It’s what bartenders do.”
Ignoring Benji’s annoying accuracy, I began my stretching and my surface check and my pre-shift routine. The bar filled the way it always did, which was gradually and then completely. The regular Saturday crowd claimed their spots with the ease of people who knew where they belonged.
Dennis sat on his stool. The observation committee had their usual table. Jacks was behind the bar looking impossibly earnest about a glass he was polishing, bless him.
At some point before my set, I went to the pass-through to check on the pastry situation and caught a fragment of conversation from the corner booth.
Finn was leaning on the edge of Mark’s table, one hand flat on the surface, the other holding his clipboard.
Mark was looking at his laptop screen. Mark’s lips were moving, but no sound escaped, which meant he was counting something.
I wasn’t trying to hear them. The bar simply wasn’t loud yet, and they weren’t being quiet.
“. . . five years in November,” Finn said. “We should do something.”
Mark’s lips stopped moving. He glanced up. Something passed across his face that I might’ve missed if I hadn’t been standing very still with a box of empanadas in my hands.
“November?” Mark asked.
“November.” Finn nodded.
Mark stared up at Finn for a moment longer, then returned his attention to his screen. His lips started moving again. Finn pushed off the table and walked back toward the office.
I stood at the pass-through for another second, then went to find Benji, because Benji needed to hear about this immediately. Bar gossip was always meant to be shared.
“Did you know we had an anniversary coming up?” I whispered, appearing at his elbow.
Benji flashed me his most shit-eating grin. “Aw, I didn’t know we were married. You’re so sweet.”
“Idiot.” I groaned, earning an even wider smile. “The bar’s anniversary.”
Benji shrugged. “I know.”
“You know?”
“Finn told me two weeks ago. He wants to do a whole thing. He’s been waiting for Mark to agree.” He reached past me for a bottle of Aperol. “Mark always takes forever to make a decision, which is why Finn started warming him up weeks before we need a final call.”
“You’ve already been thinking about it, haven’t you? You have some crazy drink planned, with fireworks and naked dancers jumping out of giant bottles or something.”
“I’ve been thinking about it.” He winked. “In the way that a person thinks about things they care about, which is to say constantly and in detail. Naked bottle dancers weren’t part of my thinking, but they are now. Thanks for that.”
He produced a cocktail napkin from his apron pocket. There was writing on it, small and dense and organized in a way that suggested subcategories.
“Benji,” I said.
“It’s preliminary.”
“The napkin has bullet points.”
“Everything worth doing has bullet points.”
“This one has sub-bullets,” I said.
He took the napkin back and returned it to his apron. “When Finn calls a staff meeting, I’ll be ready.”
I blinked at him. He blinked back.
“There’s going to be a staff meeting?” I asked.
“There’s always a staff meeting. You know that,” he said. “Finn believes in the process.”
I shook my head, returned to my pre-shift routine, and tried to focus on the evening ahead. That was my job. It was what mattered in that moment. It was also considerably easier to focus on once I stopped thinking about cocktail napkin sub-bullets.
Hours later, the bar wound down the way it always wound down, the crowd thinning after midnight, the energy dropping from its full volume to the warm, tired, good-night quality I’d come to recognize as one of the better feelings available on a Saturday in Ybor.
I was doing my post-set stretch near the end of the bar when I saw it.
Mark had risen from his booth to return his glass.
He did this sometimes. It was the small courtesy of a man who remembered that other people cleaned up after him and wanted to make that marginally easier.
He set his glass at the bar end and turned back toward his booth.
On the way, he passed Dante at the door. Dante was standing inside, his book in one hand and his phone in the other. He was reading something that required his full attention, but he looked up when Mark passed.
“Good night?” Mark said.
“Quiet night.” Dante shrugged his massive shoulders.
“Good.”
That was it. Five words. Mark kept walking. Dante went back to his book. It might’ve been the most ordinary exchange I had ever witnessed, two people who worked in the same building saying a few words to each other at the end of a shift.
There was nothing in it. There was nothing to notice. As the exchange occurred, Benji was walking past me with a tray. He slowed. Then he looked at the door where Dante resumed his reading. Then looked at the booth where Mark was sitting back down.
He reached into his apron pocket, produced the cocktail napkin, and added something to it, and then kept walking.
I watched him go. I looked at the door. I looked at the booth.
I didn’t know what I’d just seen, or if I’d even seen anything at all, but Benji had added something to the PowerPoint napkin, and Benji’s napkin had sub-bullets, and Benji did not add things to napkins without a reason.