Chapter 3 #2
There. One true thing, laid out on the bar between them, and not the worst of it, not the name, not the arrangements or the label or the empty apartment — but true, the truest thing he'd said out loud to another living person in ten years, and it cost about what he'd expected, which was a lot.
Josh didn't fix it. That was the other thing.
He didn't tell Marcus it wasn't his fault or that the guy was a coward or that Marcus should play again because the world deserved it — none of the things people said when you handed them something heavy and they wanted to hand it back lighter.
He just looked at Marcus across the dark room like he'd been given something, and held it, and let it be as heavy as it was.
"Okay," Josh said, finally, soft. "Thank you."
And then, because apparently fair was fair, because Marcus had put something on the bar and it would've been a kind of theft to just take it — Josh set down the towel and gave one back.
"My dad played," he said. "Really played.
Better than me, I think, on his best night.
Wedding circuit, hotel lounges, thirty years.
" He wasn't looking at Marcus now; he was looking at the middle distance, at Dayton, probably.
"He had one shot at the thing. One. And it fell through, and after that he just — decided the whole business was a con and everybody in it was a mark.
Quit clean. Sold his piano off the end of the driveway one afternoon and went back in the house before the guy even loaded it.
" A short breath through the nose, not quite a laugh, the exact sound Marcus had made ten minutes ago.
"So I get it. The not sitting back down.
I watched a man I loved decide the music wasn't worth what it cost him, and it — yeah.
" He picked the towel back up. Turned it in his hands. "That's my one true thing. We're even."
Marcus looked at him — really looked, the whole tired brave loud broke shape of him — and understood, all at once and too late to do anything smart about it, that they were two men circling the same fire from opposite sides.
One who'd stopped playing to keep from being erased.
One who played like his life depended on it precisely so he'd never turn into the man who quit.
Oh, Marcus thought. That's bad.
***
Somewhere in the confession Marcus had drifted, without meaning to, to the piano.
He was standing at the good grand now, the lid down, one hand flat on the cool black wood of it, and he didn't remember crossing the room to get here — only that talking about the thing had pulled his body toward it the way it always did and always would, the wanting he'd spent ten years pretending he'd killed.
His hand was on the fallboard. His thumb had found the little catch.
He wasn't going to open it. He just needed to touch the box the music lived in, once, in the dark, where nobody could see.
His hand knew the exact weight of that lid.
Ten years, and it hadn't forgotten a thing — that was the cruelty of it, that the body kept the account long after the man had closed it.
He could feel the keys through the wood the way you feel a limb that isn't there anymore, cool and waiting, and for one second he let himself want the whole of it: the sitting down, the first chord, the entire life he'd bricked up behind this closed lid.
The wanting was so old and so large it scared him worse than any man ever had.
Except Josh had come with him.
The kid was right there, close, closer than the room required, watching Marcus's hand on the piano with an expression that had nothing polished in it at all — and when Marcus looked up from his own hand, Josh was near enough that the neon out the window caught the grey of his eyes and the freckles the New Orleans sun had burned across his nose, and Marcus's whole guarded night narrowed down to one sharp fact, the way tension does, the way it warns you: I could kiss him.
It was right there. Two inches and a decade of discipline.
The kid's mouth had come open a little. He wasn't pulling back.
He was doing the opposite of pulling back, leaning the barest fraction into the small dark space between them like a note bending toward a resolution —
Marcus took his hand off the piano.
"Lock up when you leave," he said.
The words came out flat and final, the drawer of them slamming, and he watched the almost go out of Josh's face — not hurt, the kid was too well-armored for hurt to show, but a recalibration, the light coming back up over the real thing underneath.
Marcus turned before he had to watch the rest of it.
Because the kid worked for him. Because two inches from a man's mouth is exactly how it starts, the giving, the being seen, and Marcus knew precisely where that road went and had promised himself he was done walking it.
He got his keys. He got to the door. "Set the alarm. Code's the year the place opened."
"I don't know the year the place opened," Josh said behind him, and his voice was almost steady.
"Figure it out. You're smart." And Marcus went out into the wet dark before he could do something that couldn't be counted back into the drawer.
***
He was halfway to the corner when he heard it.
Through the door, muffled, one story of blue neon buzzing over his head — a piano.
The good piano. That specific sound he'd chosen in a Baton Rouge warehouse twelve years ago, unmistakable, and the tune coming soft and slow and unhurried out of it, some old ballad played by a broke kid who'd waited exactly long enough to be alone before he sat down at the one thing in the building he'd been told he couldn't have.
Marcus stopped on the sidewalk.
The rule was clear. Nobody touched that piano. He'd said it twice. All he had to do was turn around and open the door and the sound would stop and the rule would hold and the night would close up clean.
He stood under the stuttering neon — PERDID_, PERDIDO, PERDID_ — and he listened to Josh Keller play his piano in the dark, and he did not go back.
He couldn't make his feet do it. The kid played the way he did everything, like it was the best news anybody'd had all day, and it came through the door and down the empty street and Marcus stood in it the way you stand in warm rain, not moving, letting it land, ten years of a nailed-shut house and one loose board somewhere he could feel the wind getting through.
Go home, Marcus.
He didn't. He gave it one more chorus — the kid had found the bridge now and was doing something to it, tender and unshowy, something Marcus would've killed to have thought of first — and he stood there like a fool on his own sidewalk and let it undo him a little, and then a little more than that, before he finally made himself walk.
He did not feel alone. That was the worst part. He hadn't felt alone in about a month, and he'd built the whole rest of his life to make sure he always would.