Chapter 3
After Hours
By the fourth Thursday Marcus had stopped telling him to go home, which was its own kind of admission he chose not to examine.
It went like this now. Last call, the room emptying in ones and twos, Retta cashing out and rapping her goodnight on the bar.
And then instead of the door swinging shut behind the last of them and leaving Marcus alone with the register and the cat and the quiet — instead of that, there was Josh.
Still here. Flipping chairs up onto tables without being asked, or drying the glasses Retta left in the rack, or crouched down by the register murmuring nonsense at Monk, who had decided he tolerated exactly one human being in this building and it wasn't the one who fed him.
Marcus counted the drawer and let it happen. He told himself it was because the kid worked cheap and the chairs needed doing. He was thirty-eight, not stupid. He knew the difference between a reason and an excuse. He'd just decided, for now, not to say it to himself in so many words.
"You're doing that wrong," he said.
Josh looked up from the glass he was drying. "I'm drying a glass."
"You're drying it with the towel that's for the bar top. That one." Marcus nodded at the clean stack under the well. "Glasses get the linen ones or they streak."
"Oh my God." Josh set the glass down with enormous ceremony and picked up a linen towel like it was the crown jewels. "The system. There's a system. Retta know you gatekeep the towels?"
"Retta made the system."
"Of course she did." He was grinning, the real one, the chipped-tooth one that had started showing up more the later the hour got — like the polished one clocked out at midnight and left the actual kid behind to close.
Marcus had noticed that. Marcus had noticed a number of things he'd have been better off not cataloguing.
Josh had also started, somewhere around the third Thursday, playing a game he thought Marcus hadn't caught on to.
He'd float a guess out into the quiet and watch to see if it landed.
"You played trumpet before piano." No answer.
"You were in the Marines." Nothing. "You have a brother you don't talk to.
Older. He borrows money." Marcus turned a page in the ledger and said nothing, and Josh, undeterred, filed the silence under maybe and moved on.
"You read all those books behind the register or they're for looks.
" He was fishing, every night, casting light little lines into the dark of a man who gave him nothing back, and the maddening part was that he seemed to enjoy the nothing as much as he'd have enjoyed a bite.
Most people fished for information. This one seemed to be fishing mostly for the pleasure of Marcus's company, which was a thing Marcus had no filing system for at all.
"You're wrong about the brother," Marcus said, before he could stop himself.
Josh's whole face lit. "But there is a brother."
"Dry the glasses."
The kid was too thin, still. Four Thursdays of two hundred dollars hadn't put anything back on him that Marcus could see.
He ate whatever Retta put in front of him with a control that was worse than desperation would've been — a man rationing himself in public so nobody could see the size of the hunger.
Marcus had reached for the good bottle earlier, the small-batch he kept for himself and Nes, and poured Josh two fingers of it instead of the well, and said nothing, and Josh had gone quiet over the glass in a way that told Marcus the kid knew exactly what the pour meant and didn't have anywhere to put being taken care of.
Not my business. He shut the drawer.
The thing was, it should have felt like an intrusion.
Ten years, Marcus had closed this room alone.
He'd built the after-hours quiet on purpose, the same way he'd built everything else in here — deliberately, to spec, a room with no space in it for anybody to leave from.
And somehow this loud broke kid from Dayton had walked into the one place in his life engineered for solitude and made it feel, on a Thursday at one in the morning, like the emptiest thing in the world would be him actually going home.
That was a problem. Marcus knew it was a problem. He'd handle it the way he handled all his problems, which was by not handling it and calling that discipline.
Across the room, Monk rose from the register, stretched with the contempt of a creature who owed nobody anything, crossed the floor, and jumped up into Josh's lap the second the kid sat down on a bar stool to rest — settled in like he'd been doing it for years, purring like a bad engine.
Josh looked down at twelve pounds of orange cat with an expression of undisguised triumph.
"He hates everybody," Josh said. "Retta told me. He hates you."
"He tolerates me. There's a difference."
"He does not tolerate you. He's on me." Josh scratched under the cat's chin. Monk's eyes closed to slits. "Even the cat's got taste, is what I'm saying."
Marcus turned back to the drawer so the kid wouldn't see whatever his own face was doing. Ten years that animal had refused every lap in the building. Defected in a month. It was, Marcus thought, becoming a theme.
***
Nes was still around that night, which didn't happen often — the old man usually packed the upright and drifted off before last call, off to wherever Nes went, some other bar or the long walk home.
But he'd stayed, nursing the last of his one drink at the far end, watching Josh flip chairs with the flat unbothered attention of a man who'd seen a great many young players come through and outlast most of them.
"He remind you of anybody?" Nes said. To Marcus. Quiet. Not quiet enough.
"Don't."
"I'm an old man making conversation."
"You're never just making conversation." Marcus kept his eyes on the drawer. "That's the whole problem with you."
Josh, four feet away and pretending very hard to be absorbed in a chair, said, "Who does he remind you of?"
And Nes — who had spent sixty years learning exactly when to let a thing drop and had chosen, this one time, out of pure meddling old-man malice, not to — said: "This one. Younger."
The room got quiet in a specific way.
"Marcus Fontenot was the best piano player on this street," Nes told Josh, conversational, like he was reading a plaque.
"Before your time. Before this room. Twenty-five years old and he'd walk into any session in this city and by the end of the night everybody else on the stand was playing over their heads just to keep up with him.
Made you better standing next to him. Some players do that.
" He finished his drink. Set it down. "Best of us.
Then he quit and bought a bar and started telling grown men how to dry a glass. "
"Nes." Just his name. Low. The one warning Marcus gave anybody, ever.
Nes stood, unhurried, and gathered himself toward the door, and clapped Josh once on the shoulder on the way past — the closest thing to a blessing the old man handed out.
"Ask him sometime why he stopped," Nes said, to Josh, but really to Marcus, over his shoulder, the way he said most things.
"Might do him good to have to answer it out loud. "
The door shut behind him. The neon buzzed.
And then it was just the two of them and the cat, and a fact hanging in the air that hadn't been there ten minutes ago: that the man who'd hired Josh to play piano had once been the best in the city and now wouldn't touch the instrument sitting twelve feet away.
Josh set the chair down. Carefully. Marcus watched him decide how to hold it.
"You don't have to," Josh said.
Which was, of course, the exact thing that got him.
Anybody else would've pushed — is that true, why'd you stop, what happened.
The kid who ran on being liked, who reached for applause, who couldn't leave a broken sign alone — that kid looked at the one locked door in the building and said you don't have to.
Handed it right back. And Marcus, who had spent a decade making sure nobody ever got close enough to ask, felt the wrongest possible thing in response to being let off the hook.
He wanted to answer.
***
He poured himself two fingers of the good bottle, because if he was going to do this he wasn't going to do it dry, and he came around the bar, which he never did after close, and he stood there in the middle of his own dark room not knowing what to do with his hands now that they had nowhere to be.
"I played with somebody," Marcus said. And stopped.
That was the trouble with saying true things out loud — you found out how much was underneath the first sentence, and it was always more than you'd budgeted for. He turned the glass in his hand. Started again, sideways, the only way he could get at it.
"When you're young and you play like that — like you do, like I used to — everybody tells you the same thing.
That it's a gift. That you're lucky." A dry sound, not quite a laugh.
"Nobody tells you a gift is just a thing other people can take.
You put it out there, night after night, the whole open unguarded — " he tipped his chin at Josh, at the whole of him, the thing Nes had named "— that.
And you think you're sharing it. And the whole time somebody's deciding how it's worth more to them than to you. "
Josh had gone completely still. Not the performing stillness. The real one, the one he got at the keys. He didn't say anything. He was good at this, Marcus was realizing — better than his mouth ever let on. He knew when to shut up and let a man find the ledge on his own.
"I stopped playing because the last time I sat down at a piano in front of people," Marcus said, "I was somebody's accompanist and didn't know it yet.
Thought I was the point." He drank. Set the glass down.
"Found out I was the setting. You don't — you don't sit back down at the thing that taught you that. Not to give somebody else the show."