Chapter 8 #2
His father's voice had the run of the place tonight.
Told you. The business is a con and everybody in it's a mark and the only mark bigger than the guy who believes in the deal is the guy who believes in the people.
You believed in a man, Joshua. Same mistake I made.
At least I only made it with your mother.
The card was on the floor by his head where he'd dropped it.
Reggie's number. Vaughn's tour. The exact life his father had bled for and never got, sitting nine inches from his face on a heavy cream rectangle, and all Josh had to do was pick up the phone and take the thing everybody kept telling him he'd be a fool not to take.
It would even solve the money. That was the sick joke of it. He was three hundred dollars from the street and the answer was right there, and the only reason he hadn't already called was a man who'd just stood in a room and told him to leave in the kindest voice Josh had ever been gutted by.
He thought about his toothbrush in the cup in Marcus's bathroom.
His spare shirt over the back of the chair.
The little green plant on the windowsill that Marcus watered every day and pretended to resent — that would keep getting watered, probably, out of dumb habit, by a man who couldn't stand being cared for and couldn't stop caring for things.
Josh's whole real life fit in that apartment now, and if he called Reggie he'd have to go get it or leave it there, and he honestly could not work out which one would hurt less.
He picked up the card. He picked up his phone. He put in six of the ten digits.
Then he put the phone down on his chest and lay there and cried, ugly and quiet, the way he hadn't let himself since the driveway — not the pretty movie kind, the other kind, the kind you do alone on a floor at four a.m. when the last thing you believed in turns out to have a shelf life same as everything else.
He'd shown a man the real one. The unlit one.
He'd done the bravest thing he knew how to do and the man had taken one look and handed him a bus ticket.
See, said his father, not unkindly, from wherever bitter dead men go.
That's what it costs to show somebody the bottom. Now you know.
He did not call Reggie. He didn't have it in him to do anything at all. He just lay there and let it be as bad as it was, which — Marcus had taught him this, the son of a bitch, in a better week — was sometimes the only thing there was to do.
***
Retta found him at Perdido the next afternoon, come to get his keyboard and the last of his sheet music, come to make it clean, and she took one look at his face and put down the bar rag and said, "Sit down, Ohio. You're about to do something stupid and I'm the only one left who'll stop you."
"I'm not doing anything. I'm getting my stuff."
"You're leaving. It's all over you." She came around the bar, which he'd never seen her do, and sat down on the stool next to him, close, and she didn't do warm now, she did serious.
"You don't know, do you. He didn't tell you.
Course he didn't." She shook her head. "That man who came in Wednesday. Vaughn. Let me tell you who that is."
And she told him. All of it — the young Marcus, the best on the street, the arrangements, the two of them together on the stand and in life; the label, the satchel, the name on the record that should've been Marcus's; the apartment emptied the same week as the credit; the ten years after, the room built like a bunker, the piano nobody was allowed to touch.
Josh sat and listened with his whole self and did not flinch, the way she'd told him to weeks ago, back before he understood she'd been warning him about this exact afternoon.
And as she talked, the last three days rearranged themselves in his head the way a room does when somebody finally finds the light switch — the faraway look, the you don't have to do that anymore, the card slid back across the bar with one unhurried finger.
Not a man who'd stopped wanting him. A man watching a rerun of the worst thing that had ever happened to him and clawing for the exit before the part where it ends.
It didn't make it hurt any less. But it made it hurt different, and different was a thing Josh could work with.
"So when you ask me why he's throwing you out," Retta said, "the answer is he isn't. He's throwing you out because.
He looked up Wednesday night and saw the exact machine that ground him into nothing ten years ago, reaching for the one thing he let himself love since — and he did the only thing his sorry heart knows how to do to keep from getting killed twice.
He let go first." She put her hand over Josh's on the bar.
"He's not choosing to lose you, baby. He's just so sure he's going to that he can't stand to wait for it.
And if you get on a bus now, you'll prove him right, and he'll spend the rest of his life in that bunker being right, and it'll kill him slower than Vaughn did but it'll get the job done. "
"Where is he now," Josh said.
"Gone to ground. Won't pick up his phone. But Nes went after him this morning — and Nes is the one man on this earth that fool can't fully close the door on, so." Retta shrugged. "Somebody's telling the truth on both ends today. Only question left is whether either of you is too scared to hear it."
Josh stared at the zinc. Somewhere under the whole wreckage of him, something was coming back up — not the shine, the other thing, the stubborn defiant engine his father had spent a lifetime trying and failing to kill, the thing that had put him on a one-way bus with a keyboard in a garbage bag.
His father would've called Reggie. His father would've taken the sure thing and the bus and called it wisdom and gone home to be bitter about it for thirty years in a cold house in Dayton.
Josh had spent his whole life swearing he wasn't that man — and here he was, one phone call from becoming him, from letting a scared person talk him into believing he was disposable and walking away instead of fighting for the one thing worth the fight.
No. Not this one. This one he was going to fight for if it killed him.
"The anniversary's Saturday," he said.
"It is."
"He needs a full room or he loses the place."
"He does."
Josh stood up. He left the keyboard where it was.
"Then I'm not getting my stuff," he said. "I'm getting a piano player."
Retta smiled — fierce, wet-eyed, the first smile in the building in four days. "There he is," she said.