Epilogue
Encore
Somewhere out west, a spring tour was in its third week without a piano player, and Josh Keller could not have cared less if it fell in the ocean.
He knew about the tour because Retta kept him updated out of pure spite — she followed Vaughn's whole operation online now, the way you keep an eye on a hurricane that missed you, and she reported the mediocre reviews at the bar with a satisfaction that was frankly unchristian.
Piano chair sounds thin, she'd say, scrolling.
Whoever they got can't voice a ballad to save his life.
And Josh would say that's a shame and mean good, and go back to setting up for the eight o'clock.
Because the eight o'clock was his. Tuesday through Thursday, the early set, his name on a little chalkboard by the door that a broke kid from Dayton had once been too scared to hope for — and the late Friday and Saturday sets belonged to somebody else now.
To the good piano. To the man who played it.
That was the part Josh still hadn't gotten used to, six months on, and hoped he never would: the way the room filled up different on the nights Marcus played.
Word had gotten around — it had gotten around the whole city after the anniversary, after the write-up in the Advocate with the headline Josh had cut out and taped inside the register, THE MAN WHO STOPPED PLAYING, and the photo of Marcus at the good piano with his eyes shut and his hands finally where they belonged.
People came from across town now to hear the club owner nobody under thirty had ever heard play.
Marcus hated the attention and did it anyway, three or four nights a week, a short set, never long, and every single time he sat down at that piano Josh had to go stand near the walk-in and get his face right, because the sight of it still took his legs out from under him.
Some nights, if the room was right and Marcus was in the mood — and Marcus had those now, moods that ended in music instead of in the drawer — he'd tip his head at Josh mid-set, and Josh would come up and slide onto the keyboard beside the grand, and they'd trade.
Marcus would throw him a phrase and Josh would throw it back turned inside out, and Marcus would catch it and do the thing with it only Marcus could do, and the room would lean in the way rooms do when they're watching two people say something to each other that hasn't got any words in it.
Nes on the bass behind them, grinning at the neck of the upright.
Retta at the bar not even pretending to work.
It was the best part of Josh's week, every week — and the funny thing, the thing his father would never have believed, was that it wasn't the applause.
He'd have played it in an empty room. He'd have played it in the dark.
That, it turned out, was what Marcus had been trying to teach him from the very first cold correction, back when Josh thought the man just didn't like him: that the music was for the music, and the room was a gift laid on top, and if you had the first thing right you never had to beg for the second.
The room had made it. That was the other thing.
The anniversary had done exactly what Marcus needed it to — a packed house and a page of press and, it turned out, one Blue Note producer who'd hung back that night to tell Retta the label wanted to record a live session in the room, this room, the sound of it, and had put enough money on the table to make a glass tower off Poydras suddenly very interested in renewing a lease it had spent a year trying to kill.
Perdido wasn't going anywhere. They were even talking about a record — Marcus's arrangements, the whole reclaimed book, cut properly this time with the right name on the sleeve.
Josh had cried about that one in the walk-in too.
He was doing a lot of his crying in the walk-in these days. It was turning into his whole thing.
And his own name was starting to mean something — on his own terms, which was the part he was quietly proudest of.
Not Vaughn's terms: not a chair in another man's band, a sideman with a per diem and a bunk on a bus.
His terms. He had the eight o'clock with his name on the chalkboard.
He'd started teaching two mornings a week, kids from the neighborhood, the way his father used to before the bitterness ate it out of him — except Josh taught them the other lesson, the one his father never got to, the one about how it's worth it, how the joy is worth the cost, how you play the thing even if it only ever pays you back in the playing.
He was never going to be a name on a marquee in twelve cities.
He was going to be a name on a chalkboard by a door on Frenchmen, in a room he loved, and he had looked at that difference for a long hard minute and chosen, with his whole chest, the smaller and truer thing.
***
The sublet was long gone.
He'd moved into the apartment over the shuttered print shop in November, one duffel bag and a garbage-bag full of a Casio, and the spare provisional rooms that had told him so much about Marcus back in the fall had been slowly, quietly changing ever since — a second chair, a second toothbrush that had earned its cup, a windowsill that now held three plants because Josh kept bringing home stragglers from the corner store and Marcus kept pretending to resent them and watering them at six every morning without being asked.
And in the corner, where six months ago there had been nothing, a deliberate scrubbed-out nothing, a musician's home with no music in it — there was a piano.
An upright. Nothing fancy. Marcus had brought it home in December without a word, had it hauled up the narrow stairs by two guys and a lot of cursing, and set it against the wall like it was no particular occasion, like a man might just decide one Tuesday to stop living as though the lease on his own life could get called at any hour.
Josh had come home to it and stood in the doorway and not said anything, because saying something would've made Marcus close the drawer, and instead he'd just gone and sat down at it and played eight bars of nothing in particular, some ballad his fingers went to on their own — the exact thing he used to do at the Casio in a hot sublet before a shift, back when it was the only true thing he had — and Marcus had come and stood behind him and put his hands on Josh's shoulders and left them there, warm, not going anywhere, and that had been the whole conversation. They'd both understood it fine.
Tonight, after close, they ended up there — at the home piano, the two of them on a bench built for one, Josh picking out the head of something and Marcus reaching around him to add the thing underneath, the way he did, the way he'd done since the first night he broke his own no-touch rule.
His hands came over Josh's on the keys. They didn't shake anymore. They hadn't shaken in months.
"You're crowding me," Josh said, not moving an inch away.
"It's my piano."
"It's our piano. I live here. I pay for the plants."
"You bring home weeds and I keep them alive.
That's not the same as paying for them." But Marcus's mouth was against the back of Josh's neck now, and his hands had stopped arranging anything, and the tune trailed off into the quiet of a room that had a man in it who didn't sleep with one foot out the door anymore.
Later — soft, unhurried, the good kind of tired — Josh lay in the squared-off bed that had long since lost its corners to the two of them and watched Marcus watch him in the dark, the way he still did, like he was reading a letter he was finally allowed to answer.
"What," Josh said.
"Nothing." Marcus's hand moved slow up his spine. "You're still here. It stops being a surprise eventually, they tell me. Hasn't yet."
"I'm not going anywhere, old man." Josh found his hand, laced their fingers, the pianist's hand that used to hide in a pocket and now just lived out in the open where anybody could see it. "I told you. I already picked."
***
His father would not have understood any of it.
Josh thought about that sometimes, on the good nights, which were most nights now — thought about the man who'd sold his Wurlitzer off the end of a driveway and gone inside before the van pulled away, the man who'd been so sure the music was a con and the love was a con and the only smart move was to stop wanting things where they could hurt you.
His father had watched the music leave from behind a window and called it wisdom.
And Josh had gotten on a one-way bus with a keyboard in a garbage bag precisely so that he would never, ever be that man — and it had worked.
That was the thing he wished he could go back and tell the kid on the bus, or the kid in the bedroom window at sixteen.
It works. You bet everything on the joy being real and worth the cost, and you were right, and it pays out.
Not always. Not for everybody. But it can. Look.
He'd chosen the joy on purpose, the whole way down, even when it was stupid, even when it was broke, even when a good man tried to hand him a bus ticket in a kind voice.
And it had brought him here — to a room that was his, and a piano that was theirs, and a man who'd buried the best of himself for a decade and dug it back up because a sunshine kid from Ohio wouldn't stop believing it was still down there.
Not naive. He'd carry that to his grave now. The joy was never naive. It was the bravest bet on the table, and he'd made it, and he'd won.
***
The next night the room was full and the eight o'clock ran long, and when Josh finally came off the stage Marcus was leaning on the bar in the spot he always leaned, arms crossed, that dry unbothered look on his face that Josh could now read like a page — and under it, in the eyes, the thing that was only ever for him.
"You played over the top of the bridge again," Marcus said. "To get them clapping."
"I did not."
"You did. Bar fourteen. You went out and got it instead of letting it come to you."
"Okay, first of all," Josh said, hooking a thumb in the strap of a gig bag that had a real instrument in it now, "bar fourteen slapped, and the whole room agrees with me.
Second of all —" he leaned in, close, at the bar, in front of God and Retta and the cat and everybody, and grinned the real one, the chipped-tooth one, the one that had never once in his life been aimed at anybody the way it was aimed at this man "— you've been telling me I play that bridge wrong since August, and you married me anyway, so. "
"I did not marry you. We are not married. You've mentioned a courthouse exactly once and I said I'd think about it."
"You're gonna love me," Josh said, easy, sure, the way you say a thing that's just true. "Admit it. Say it in front of Retta so it counts."
And Marcus Fontenot — who had built a whole room and a whole life so that nobody could ever take anything from him again, and who had learned, late and hard and all the way down, that the only things worth having are the ones you give away in the light — looked at the broke bright impossible kid who'd walked into his club on a Tuesday and refused to leave, and reached out and took the hand that used to hide in a pocket and pressed it flat over Josh's, out in the open, where the whole room could see.
"I already do," he said. "God help me. Ask Retta, she made twenty dollars on it."
"He does!" Retta called from the register, not looking up. "It's on the books."
The neon burned clean and blue over the door, whole, no stutter, a thing a kid had fixed the first week because he couldn't stand to watch anything good flicker.
Nes counted off something easy in the corner.
And Josh Keller leaned on the bar in a room that was his, in a city that had heard him, next to a man who played every night now with the door wide open — and understood that he'd bet his whole life on the light being worth it, and the light had, at long and impossible last, come all the way back.
THE END