Chapter 4 #2
"The building." She tipped her head toward the back — toward the office, toward the phone call Josh wasn't supposed to have heard through a cheap door.
"You picked up on that. I know you did, you pick up on everything, it's the thing about you.
It's bad. Been bad since summer. Some outfit bought the whole block and they'd sooner put a daiquiri barn in here than a jazz room, 'cause a daiquiri barn don't care about the music, it just moves plastic cups by the gallon.
October's his one shot at making the case.
So." She squared the register drawer with both hands.
"He's carrying more than he's letting either of us see, and he carries it alone on purpose, 'cause the last time he leaned his weight on somebody, it damn near killed him. You understand what I'm telling you."
"What happened? The last time."
Retta's face closed, gentle, the very same drawer Marcus had.
"That's his to tell. And if he ever does — you listen with your whole self, and you do not flinch.
" She pulled a roll of gaff tape off the back bar and pressed it into his hand like a sacrament.
"Now go fix the man's sign. Lord knows somebody around here oughta fix something. "
It took him forty minutes, not twenty — the wiring in the second D was older than he was, and somebody had wrapped a splice in electrical tape roughly during the Clinton administration — but he reseated the ballast, traded out the dead segment, and chased down a corroded ground that explained the whole ten-year stutter.
It was the one inheritance his father hadn't poisoned: the man had been able to fix anything with a cord on it, and he'd taught Josh at the kitchen table back when he still taught Josh things, back before the driveway.
When Josh threw the breaker the whole sign came up clean and steady and blue for the first time in God knew how long.
PERDIDO. All of it. No stutter. He stood on the sidewalk in the last of the daylight with the multimeter still in his hand and grinned up at it like an idiot.
Marcus came out to see what the ladder was about.
He stopped on the sidewalk. Looked up at the sign — steady, whole, blue — and then at Josh, and then back at the sign, and Josh watched him try to find the drawer for this and come up empty.
There wasn't a compartment in the man for it.
Somebody had done something for him, unasked, for nothing, a small unglamorous useful thing, and Marcus Fontenot stood on his own sidewalk holding it like a dish that was too hot.
He looked, for one second, like he might actually say thank you.
Josh watched him get most of the way there — the mouth opening, the shoulders coming down half an inch — and then watched the reflex kick in and haul the whole thing back, because a thank-you was a thing you owed, and owing was a kind of leaning, and this was a man who'd sooner stand under a broken sign for ten years than lean on another human being for eleven dollars.
"I fixed your sign," Josh said, because somebody had to say something. "The D. You're welcome."
"I didn't ask you to do that."
"I know. That's kind of the whole point of a favor, big guy." He came down off the ladder. "Eleven bucks and a transformer. Don't make it weird."
"You're not — " Marcus started, and stopped. His jaw worked. "It's my sign. I'll pay you the eleven dollars."
"You will not."
"Josh."
And there it was, his name, the way Marcus only used it when a thing had gotten past him — Josh had catalogued that too — and Josh should've let it go, he knew how to let things go, letting things go was his whole entire skill set.
But he was up on eleven dollars and a fixed sign and three weeks of a man's hands hovering an inch off his shoulders, and the need-seed his dad had planted and never watered had picked tonight to sprout, and what came out of Josh was true and it cost him to say it:
"Let somebody do something for you. Once.
It won't kill you." He was still holding the multimeter like a shield.
"You feed me. You pour me the good stuff.
You noticed I was hungry before I noticed.
You take care of everybody in that room and you won't let one single person hand anything back, because — I don't know why.
But I fixed your sign, and I'm gonna help you fill that room in October, and you don't get to eleven-dollars your way out of it.
Okay? Some of us want to be more than a set you booked. "
The last part came out before he could stop it, and it landed in the quiet between them with more weight than eleven dollars could carry, and they both heard exactly how much of it wasn't about the sign.
***
Marcus looked at him for a long moment under the fixed blue neon.
"You work for me," Marcus said. Quiet. It wasn't an argument.
It was almost a plea, a man reaching for the one wall still standing.
"That's the whole — I hired you. I sign your envelope.
Whatever this is, it doesn't — I don't do that.
Not with somebody who plays my room. It's the one line I've got left and I'd like to keep it. "
"I know." Josh's voice came out steadier than he felt. "I heard you. Boss."
He watched the word do its job. Watched Marcus take the out and hate it and take it anyway.
"You're on in ten," Marcus said, and turned to go back inside — and there it was, the retreat, the drawer sliding shut, the man walking away from the exact thing he wanted because wanting it was the thing that scared him.
Three weeks ago Josh would've read it as he doesn't want me.
Would've smiled his smile and filed it under one more person who liked the show and not the guy.
He didn't read it that way anymore. He'd been to the after-hours. He'd heard the man's voice with the bottom sanded off. He knew what Marcus's retreats were made of now, and it wasn't disinterest — it was a man who'd been robbed once, standing very still so it couldn't happen again.
"Yeah," Josh said, to his back. "I'll be on in ten."
He stood a second longer under the sign he'd fixed — steady, whole, blue — and thought about his father, who could fix anything with a cord on it and had fixed exactly nothing that mattered, who'd looked at every good thing in his life like a bill coming due.
Josh had spent thirty years terrified of turning into that man.
And here he was in a strange warm city, broke, wanting somebody he wasn't allowed to have, betting his rent on a room that might not see spring — and the terror wasn't there.
Something else had moved into its spot. Something that felt, God help him, like hope, which his father would've called the most expensive drink in the house.
He collapsed the ladder and carried it in, and under the newly perfect neon, for the first time since Dayton, Josh Keller let himself want something he wasn't sure he was allowed to have — not the applause, not the room, not the gig.
Him.
Oh, buddy, he thought. That's a problem.